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作者：Hart, Oliver; Holmstrom, Bengt
作者单位：Harvard University; Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：The formal literature on firm boundaries has assumed that ex post conflicts are resolved through bargaining. In reality, parties often simply exercise their decision rights. We develop a model, based on shading, in which the use of authority has a central role. We consider two firms deciding whether to adopt a common standard. Nonintegrated firms may fail to coordinate if one firm loses. An integrated firm can internalize the externality, but puts insufficient weight on employee benefits. We u...
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作者：Hornbeck, Richard
作者单位：Harvard University; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：This paper examines the impact on agricultural development of the introduction of barbed wire fencing to the American Plains in the late nineteenth century. Without a fence, farmers risked uncompensated damage by others' livestock. From 1880 to 1900, the introduction and near-universal adoption of barbed wire greatly reduced the cost of fences, relative to the predominant wooden fences, especially in counties with the least woodland. Over that period, counties with the least woodland experienc...
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作者：Rothstein, Jesse
作者单位：University of California System; University of California Berkeley; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：Growing concerns over the inadequate achievement of US. students have led to proposals to reward good teachers and penalize (or fire) bad ones. The leading method for assessing teacher quality is value added modeling (VAM), which decomposes students' test scores into components attributed to student heterogeneity and to teacher quality. Implicit in the VAM approach are strong assumptions about the nature of the educational production function and the assignment of students to classrooms. In th...
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作者：Riboni, Alessandro; Ruge-Murcia, Francisco J.
作者单位：Universite de Montreal
摘要：This paper studies the theoretical and empirical implications of monetary policy making by committee under four different voting protocols. The protocols are a consensus model, where a supermajority is required for a policy change; an agenda-setting model, where the chairman controls the agenda; a dictator model, where the chairman has absolute power over the committee; and a simple majority model, where policy is determined by the median member. These protocols give preeminence to different a...
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作者：Foster, Dean P.; Young, H. Peyton
作者单位：University of Pennsylvania; University of Oxford; Brookings Institution
摘要：We show that it is very difficult to devise performance-based compensation contracts that reward portfolio managers who generate excess returns while screening out managers who cannot generate such returns. Theoretical bounds are derived on the amount of fee manipulation that is possible under various performance contracts. We show that recent proposals to reform compensation practices, such as postponing bonuses and instituting clawback provisions, will not eliminate opportunities to game the...
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作者：Azoulay, Pierre; Zivin, Joshua S. Graff; Wang, Jialan
作者单位：Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); National Bureau of Economic Research; University of California System; University of California San Diego
摘要：We estimate the magnitude of spillovers generated by 112 academic super-stars who died prematurely and unexpectedly, thus providing an exogenous source of variation in the structure of their collaborators' coauthorship networks. Following the death of a superstar, we find that collaborators experience, on average, a lasting 5% to 8% decline in their quality-adjusted publication rates. By exploring interactions of the treatment effect with a variety of star, coauthor, and star/coauthor dyad cha...
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作者：Atkeson, Andrew; Chari, Varadarajan V.; Kehoe, Patrick J.
作者单位：University of California System; University of California Los Angeles; National Bureau of Economic Research; University of California System; University of California Los Angeles; Federal Reserve System - USA; Federal Reserve Bank - Minneapolis; University of Minnesota System; University of Minnesota Twin Cities; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：In standard monetary policy approaches, interest-rate rules often produce indeterminacy. A sophisticated policy approach does not. Sophisticated policies depend on the history of private actions, government policies, and exogenous events and can differ on and off the equilibrium path. They can uniquely implement any desired competitive equilibrium. When interest rates are used along the equilibrium path, implementation requires regime-switching. These results are robust to imperfect informatio...
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作者：Goldberg, Pinelopi Koujianou; Khandelwal, Amit Kumar; Pavcnik, Nina; Topalova, Petia
摘要：New goods play a central role in many trade and growth models. We use detailed trade and firm-level data from India to investigate the relationship between declines in trade costs, imports of intermediate inputs, and domestic firm product scope. We estimate substantial gains from trade through access to new imported inputs. Moreover, we find that lower input tariffs account on average for 31% of the new products introduced by domestic firms. This effect is driven to a large extent by increased...
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作者：Lileeva, Alla; Trefler, Daniel
作者单位：York University - Canada; University of Toronto; Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR); National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：Market size matters for innovation and hence for productivity. Improved access to foreign markets will thus encourage firms to simultaneously export and invest in raising productivity. We examine this insight using the responses of Canadian plants to the elimination of U. S. tariffs. Unique plant-specific tariff cuts serve as an instrument for changes in exporting. We find that Canadian plants that were induced by the tariff cuts to start exporting or to export more (a) increased their labor p...
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作者：Aghion, Philippe; Algan, Yann; Cahuc, Pierre; Shleifer, Andrei
作者单位：Harvard University; Institut Polytechnique de Paris; ENSAE Paris; Ecole Polytechnique
摘要：We document that, in a cross section of countries, government regulation is strongly negatively correlated with measures of trust. In a simple model explaining this correlation, distrust creates public demand for regulation, whereas regulation in turn discourages formation of trust, leading to multiple equilibria. A key implication of the model is that individuals in low-trust countries want more government intervention even though they know the government is corrupt. We test this and other im...
