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作者：Parsley, David C.; Wei, Shang-Jin
作者单位：Vanderbilt University
摘要：We match Big Mac prices with prices of its ingredients as a unique prism to study real exchange rates (RERs). This approach has several advantages. First, the levels of the Big Mac RER can be measured meaningfully. Second, as the exact composition of a Big Mac is known, the contributions of its tradable and non-tradable components can be estimated relatively precisely. Third, the dynamics of the RER can be studied in a setting free of several biases inherent in CPI-based RERs. Finally, a large...
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作者：Pischke, Joern-Steffen
作者单位：University of London; London School Economics & Political Science
摘要：This article investigates how changing the length of the school year, leaving the basic curriculum unchanged, affects learning and subsequent earnings. I use variation introduced by the West German short school years in 1966-7, which exposed some students to a total of about two thirds of a year less of schooling while enrolled. I find that the short school years increased grade repetition in primary school and led to fewer students attending higher secondary school tracks. On the other hand, ...
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作者：Gintis, Herbert
摘要：The Walrasian general equilibrium model is the centrepiece of modern economic theory, but progress in understanding its dynamical properties has been meagre. This article shows that the instability of Walras' tatonnement process is due to the public nature of prices, which leads to excessive correlation in the behaviour of economic agents. When prices are private information, a dynamic with a globally stable stationary state obtains in economies that are unstable in the tatonnment process. We ...
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作者：Collard, Fabrice; Dellas, Harris
作者单位：Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS); University of Bern
摘要：Recent empirical work has suggested that in response to a positive technology shock employment shows a persistent decline. We show that the standard, open economy, flexible price model can generate a negative response of employment to a positive technology shock and can also match the negative conditional correlation between productivity and employment quite well if trade elasticities are low. While the model also has good overall properties, it fails to generate sufficient procyclicality in e...
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作者：Giannitsarou, Chryssi
作者单位：University of Cambridge
摘要：It is known that in a real business cycle model with constant returns to scale and a balanced budget fiscal policy rule, steady state indeterminacy may arise due to endogenous labour income tax rates. This article shows that when the government finances its expenditures via an endogenous consumption tax instead, a steady state is always saddle-path stable. Consequently, combining income taxes with consumption taxes makes the ranges of indeterminacy shrink, thus reducing the possibility of aggr...
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作者：Cordella, Tito; Dell'Ariccia, Giovanni
摘要：Should donors interested in the effectiveness of developmental programmes rely on conditional budget support or on project aid? To answer this question, we present a model in which only a subset of developmental expenditures can be subject to conditionality. We show that budget support is preferable to project aid when the preferences of donors and recipients are aligned, and when assistance is small relative to the recipients' own resources. Furthermore, when donors cannot observe the recipie...
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作者：Goux, Dominique; Maurin, Eric
作者单位：IZA Institute Labor Economics
摘要：Children's outcomes are strongly correlated with those of their neighbours. The extent to which this is causal is the subject of an extensive literature. There is an identification problem because people with similar characteristics are observed to live in close proximity. Another major difficulty is that neighbourhoods measured in available data are often considerably larger than those which matter for outcomes (i.e. close neighbours). Several institutional features of France enable us to add...
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作者：Gruener, Hans Peter; Schils, Ruediger
作者单位：University of Mannheim; RWE Group
摘要：We study the relationship between wealth redistribution and the allocation of firm-ownership. The economy's wealth distribution affects the equilibrium interest rate and the allocation of entrepreneurial rents when wealth determines agents' ability to borrow. This leads to an unconventional voting behaviour of the politically decisive middle class: the political preferences of middle and upper class voters coincide when redistribution only has an adverse interest-rate effect. Middle class vote...
