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作者：Mendoza, Enrique G.; Yue, Vivian Z.
作者单位：University System of Maryland; University of Maryland College Park; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：Why are episodes of sovereign default accompanied by deep recessions? The existing literature cannot answer this question. On one hand, sovereign default models treat income fluctuations as an exogenous endowment process with ad hoc default costs. On the other hand, emerging markets business cycle models abstract from modeling default and treat default risk as part of an exogenous interest rate on working capital. We propose instead a general equilibrium model of both sovereign default and bus...
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作者：Michaels, Guy; Rauch, Ferdinand; Redding, Stephen J.
作者单位：University of London; London School Economics & Political Science; Princeton University
摘要：We examine urbanization using new data that allow us to track the evolution of population in rural and urban areas in the United States from 1880 to 2000. We find a positive correlation between initial population density and subsequent population growth for intermediate densities, which increases the dispersion of the population density distribution over time. We use theory and empirical evidence to show this pattern of population growth is the result of differences in agriculture's initial sh...
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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：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：Bleakley, Hoyt; Lin, Jeffrey
作者单位：University of Chicago; Federal Reserve System - USA; Federal Reserve Bank - Philadelphia
摘要：Many cities in North America formed at obstacles to water navigation, where continued transport required overland hauling or portage. Portage sites attracted commerce and supporting services, and places where the falls provided water power attracted manufacturing during early industrialization. We examine portage sites in the U.S. South, Mid-Atlantic, and Midwest, including those on the fall line, a geomorphological feature in the southeastern United States marking the final rapids on rivers b...
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作者：Jensen, Robert
作者单位：University of California System; University of California Los Angeles
摘要：Do labor market opportunities for women affect marriage and fertility decisions? We provided three years of recruiting services to help young women in randomly selected rural Indian villages get jobs in the business process outsourcing industry. Because the industry was so new at the time of the study, there was almost no awareness of these jobs, allowing us in effect to exogenously increase women's labor force opportunities from the perspective of rural households. We find that young women in...
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作者：Padro i Miquel, Gerard; Yared, Pierre
作者单位：University of London; London School Economics & Political Science; National Bureau of Economic Research; Columbia University
摘要：This article characterizes optimal policy when a government uses indirect control to exert its authority. We develop a dynamic principal-agent model in which a principal (a government) delegates the prevention of a disturbance-such as riots, protests, terrorism, crime, or tax evasion-to an agent who has an advantage in accomplishing this task. Our setting is a standard repeated moral hazard model with two additional features. First, the principal is allowed to exert direct control by interveni...
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作者：Kraay, Aart
作者单位：The World Bank
摘要：This article proposes a novel approach to empirically identifying government spending multipliers that relies on two features unique to many low-income countries: (1) borrowing from the World Bank finances a substantial fraction of government spending, and (2) spending on World Bank-financed projects is typically spread out over several years following the original approval of the project. The first fact means that fluctuations in spending on World Bank-financed projects are a significant sour...
