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作者：Aneja, Abhay; Ritadhi, S. K.
作者单位：University of California System; University of California Berkeley
摘要：We study the impact of caste-based ethnic parties on the redistribution of public resources to historically disadvantaged low caste and indigenous communities in India. Exploiting the outcome of narrowly contested state assembly elections as a source of exogenous variation, we show that a 10 percentage point increase in legislators from low caste parties increases low caste households' consumption from India's largest safety net program by 4%. Further suggesting the importance of parties' vary...
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作者：Chu, Angus C.; Peretto, Pietro F.; Wang, Xilin
作者单位：University of Macau; Fudan University
摘要：This study explores how agricultural technology affects the endogenous takeoff of an economy in the Schumpeterian growth model. Due to the subsistence requirement for agricultural consumption, an im-provement in agricultural technology reallocates labor from agriculture to the industrial sector. Therefore, agricultural improvement expands firm size in the industrial sector, which determines innovation and triggers an endogenous transition from stagnation to growth. Calibrating the model to dat...
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作者：Heyes, Anthony; Saberian, Soodeh
作者单位：University of Ottawa; University of Exeter; University of Manitoba
摘要：The ability of people to work underpins most economic outcomes. Using data from the nationally representative India Human Development Survey (IHDS-II), with pre-scheduling of interview locations ensuring plausibly random assignment of temperature treatment to respondent, we evidence the impact of short-term (withinmonth) high temperatures on self-evaluated ability to work, and how that impact depends on individual living conditions. Other things equal a hot day (one in which maximum daytime te...
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作者：Chen, Shuai; Oliva, Paulina; Zhang, Peng
作者单位：Zhejiang University; University of Southern California; National Bureau of Economic Research; The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen; Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data
摘要：This paper looks at the effects of air pollution on migration in China using changes in the average strength of thermal inversions over five-year periods as a source of exogenous variation for medium-run air pollution levels. Our findings suggest that air pollution is responsible for large changes in inflows and outflows of migration in China. Specifically, we find that a 10 percent increase in air pollution, holding everything else constant, is capable of reducing population through net outmi...
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作者：Simons, Andrew M.
作者单位：Fordham University
摘要：Do poverty outcomes improve when the implementation of social assistance programs is decentralized? The centralized implementation mandates of Ethiopia's Productive Safety Net Program require a full and uniform payment to each eligible person. In practice, however, communities do not receive enough funding to fully implement the program. Therefore, communities must exercise local discretion in allocating aid. I recover the preferences revealed by local communities' aid allocations and find the...
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作者：Castells-Quintana, David; Lopez-Uribe, Maria del Pilar; McDermott, Thomas K. J.
作者单位：Autonomous University of Barcelona; Universidad de los Andes (Colombia); Ollscoil na Gaillimhe-University of Galway
摘要：In this paper, we study the effect of displacement of population into cities on urban conflict in developing countries. To do so, we construct a novel measure of exposure to floods, using data on more than 3300 flood events worldwide, as an exogenous source of population displacement. We combine this with city level observations of thousands of urban social disorder events over the period 1985-2015. Exposure to floods is found to be associated with higher intensity of urban social disorder. Ou...
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作者：Bluhm, Richard; Krause, Melanie
作者单位：University of Stuttgart; Leibniz University Hannover; Leipzig University
摘要：Tracking the development of cities in emerging economies is difficult with conventional data. This paper shows that nighttime lights can be used as a reliable proxy for economic activity at the city level, provided they are first corrected for top-coding. The commonly-used satellite images of nighttime light intensity fail to capture the true brightness of larger cities. We present a stylized model of urban luminosity and empirical evidence which both suggest that these 'top lights' can be cha...
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作者：McCullough, Ellen; Zhen, Chen; Shin, Soye; Lu, Meichen; Arsenault, Joanne
作者单位：University System of Georgia; University of Georgia; National University of Singapore
摘要：Consumer preferences can be leveraged to magnify the impacts of agricultural investments and interventions on diets for all consumers in an economy, not just farmers. Using nationally representative panel data from Tanzania, we estimate demand for 19 food groups using an Exact Affine Stone Index censored demand system, which is flexible, utility-theoretic, controls for unobserved heterogeneity, and accounts for bias arising from endogenous prices. We find strong links between growth in househo...
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作者：McKenzie, David; Mohpal, Aakash; Yang, Dean
作者单位：The World Bank; University of Michigan System; University of Michigan; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：A randomized experiment among poor entrepreneurs tested the impact of exogenously inducing higher financial aspirations. In theory, raising aspirations could have positive effects by inducing higher effort, but could also reduce effort if unmet aspirations lead to frustration. Treatment resulted in more ambitious savings goals, but nearly all individuals fell far short of reaching these goals. Two years later, treated individuals had not saved more, and actually had lower borrowing and busines...
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作者：Cai, Xiqian; Jiang, Wei; Song, Hong; Xie, Huihua
作者单位：Xiamen University; Xiamen University; Shanghai University of International Business & Economics; Fudan University; The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen
摘要：This paper examines workers' response to a nonlinear payment system with a penalty and a reward design in a manufacturing firm in China. Using bunching methods, our estimates show that about 31% of workers make decisions with errors, and the structural elasticity of output response to the piece rate is 0.28. The focal nonlinear payment scheme generates 4% output gains compared with a linear payment scheme given the same total wage costs. Further decomposition analysis shows that the reward asp...
