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作者：Ahern, Kenneth R.; Dittmar, Amy K.
作者单位：University of Michigan System; University of Michigan
摘要：In 2003, a new law required that 40% of Norwegian firms' directors be women-at the time only 9% of directors were women. We use the prequota cross-sectional variation in female board representation to instrument for exogenous changes to corporate boards following the quota. We find that the constraint imposed by the quota caused a significant drop in the stock price at the announcement of the law and a large decline in Tobin's Q over the following years, consistent with the idea that firms cho...
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作者：Casey, Katherine; Glennerster, Rachel; Miguel, Edward
作者单位：Stanford University; University of California System; University of California Berkeley; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：Despite their importance, there is limited evidence on how institutions can be strengthened. Evaluating the effects of specific reforms is complicated by the lack of exogenous variation in institutions, the difficulty of measuring institutional performance, and the temptation to cherry pick estimates from among the large number of indicators required to capture this multifaceted subject. We evaluate one attempt to make local institutions more democratic and egalitarian by imposing participatio...
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作者：Gibbons, Robert; Holden, Richard; Powell, Michael
作者单位：Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); University of New South Wales Sydney; Northwestern University
摘要：We analyze a rational-expectations model of price formation in an intermediate-good market under uncertainty. There is a continuum of firms, each consisting of a party who can reduce production cost and a party who can discover information about demand. Both parties can make specific investments at private cost, and there is a machine that either party can control. As in incomplete-contracting models, different governance structures (i.e., different allocations of control of the machine) creat...
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作者：Schmieder, Johannes F.; von Wachter, Till; Bender, Stefan
作者单位：Boston University; Columbia University; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：One goal of extending the duration of unemployment insurance (UI) in recessions is to increase UI coverage in the face of longer unemployment spells. Although it is a common concern that such extensions may themselves raise nonemployment durations, it is not known how recessions would affect the magnitude of this moral hazard. To obtain causal estimates of the differential effects of UI in booms and recessions, this article exploits the fact that in Germany, potential UI benefit duration is a ...
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作者：Eggertsson, Gauti B.; Krugman, Paul
作者单位：Federal Reserve System - USA; Federal Reserve Bank - New York; Princeton University
摘要：In this article we present a simple new Keynesian-style model of debt-driven slumps-that is, situations in which an overhang of debt on the part of some agents, who are forced into rapid deleveraging, is depressing aggregate demand. Making some agents debt-constrained is a surprisingly powerful assumption. Fisherian debt deflation, the possibility of a liquidity trap, the paradox of thrift and toil, a Keynesian-type multiplier, and a rationale for expansionary fiscal policy all emerge naturall...
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作者：Voigtlaender, Nico; Voth, Hans-Joachim
作者单位：University of California System; University of California Los Angeles; National Bureau of Economic Research; ICREA; Centre de Recerca en Economia Internacional (CREI); Pompeu Fabra University
摘要：How persistent are cultural traits? Using data on anti-Semitism in Germany, we find local continuity over 600 years. Jews were often blamed when the Black Death killed at least a third of Europe's population during 1348-50. We use plague-era pogroms as an indicator for medieval anti-Semitism. They reliably predict violence against Jews in the 1920s, votes for the Nazi Party, deportations after 1933, attacks on synagogues, and letters to Der Sturmer. We also identify areas where persistence was...
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作者：Gabaix, Xavier
作者单位：New York University
摘要：This article incorporates a time-varying severity of disasters into the hypothesis proposed by Rietz (1988) and Barro (2006) that risk premia result from the possibility of rare large disasters. During a disaster an asset's fundamental value falls by a time-varying amount. This in turn generates time-varying risk premia and, thus, volatile asset prices and return predictability. Using the recent technique of linearity-generating processes, the model is tractable and all prices are exactly solv...
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作者：Besley, Timothy J.; Burchardi, Konrad B.; Ghatak, Maitreesh
作者单位：University of London; London School Economics & Political Science
摘要：This paper explores the consequences of improving property rights to facilitate the use of fixed assets as collateral, popularly attributed to the influential policy advocate Hernando de Soto. We use an equilibrium model of a credit market with moral hazard to characterize the theoretical effects and also develop a quantitative analysis using data from Sri Lanka. We show that the effects are likely to be nonlinear and heterogeneous by wealth group. They also depend on the extent of competition...
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作者：Bloom, Nicholas; Sadun, Raffaella; Van Reenen, John
作者单位：University of London; London School Economics & Political Science; National Bureau of Economic Research; Harvard University
摘要：We argue that social capital as proxied by trust increases aggregate productivity by affecting the organization of firms. To do this we collect new data on the decentralization of investment, hiring, production, and sales decisions from corporate headquarters to local plant managers in almost 4,000 firms in the United States, Europe, and Asia. We find that firms headquartered in high-trust regions are significantly more likely to decentralize. To help identify causal effects, we look within mu...
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作者：Piccione, Michele; Spiegler, Ran
作者单位：University of London; London School Economics & Political Science; Tel Aviv University; University of London; University College London
摘要：This article studies market competition when firms can influence consumers' ability to compare market alternatives through their choice of price formats. In our model, the ability of a consumer to make a comparison depends on the firms' format choices. Our main results concern the interaction between firms' equilibrium price and format decisions and its implications for industry profits and consumer switching rates. In particular, market forces drive down the firms' profits to a constrained co...
