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作者：Spenkuch, Jorg L.; Toniatti, David
作者单位：Northwestern University
摘要：We study the persuasive effects of political advertising. Our empirical strategy exploits FCC regulations that result in plausibly exogenous variation in the number of impressions across the borders of neighboring counties. Applying this approach to detailed data on television advertisement broadcasts and viewership patterns during the 2004-12 presidential campaigns, our results indicate that total political advertising has almost no impact on aggregate turnout. By contrast, we find a positive...
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作者：Arnold, David; Dobbie, Will; Yang, Crystal S.
作者单位：Princeton University; National Bureau of Economic Research; Harvard University
摘要：This article develops a new test for identifying racial bias in the context of bail decisions-a high-stakes setting with large disparities between white and black defendants. We motivate our analysis using Becker's model of racial bias, which predicts that rates of pretrial misconduct will be identical for marginal white and marginal black defendants if bail judges are racially unbiased. In contrast, marginal white defendants will have higher rates of misconduct than marginal black defendants ...
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作者：Nakamura, Emi; Steinsson, Jon; Sun, Patrick; Villar, Daniel
作者单位：University of California System; University of California Berkeley; University of California System; University of California Berkeley; Federal Reserve System - USA; Federal Reserve System Board of Governors
摘要：A key policy question is: how high an inflation rate should central banks target? This depends crucially on the costs of inflation. An important concern is that high inflation will lead to inefficient price dispersion. Workhorse New Keynesian models imply that this cost of inflation is very large. An increase in steady-state inflation from 0% to 10% yields a welfare loss that is an order of magnitude greater than the welfare loss from business cycle fluctuations in output in these models. We a...
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作者：Farhi, Emmanuel; Maggiori, Matteo
作者单位：National Bureau of Economic Research; Harvard University; Center for Economic & Policy Research (CEPR)
摘要：We propose a simple model of the international monetary system. We study the world supply and demand for reserve assets denominated in different currencies under a variety of scenarios: a hegemon versus a multipolar world; abundant versus scarce reserve assets; and a gold exchange standard versus a floating rate system. We rationalize the Triffin dilemma, which posits the fundamental instability of the system, as well as the common prediction regarding the natural and beneficial emergence of a...
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作者：Cai, Jing; Szeidl, Adam
作者单位：University System of Maryland; University of Maryland College Park; National Bureau of Economic Research; Central European University; Center for Economic & Policy Research (CEPR)
摘要：We organized business associations for the owner-managers of young Chinese firms to study the effect of business networks on firm performance. We randomized 2,820 firms into small groups whose managers held monthly meetings for one year, and into a no-meetings control group. We find the following. (i) The meetings increased firm revenue by 8.1%, and also significantly increased profit, factors, inputs, the number of partners, borrowing, and a management score. (ii) These effects persisted one ...
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作者：Che, Yeon-Koo; Horner, Johannes
作者单位：Columbia University; Yale University; Universite de Toulouse; Universite Toulouse 1 Capitole; Toulouse School of Economics
摘要：This article studies how a recommender system may incentivize users to learn about a product collaboratively. To improve the incentives for early exploration, the optimal design trades off fully transparent disclosure by selectively overrecommending the product (or spamming) to a fraction of users. Under the optimal scheme, the designer spams very little on a product immediately after its release but gradually increases its frequency; she stops it altogether when she becomes sufficiently pessi...
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作者：Henderson, J. Vernon; Squires, Tim; Storeygard, Adam; Weil, David
摘要：We explore the role of natural characteristics in determining the worldwide spatial distribution of economic activity, as proxied by lights at night, observed across 240,000 grid cells. A parsimonious set of 24 physical geography attributes explains 47% of worldwide variation and 35% of within-country variation in lights. We divide geographic characteristics into two groups, those primarily important for agriculture and those primarily important for trade, and confront a puzzle. In examining w...
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作者：Agan, Amanda; Starr, Sonja
作者单位：Rutgers University System; Rutgers University New Brunswick; University of Michigan System; University of Michigan
摘要：Ban the Box (BTB) policies restrict employers from asking about applicants' criminal histories on job applications and are often presented as a means of reducing unemployment among black men, who disproportionately have criminal records. However, withholding information about criminal records could risk encouraging racial discrimination: employers may make assumptions about criminality based on the applicant's race. To investigate BTB's effects, we sent approximately 15,000 online job applicat...
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作者：de la Croix, David; Doepke, Matthias; Mokyr, Joel
作者单位：Universite Catholique Louvain; Northwestern University
摘要：In the centuries leading up to the Industrial Revolution, Western Europe gradually pulled ahead of other world regions in terms of technological creativity, population growth, and income per capita. We argue that superior institutions for the creation and dissemination of productive knowledge help explain the European advantage. We build a model of technological progress in a preindustrial economy that emphasizes the person-to-person transmission of tacit knowledge. The young learn as apprenti...
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作者：Kleinberg, Jon; Lakkaraju, Himabindu; Leskovec, Jure; Ludwig, Jens; Mullainathan, Sendhil
作者单位：Cornell University; Stanford University; University of Chicago; National Bureau of Economic Research; Center for Economic & Policy Research (CEPR); National Bureau of Economic Research; Harvard University
摘要：Can machine learning improve human decision making? Bail decisions provide a good test case. Millions of times each year, judges make jail-or-release decisions that hinge on a prediction of what a defendant would do if released. The concreteness of the prediction task combined with the volume of data available makes this a promising machine-learning application. Yet comparing the algorithm to judges proves complicated. First, the available data are generated by prior judge decisions. We only o...
