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作者：Ponticelli, Jacopo; Alencar, Leonardo S.
作者单位：University of Chicago; Central Bank of Brazil
摘要：We exploit variation in the congestion of civil courts across Brazilian municipalities, together with a bankruptcy reform increasing secured creditors' protection, to estimate the effect of enforcement on firm access to finance, investment, and size. We find that firms operating in municipalities with less congested courts experienced a larger increase in the use of secured loans, as well as a larger increase in investment and value of output in the years after the reform. To establish the dir...
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作者：Kline, Patrick; Walters, Christopher R.
作者单位：University of California System; University of California Berkeley; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：We use data from the Head Start Impact Study (HSIS) to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of Head Start, the largest early childhood education program in the United States. Head Start draws roughly a third of its participants from competing preschool programs, many of which receive public funds. We show that accounting for the fiscal impacts of such program substitution pushes estimates of Head Start's benefit-cost ratio well above one under a wide range of assumptions on the structure of the mar...
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作者：Pinkovskiy, Maxim; Sala-I-Martin, Xavier
作者单位：Federal Reserve System - USA; Federal Reserve Bank - New York; Columbia University; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：GDP per capita and household survey means present conflicting pictures of the rate of economic development in emerging countries. One of the areas in which the national accounts-household surveys debate is key is the measurement of developing world poverty. We propose a data-driven method to assess the relative quality of GDP per capita and survey means by comparing them to the evolution of satellite-recorded nighttime lights. Our main assumption, which is robust to a variety of specification ...
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作者：Farhi, Emmanuel; Gabaix, Xavier
作者单位：Harvard University; New York University
摘要：We propose a new model of exchange rates, based on the hypothesis that the possibility of rare but extreme disasters is an important determinant of risk premia in asset markets. The probability of world disasters as well as each country's exposure to these events is time-varying. This creates joint fluctuations in exchange rates, interest rates, options, and stock markets. The model accounts for a series of major puzzles in exchange rates: excess volatility and exchange rate disconnect, forwar...
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作者：Sampson, Thomas
作者单位：University of London; London School Economics & Political Science
摘要：This article develops an idea flows theory of trade and growth with heterogeneous firms. Entrants learn from incumbent firms, and the diffusion technology is such that learning depends not on the frontier technology, but on the entire distribution of productivity. By shifting the productivity distribution upward, selection causes technology diffusion, and in equilibrium this dynamic selection process leads to endogenous growth without scale effects. On the balanced growth path, the productivit...
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作者：Donaldson, Dave; Hornbeck, Richard
作者单位：Stanford University; National Bureau of Economic Research; University of Chicago
摘要：This article examines the historical impact of railroads on the U.S. economy, with a focus on quantifying the aggregate impact on the agricultural sector in 1890. Expansion of the railroad network may have affected all counties directly or indirectly-an econometric challenge that arises in many empirical settings. However, the total impact on each county is captured by changes in that county's market access,'' a reduced-form expression derived from general equilibrium trade theory. We measure ...
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作者：Arkolakis, Costas
作者单位：Yale University
摘要：This article develops an analytical framework to study firm and exporter growth and provides a dynamic foundation for a standard general equilibrium trade model. Firm-level growth is the result of idiosyncratic productivity improvements with a continuous arrival of new potential producers. A firm enters a market if it is profitable to incur the marginal cost to reach the first consumer and pays an increasing marketing cost to reach additional consumers. I calibrate the model using data on the ...
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作者：Baker, Scott R.; Bloom, Nicholas; Davis, Steven J.
作者单位：Center for Economic & Policy Research (CEPR); Northwestern University; Stanford University; National Bureau of Economic Research; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：We develop a new index of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) based on newspaper coverage frequency. Several types of evidence-including human readings of 12,000 newspaper articles-indicate that our index proxies for movements in policy-related economic uncertainty. Our U.S. index spikes near tight presidential elections, Gulf Wars I and II, the 9/11 attacks, the failure of Lehman Brothers, the 2011 debt ceiling dispute, and other major battles over fiscal policy. Using firm-level data, we find ...
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作者：Artavanis, Nikolaos; Morse, Adair; Tsoutsoura, Margarita
作者单位：University of Massachusetts System; University of Massachusetts Amherst; University of California System; University of California Berkeley; National Bureau of Economic Research; University of Chicago
摘要：We document that in semiformal economies, banks lend to tax-evading individuals based on the bank's assessment of the individual's true income. This observation leads to a novel approach to estimate tax evasion. We use micro-data on household credit from a Greek bank and replicate the bank underwriting model to infer the banks estimate of individuals' true income. We estimate that 43-45% of self-employed income goes unreported and thus untaxed. For 2009, this implies (sic)28.2 billion of unrep...
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作者：Khan, Adnan Q.; Khwaja, Asim I.; Olken, Benjamin A.
作者单位：University of London; London School Economics & Political Science; Harvard University; Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
摘要：Performance pay for tax collectors has the potential to raise revenues, but might come at a cost if it increases the bargaining power of tax collectors vis-A -vis taxpayers. We report the first large-scale field experiment on these issues, where we experimentally allocated 482 property tax units in Punjab, Pakistan, into one of three performance pay schemes or a control. After two years, incentivized units had 9.4 log points higher revenue than controls, which translates to a 46% higher growth...
