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作者：Saez, E
作者单位：University of California System; University of California Berkeley
摘要：This paper presents top income shares series for the United States and Canada over the 20th century. In both countries, top income shares display a U-shaped pattern over the century, with a precipitous drop during World War II, with no recovery in the following decades. Since the late 1970s, however, top income shares have been increasing dramatically and the very top shares are now almost as high as in the prewar era. The drop in top income shares in the first part of the century is mainly a ...
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作者：Erceg, CJ; Gust, C; Guerrieri, L
摘要：Gali's innovative approach of imposing long-run restrictions on a vector autoregression (VAR) to identify the effects of a technology shock has become widely utilized. In this paper, we investigate its reliability through Monte Carlo simulations using calibrated business cycle models. Overall, Gali's methodology appears to be fruitful: the impulse responses derived from the artificial data generally have the same sign and qualitative pattern as the true responses, and the approach can be infor...
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作者：Gilboa, Y; Justman, M
作者单位：Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
摘要：We examine the trade-offs implicit in academic admissions standards when students are charged cost-based tuition and offered loans that remove liquidity constraints. Lowering entry requirements while holding graduation requirements fixed increases aggregate output and promotes a more equal distribution of wages, but reduces relative income mobility and diminishes the scope for affirmative action. Lowering admissions standards while raising graduation requirements, so that the number of graduat...
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作者：Benigno, P; Woodford, M
作者单位：New York University; Columbia University
摘要：This paper considers the appropriate stabilization objectives for monetary policy in a micro-founded model with staggered price-setting. Rotemberg and Woodford (1997) and Woodford (2002) have shown that under certain conditions, a local approximation to the expected utility of the representative household in a model of this kind is related inversely to the expected discounted value of a conventional quadratic loss function, in which each period's loss is a weighted average of squared deviation...
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作者：Farhi, E; Tirole, J; Lerner, J
作者单位：Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Harvard University; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：We study the role of Standard Setting Organization (SSOs) in the adoption of standards. The way the SSO balances the interests of sponsor and users is key to its ability to certify the technology. Proximity to users builds trust in the endorsement, but may be unattractive to technology sponsors. In a static context, we show that the SSO is an effective certifier if and only if it puts enough weight on users' interests. We then tackle the more challenging problem of SSO certification in a dynam...
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作者：Eklöf, M
作者单位：Uppsala University
摘要：This paper considers the social costs implied by inefficient allocation of contracts in a first-price, scaled-bid procurement auction with asymmetric bidders. We adopt a constrained (piecewise linear) strategy equilibrium concept and estimate the structural parameters of the bidders' distribution of costs. We estimate social costs defined as the predicted cost difference between the winning firm and the most efficient bidding firm. We also compare the expected procurement costs under two diffe...
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作者：Mortensen, DT
作者单位：Northwestern University
摘要：The role of passive labor market policy as a possible reason for the run up in relative unemployment rates in Europe in the 1980s has been extensively studied. More recently the focus have shifted to lagging growth rates in Europe. The Lisbon strategy reflects these concerns by calling for reforms that ease market access, promote flexible labor markets, and simplify taxes and market regulation. The principal purpose of this paper is to build a simple model in which the possible effects of payr...
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作者：Banerjee, A; Iyer, L; Somanathan, R
作者单位：Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Harvard University; University of Michigan System; University of Michigan
摘要：We examine the influence of three historically important sources of social divisions on the availability of public goods in rural India: colonial power, landowner-peasant relations as determined by the land tenure system and social fragmentation based on the Hindu caste system and the presence of sizable religious minorities. Using data on public goods from 1991, we find that regions that were under British colonial power in the pre-independence period and those where agrarian power was concen...
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作者：Alessie, R; Weber, G; Hochguertel, S
作者单位：Utrecht University; Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam; University of Padua; University of Padua
摘要：In this paper we analyse unique data on credit applications received by the leading provider of consumer credit in Italy (Findomestic). The data set covers a five-year period (1995-1999) during which the consumer credit market rapidly expanded in Italy and a new law (the usury law) came into force that set a limit on interest rates charged to consumers. We compute behavioural changes by controlling for changes in the observable characteristics of the Findomestic clientele and argue that, under...
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作者：Ginsburgh, V; Weber, S; Ortuño-Ortin, I
作者单位：Universite Libre de Bruxelles; Universitat d'Alacant; Southern Methodist University; Universite Catholique Louvain
摘要：We consider a linguistically diversified society and examine the notion of language disenfranchisement when some individuals are denied the full access to documents and political process in their native tongues. To calculate the disenfranchisement indices we use the Dyen percentage cognate matrix of linguistic distances between Indo-European languages and apply survey and population data on language proficiency in the European Union. We then determine optimal sets of official languages that de...
