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作者：Almond, Douglas; Doyle, Joseph J., Jr.; Kowalski, Amanda E.; Williams, Heidi
作者单位：Columbia University; National Bureau of Economic Research; Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Yale University; Harvard University
摘要：A key policy question is whether the benefits of additional medical expenditures exceed their costs. We propose a new approach for estimating marginal returns to medical spending based on variation in medical inputs generated by diagnostic thresholds. Specifically, we combine regression discontinuity estimates that compare health outcomes and medical treatment provision for newborns on either side of the very low birth weight threshold at 1,500 grams. First, using data on the census of U. S. b...
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作者：Duarte, Margarida; Restuccia, Diego
作者单位：University of Toronto
摘要：We investigate the role of sectoral labor productivity in explaining the process of structural transformation-the secular reallocation of labor across sectors-and the time path of aggregate productivity across countries. We measure sectoral labor productivity across countries using a model of the structural transformation. Productivity differences across countries are large in agriculture and services and smaller in manufacturing. Over time, productivity gaps have been substantially reduced in...
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作者：Chen, Shaohua; Ravallion, Martin
作者单位：The World Bank
摘要：A new data set on national poverty lines is combined with new price data and almost 700 household surveys to estimate absolute poverty measures for the developing world. We find that 25% of the population lived in poverty in 2005, as judged by what poverty typically means in the world's poorest countries. This is higher than past estimates. Substantial overall progress is still indicated-the corresponding poverty rate was 52% in 1981-but progress was very uneven across regions. The trends over...
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作者：Price, Joseph; Wolfers, Justin
作者单位：Brigham Young University; University of Pennsylvania; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：The NBA provides an intriguing place to assess discrimination: referees and players are involved in repeated interactions in a high-pressure setting, with referees making split-second decisions that might allow implicit racial biases to become evident. We find that more personal fouls are awarded against players when they are officiated by an opposite-race officiating crew than when they are officiated by an own-race refereeing crew. These biases are sufficiently large so that they affect the ...
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作者：Putterman, Louis; Weil, David N.
作者单位：Brown University; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：We construct a matrix showing the share of the year 2000 population in every country that is descended from people in different source countries in the year 1500. Using the matrix to adjust indicators of early development so that they reflect the history of a population's ancestors rather than the history of the place they live today greatly improves the ability of those indicators to predict current GDP. The variance of the early development history of a country's inhabitants is a good predic...
