-
作者：Gobbi, Paula E.; Goni, Marc
作者单位：Universite Libre de Bruxelles; Centre for Economic Policy Research - UK; Norwegian School of Economics (NHH)
摘要：Using genealogical data of British aristocrats, we show that inheritances can affect childlessness. We study settlements, a contract restricting heirs' powers and settling bequests for yet-to-be-born generations. Settlements reduced childlessness to the 'natural' rate, ensuring aristocratic dynasties' survival. Our estimation exploits that settlements were signed at the heir's wedding if the family head lived until this date. Whether the heir was born after a girl provides as-good-as-random as...
-
作者：Bourguignon, Francois; Platteau, Jean-Philippe
作者单位：Paris School of Economics; University of Namur
摘要：This article revisits the inter-country aid allocation by a donor who must distribute a given aid amount and is sensitive to needs and governance considerations. Against conventional wisdom, if the donor has strong enough aversion to poverty, the share of a country whose governance has improved is reduced. Yet, the poor will still be better off. These results continue to hold when aid effectiveness depends on intrinsic governance and the volume of aid received, and when a more general dynamic ...
-
作者：Buggle, Johannes C.; Durante, Ruben
作者单位：University of Lausanne; ICREA; Pompeu Fabra University; Barcelona School of Economics
摘要：This paper examines the relationship between economic risk and the evolution of social cooperation. We hypothesise that trust developed in pre-industrial times as a result of experiences of cooperation aimed at coping with climatic risk. We document that European regions with higher pre-industrial climatic variability display higher levels of trust today. This effect is driven by variability in the growing season months and is more pronounced in agricultural regions. Regarding possible mechani...
-
作者：Kuecken, Maria; Thuilliez, Josselin; Valfort, Marie-Anne
作者单位：US Food & Drug Administration (FDA); Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS); CNRS - Institute for Humanities & Social Sciences (INSHS); Paris School of Economics
摘要：We estimate the effects of a large-scale antimalaria campaign on a rich set of human capital outcomes in 27 sub-Saharan African countries. Using pre-campaign malaria risk as treatment probability, we exploit quasi-experimental variation in period and cohort exposure to antimalaria campaigns. A conservative interpretation of our results shows a globally positive impact of antimalaria campaigns: they reduced the probability of infant mortality (1 p.p.) and birth (0.4 p.p.) and increased educatio...
-
作者：Kabatek, Jan; Ribar, David C.
作者单位：University of Melbourne; IZA Institute Labor Economics; Tilburg University; University System of Georgia; Georgia State University
摘要：Are couples with daughters more likely to divorce than couples with sons? Using Dutch registry and US survey data, we show that couples with daughters face higher risks of divorce, but only when daughters are 13- to 18-years-old. These age-specific results run counter to explanations involving overarching, time-invariant preferences for sons and sex-selection into live birth. We propose another explanation that involves relationship strains in families with teenage daughters. In subsample anal...
-
作者：Desmet, Klaus; Wacziarg, Romain
作者单位：Southern Methodist University; National Bureau of Economic Research; Centre for Economic Policy Research - UK; University of California System; University of California Los Angeles
摘要：We study the evolution of cultural divides both theoretically and empirically. We propose a model of cultural change where intergenerational transmission and forces of social influence determine the distribution of cultural traits in society. We conduct an empirical investigation of the evolution of cultural heterogeneity in the USA between 1972 and 2018, using the General Social Survey. In recent decades, cultural heterogeneity between individuals has risen. Cultural divides between identity ...
-
作者：Cassar, Lea; Meier, Stephan
作者单位：University of Regensburg; Centre for Economic Policy Research - UK; Columbia University
摘要：Many firms consider prosocial initiatives to be an effective tool to motivate workers. However, despite some initial supportive evidence, little is known about when and how prosocial incentives work. Our field experiment shows that the instrumental use of prosocial incentives to increase effort can backfire. The negative effect is particularly strong for performance-based prosocial incentives, which are, by construction, more instrumental than unconditional incentives, and for the workers who ...
-
作者：Denter, Philipp; Dumav, Martin; Ginzburg, Boris
作者单位：Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
摘要：A biased newspaper aims to persuade voters to vote for the government. Voters are uncertain about the government's competence. Each voter receives the newspaper's report as well as independent private signals about the competence. Voters then exchange messages containing this information on social media and form posterior beliefs, neglecting correlation among messages. We show that greater social connectivity increases the probability of an efficient voting outcome if the prior favours the gov...
-
作者：Chambers, Christopher P.; Echenique, Federico
作者单位：Georgetown University; California Institute of Technology
摘要：We establish that a type of statistical discrimination-that based on informativeness of signals about workers' skills and the ability appropriately to match workers to tasks-is possible if and only if it is impossible uniquely to identify the signal structure observed by an employer from a realised empirical distribution of skills. The impossibility of statistical discrimination is shown to be equivalent to the existence of a fair, skill-dependent, remuneration for workers. Finally, we connect...
-
作者：Bird, Daniel; Frug, Alexander
作者单位：Tel Aviv University; Pompeu Fabra University; Barcelona School of Economics
摘要：Workers are rarely assigned to perform the same task throughout their career. Instead, their assignments may change randomly over time to comply with the fluctuating needs of the organisation where they are employed. In this article, we show that this typical randomness in workplaces has a striking effect on the structure of long-term employment contracts. In particular, simple intertemporal variability in the worker's tasks is sufficient to generate a rich promotion-based dynamics in which, o...
