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作者:Costinot, Arnaud; Donaldson, Dave; Vogel, Jonathan; Werning, Ivan
作者单位:Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Columbia University
摘要:The theory of comparative advantage is at the core of neoclassical trade theory. Yet we know little about its implications for how nations should conduct their trade policy. For example, should import sectors with weaker comparative advantage be protected more? Conversely, should export sectors with stronger comparative advantage be subsidized less? In this article we take a first stab at exploring these issues. Our main results imply that in the context of a canonical Ricardian model, optimal...
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作者:Greenwood, Robin; Hanson, Samuel G.
作者单位:Harvard University
摘要:We study the link between investment boom and bust cycles and returns on capital in the dry bulk shipping industry. We show that high current ship earnings are associated with high used ship prices and heightened industry investment in new ships, but forecast low future returns. We propose and estimate a behavioral model of industry cycles that can account for the evidence. In our model, firms overextrapolate exogenous demand shocks and partially neglect the endogenous investment response of t...
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作者:Einav, Liran; Finkelstein, Amy; Schrimpf, Paul
作者单位:Stanford University; National Bureau of Economic Research; Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); University of British Columbia
摘要:We study the demand response to nonlinear price schedules using data on insurance contracts and prescription drug purchases in Medicare Part D. We exploit the kink in individuals' budgets set created by the famous donut hole, where insurance becomes discontinuously much less generous on the margin, to provide descriptive evidence of the drug purchase response to a price increase. We then specify and estimate a simple dynamic model of drug use that allows us to quantify the spending response al...
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作者:Galasso, Alberto; Schankerman, Mark
作者单位:University of Toronto; University of London; London School Economics & Political Science
摘要:Cumulative innovation is central to economic growth. Do patent rights facilitate or impede follow-on innovation? We study the causal effect of removing patent rights by court invalidation on subsequent research related to the focal patent, as measured by later citations. We exploit random allocation of judges at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to control for endogeneity of patent invalidation. Patent invalidation leads to a 50% increase in citations to the focal patent, on av...
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作者:Bursztyn, Leonardo; Jensen, Robert
作者单位:University of California System; University of California Los Angeles; University of Pennsylvania; National Bureau of Economic Research; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要:When effort is observable to peers, students may try to avoid social penalties by conforming to prevailing norms. To test this hypothesis, we first consider a natural experiment that introduced a performance leaderboard into computer-based high school courses. The result was a 24 percent performance decline. The decline appears to be driven by a desire to avoid the leaderboard; top performing students prior to the change, those most at risk of appearing on the leaderboard, had a 40 percent per...
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作者:Gabaix, Xavier; Maggiori, Matteo
作者单位:Harvard University; New York University
摘要:We provide a theory of the determination of exchange rates based on capital flows in imperfect financial markets. Capital flows drive exchange rates by altering the balance sheets of financiers that bear the risks resulting from international imbalances in the demand for financial assets. Such alterations to their balance sheets cause financiers to change their required compensation for holding currency risk, thus affecting both the level and volatility of exchange rates. Our theory of exchang...
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作者:Michaillat, Pascal; Saez, Emmanuel
作者单位:University of London; London School Economics & Political Science; University of California System; University of California Berkeley
摘要:This article develops a model of unemployment fluctuations. The model keeps the architecture of the general-disequilibrium model of Barro and Grossman (1971) but takes a matching approach to the labor and product markets instead of a disequilibrium approach. On the product and labor markets, both price and tightness adjust to equalize supply and demand. Since there are two equilibrium variables but only one equilibrium condition on each market, a price mechanism is needed to select an equilibr...
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作者:Fillat, Jose L.; Garetto, Stefania
作者单位:Federal Reserve System - USA; Federal Reserve Bank - Boston; Boston University
摘要:This article starts by unveiling a strong empirical regularity: multinational corporations exhibit higher stock market returns and earning yields than nonmultinational firms. Within nonmultinationals, exporters exhibit higher earning yields and returns than firms selling only in their domestic market. To explain this pattern, we develop a real option value model where firms are heterogeneous in productivity and have to decide whether and how to sell in a foreign market where demand is risky. S...
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作者:Piguillem, Facundo; Riboni, Alessandro
作者单位:Institut Polytechnique de Paris; Ecole Polytechnique
摘要:We study legislators who have a present bias for spending: they want to increase current spending and procrastinate spending cuts. We show that disagreement in legislatures can lead to policy persistence that attenuates the temptation to overspend. Depending on the environment, legislators' decisions to be fiscally responsible may either complement or substitute other legislators' decisions. When legislators have low discount factors, their actions are strategic complements. Thus, changes of t...
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作者:Kremer, Michael; Snyder, Christopher M.
作者单位:Brookings Institution; Dartmouth College; Harvard University; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要:Preventives are sold ex ante, before disease status is realized, while treatments are sold ex post. Even if the mean of the ex ante distribution of consumer values is the same as that ex post, the shape of the distributions may differ, generating a difference between the surplus each product can extract. If, for example, consumers differ only in ex ante disease risk, then a monopolist would have more difficulty extracting surplus with a preventive than with a treatment because treatment consum...