-
作者：Bold, Tessa; Kaizzi, Kayuki C.; Svensson, Jakob; Yanagizawa-Drott, David
作者单位：Stockholm University; University of Zurich
摘要：To reduce poverty and food insecurity in Africa requires raising productivity in agriculture. Systematic use of fertilizer and hybrid seed is a pathway to increased productivity, but adoption of these technologies remains low. We investigate whether the quality of agricultural inputs can help explain low take-up. Testing modern products purchased in local markets, we find that 30% of nutrient is missing in fertilizer, and hybrid maize seed is estimated to contain less than 50% authentic seeds....
-
作者：Lopez-Salido, David; Stein, Jeremy C.; Zakrajsek, Egon
作者单位：Federal Reserve System - USA; Federal Reserve System Board of Governors; Harvard University; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：Using U.S. data from 1929 to 2015, we show that elevated credit-market sentiment in year t - 2 is associated with a decline in economic activity in years t and t + 1. Underlying this result is the existence of predictable mean reversion in credit-market conditions. When credit risk is aggressively priced, spreads subsequently widen. The timing of this widening is, in turn, closely tied to the onset of a contraction in economic activity. Exploring the mechanism, we find that buoyant credit-mark...
-
作者：Guerrieri, Veronica; Lorenzoni, Guido
作者单位：University of Chicago; National Bureau of Economic Research; Northwestern University
摘要：We study the effects of a credit crunch on consumer spending in a heterogeneous-agent incomplete-market model. After an unexpected permanent tightening in consumers' borrowing capacity, constrained consumers are forced to repay their debt, and unconstrained consumers increase their precautionary savings. This depresses interest rates, especially in the short run, and generates an output drop, even with flexible prices. The output drop is larger with sticky prices, if the zero lower bound preve...
-
作者：Atkin, David; Chaudhry, Azam; Chaudry, Shamyla; Khandelwal, Amit K.; Verhoogen, Eric
作者单位：Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Lahore School of Economics; Columbia University
摘要：This article studies technology adoption in a cluster of soccer-ball producers in Sialkot, Pakistan. We invented a new cutting technology that reduces waste of the primary raw material and gave the technology to a random subset of producers. Despite the clear net benefits for nearly all firms, after 15 months take-up remained puzzlingly low. We hypothesize that an important reason for the lack of adoption is a misalignment of incentives within firms: the key employees (cutters and printers) ar...
-
作者：Glover, Dylan; Pallais, Amanda; Pariente, William
作者单位：Institut d'Etudes Politiques Paris (Sciences Po); Harvard University; National Bureau of Economic Research; Universite Catholique Louvain
摘要：Examining the performance of cashiers in a French grocery store chain, we find that manager bias negatively affects minority job performance. In the stores studied, cashiers work with different managers on different days and their schedules are determined quasi-randomly. When minority cashiers, but not majority cashiers, are scheduled to work with managers who are biased (as determined by an implicit association test), they are absent more often, spend less time at work, scan items more slowly...
-
作者：Brot-Goldberg, Zarek C.; Chandra, Amitabh; Handel, Benjamin R.; Kolstad, Jonathan T.
作者单位：University of California System; University of California Berkeley; Harvard University; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：Measuring consumer responsiveness to medical care prices is a central issue in health economics and a key ingredient in the optimal design and regulation of health insurance markets. We leverage a natural experiment at a large self-insured firm that required all of its employees to switch from an insurance plan that provided free health care to a nonlinear, high-deductible plan. The switch caused a spending reduction between 11.8% and 13.8% of total firm-wide health spending. We decompose this...
-
作者：Polborn, Mattias K.; Snyder, James M., Jr.
作者单位：Vanderbilt University; Vanderbilt University; Harvard University; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：We develop a theory of legislative competition in which voters care about local candidate valence and national party positions that are determined by the parties' median legislators. As long as election outcomes are sufficiently predictable, the only stable equilibria exhibit policy divergence between the parties. If the degree of uncertainty about election outcomes decreases, and if voters place less weight on local candidates' valence, polarization between the parties increases. Furthermore,...
-
作者：Celerier, Claire; Vallee, Boris
作者单位：University of Toronto; Harvard University
摘要：This study investigates how banks design financial products to cater to yield-seeking investors. We focus on a large market of investment products targeted exclusively at households: retail structured products. These products typically offer a high return under their best-case scenario-the headline rate-that is nested in a complex payoff formula. Using a text analysis of the payoff formulas of the 55,000 products issued in Europe from 2002 to 2010, we measure product headline rates, complexity...
-
作者：Bhargava, Saurabh; Loewenstein, George; Sydnor, Justin
作者单位：Carnegie Mellon University
摘要：We examine the health plan choices that 23,894 employees at a U.S. firm made from a large menu of options that differed only in financial cost-sharing and premium. These decisions provide a clear test of the predictions of the standard economic model of insurance choice in the absence of choice frictions because plans were priced so that nearly every plan with a lower deductible was financially dominated by an otherwise identical plan with a high deductible. We document that the majority of em...
-
作者：Goldschmidt, Deborah; Schmieder, Johannes F.
作者单位：Boston University; National Bureau of Economic Research; Center for Economic & Policy Research (CEPR)
摘要：The nature of the relationship between employers and employees has been changing over the past three decades, with firms increasingly relying on contractors, temp agencies, and franchises rather than hiring employees directly. We investigate the impact of this transformation on the wage structure by following jobs that are moved outside the boundary of lead employers to contracting firms. We develop a new method for identifying outsourcing of food, cleaning, security, and logistics services in...
