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作者：Ludema, Rodney D.; Mayda, Anna Maria
作者单位：Georgetown University
摘要：International trade agreements are an important element of the world economic system, but questions remain as to their purpose. The terms-of-trade hypothesis posits that countries use tariffs in part to improve their terms of trade and that trade agreements cause them to internalize the costs that such terms-of-trade shifts impose on other countries. This article investigates whether the most-favored-nation (MFN) tariffs set by World Trade Organization (WTO) members in the Uruguay Round are co...
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作者：Powell, Robert
作者单位：University of California System; University of California Berkeley
摘要：Governments in weak states often face an armed opposition and have to decide whether to try to accommodate and contain that adversary or to try to consolidate power and monopolize violence by disarming it. When and why do governments choose to consolidate power and monopolize violence? How fast do they try to consolidate power? When does this lead to costly fighting rather than to efforts to eliminate the opposition by buying it off? We study an infinite-horizon model in which the government i...
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作者：Lyn, Gary; Rodriguez-Clare, Andres
作者单位：University of Massachusetts System; University of Massachusetts Lowell; University of California System; University of California Berkeley; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：Recently, Gene Grossman and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg (GRH; External Economies and International Trade: Redux, Quarterly Journal of Economics 125 [2010], 829-858) proposed a novel way to think about the implications of international trade in the presence of national external economies at the industry level. Instead of perfect competition and two industries, GRH assume Bertrand competition and a continuum of industries. GRH conclude that the equilibrium is unique if transport costs are low, that t...
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作者：Alesina, Alberto; Giuliano, Paola; Nunn, Nathan
作者单位：Harvard University; National Bureau of Economic Research; University of California System; University of California Los Angeles
摘要：The study examines the historical origins of existing cross-cultural differences in beliefs and values regarding the appropriate role of women in society. We test the hypothesis that traditional agricultural practices influenced the historical gender division of labor and the evolution of gender norms. We find that, consistent with existing hypotheses, the descendants of societies that traditionally practiced plough agriculture today have less equal gender norms, measured using reported gender...
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作者：Legros, Patrick; Newman, Andrew F.
作者单位：Universite Libre de Bruxelles; Boston University
摘要：This article presents a perfectly competitive model of firm boundary decisions and study their interplay with product demand, technology, and welfare. Integration is privately costly but is effective at coordinating production decisions; nonintegration is less costly but coordinates relatively poorly. Output price influences the choice of ownership structure: integration increases with the price level. At the same time, ownership affects output, because integration is more productive than noni...
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作者：Bidner, Chris; Francois, Patrick
作者单位：University of New South Wales Sydney; University of British Columbia
摘要：When and how do democratic institutions deliver accountable government? In addressing this broad question, we focus on the role played by political norms-specifically, the extent to which leaders abuse office for personal gain and the extent to which citizens punish such transgressions. We show how qualitatively distinct political norms can coexist because of a dynamic complementarity, in which citizens' willingness to punish transgressions is raised when they expect such punishments to be use...
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作者：Duflo, Esther; Greenstone, Michael; Pande, Rohini; Ryan, Nicholas
作者单位：Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Harvard University
摘要：In many regulated markets, private, third-party auditors are chosen and paid by the firms that they audit, potentially creating a conflict of interest. This article reports on a two-year field experiment in the Indian state of Gujarat that sought to curb such a conflict by altering the market structure for environmental audits of industrial plants to incentivize accurate reporting. There are three main results. First, the status quo system was largely corrupted, with auditors systematically re...
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作者：Rothschild, Casey; Scheuer, Florian
作者单位：Wellesley College; Stanford University; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：We consider,optimal redistribution in a model where individuals can self-select into one of several possible sectors based on heterogeneity in a multidimensional skill vector. We first show that when the government does not observe the sectoral choice or underlying skills of its citizens, the constrained Pareto frontier can be implemented with a single nonlinear income tax. We then characterize this optimal tax schedule. If sectoral inputs are complements, a many-sector model with self-selecti...
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作者：Young, Alwyn
作者单位：University of London; London School Economics & Political Science
摘要：Using population and product consumption data from the Demographic and Health Surveys, I construct comparable measures of inequality and migration for 65 countries, including some of the poorest countries in the world. I find that the urban-rural gap accounts for 40% of mean country inequality and much of its cross-country variation. One out of every four or five individuals raised in rural areas moves to urban areas as a young adult, where they earn much higher incomes than nonmigrant rural p...
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作者：Mian, Atif; Rao, Kamalesh; Sufi, Amir
作者单位：Princeton University; National Bureau of Economic Research; University of Chicago
摘要：We investigate the consumption consequences of the 2006-9 housing collapse using the highly unequal geographic distribution of wealth losses across the United States. We estimate a large elasticity of consumption with respect to housing net worth of 0.6 to 0.8, which soundly rejects the hypothesis of full consumption risk-sharing. The average marginal propensity to consume (MPC) out of housing wealth is 5-7 cents with substantial heterogeneity across ZIP codes. ZIP codes with poorer and more l...
