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作者:Dal Bo, Ernesto; Dal Bo, Pedro; Snyder, Jason
作者单位:University of California System; University of California Berkeley; National Bureau of Economic Research; Brown University; University of California System; University of California Los Angeles
摘要:Political dynasties have long been present in democracies, raising concerns that inequality in the distribution of political power may reflect imperfections in democratic representation. However, the persistence of political elites may simply reflect differences in ability or political vocation across families and not their entrenchment in power. We show that dynastic prevalence in the Congress of the U.S. is high compared to that in other occupations and that political dynasties do not merely...
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作者:Hellwig, Christian; Veldkamp, Laura
作者单位:University of California System; University of California Los Angeles; New York University
摘要:We explore how optimal information choices change the predictions of strategic models. When a large number of agents play a game with strategic complementarity, information choices exhibit complementarity as well: if an agent wants to do what others do, they want to know what others know. This makes heterogeneous beliefs difficult to sustain and may generate multiple equilibria. In models with substitutability, agents prefer to differentiate their information choices. We use these theoretical ...
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作者:Galor, Oded; Moav, Omer; Vollrath, Dietrich
作者单位:Brown University; Hebrew University of Jerusalem; University of London; Royal Holloway University London; University of Houston System; University of Houston
摘要:This paper suggests that inequality in the distribution of landownership adversely affected the emergence of human-capital promoting institutions (e.g. public schooling), and thus the pace and the nature of the transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy, contributing to the emergence of the great divergence in income per capita across countries. The prediction of the theory regarding the adverse effect of the concentration of landownership on education expenditure is established ...
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作者:Jones, Benjamin F.
作者单位:Northwestern University; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要:This paper investigates a possibly fundamental aspect of technological progress. If knowledge accumulates as technology advances, then successive generations of innovators may face an increasing educational burden. Innovators can compensate through lengthening educational phases and narrowing expertise, but these responses come at the cost of reducing individual innovative capacities, with implications for the organization of innovative activity-a greater reliance on teamwork-and negative impl...
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作者:Hoppe, Heidrun C.; Moldovanu, Benny; Sela, Aner
作者单位:Leibniz University Hannover; University of Bonn; Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
摘要:We study two-sided markets with a finite number of agents on each side, and with two-sided incomplete information. Agents are matched assortatively on the basis of costly signals. Asymmetries in signalling activity between the two sides of the market can be explained by asymmetries either in size or in heterogeneity. Our main results identify general conditions under which the potential increase in expected output due to assortative matching (relative to random matching) is offset by the costs...
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作者:Heinemann, Frank; Nagel, Rosemarie
作者单位:Technical University of Berlin; Pompeu Fabra University
摘要:This paper proposes a method to measure strategic uncertainty by eliciting certainty equivalents analogous to measuring risk attitudes in lotteries. We apply this method by conducting experiments on a class of one-shot coordination games with strategic complementarities and choices between simple lotteries and sure payoff alternatives, both framed in a similar way. Despite the multiplicity of equilibria in the coordination games, aggregate behaviour is fairly predictable. The pure or mixed Nas...
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作者:Aguiar, Mark; Amador, Manuel; Gopinath, Gita
作者单位:University of Rochester; National Bureau of Economic Research; Stanford University; Harvard University
摘要:We characterize optimal taxation of foreign capital and optimal sovereign debt policy in a small open economy where the government cannot commit to policy, seeks to insure a risk-averse domestic constituency, and is more impatient than the market. Optimal policy generates long-run cycles in both sovereign debt and foreign direct investment in an environment in which the first best capital stock is a constant. The expected tax on capital endogenously varies with the state of the economy, and in...
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作者:Li, Hong; Mueller, Ulrich K.
作者单位:Brandeis University; Princeton University
摘要:This paper considers time series Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) models where a subset of the parameters are time varying. We focus on an empirically relevant case with moderately large instabilities, which are well approximated by a local asymptotic embedding that does not allow the instability to be detected with certainty, even in the limit. We show that for many forms of the instability and a large class of GMM models, usual GMM inference on the subset of stable parameters is asymptoti...