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作者：Helpman, Elhanan; Melitz, Marc; Rubinstein, Yona
作者单位：Harvard University; Brown University; Princeton University; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：We develop a simple model of international trade with heterogeneous firms that is consistent with a number of stylized features of the data. In particular, the model predicts positive as well as zero trade flows across pairs of countries, and it allows the number of exporting firms to vary across destination countries. As a result, the impact of trade frictions on trade flows can be decomposed into the intensive and extensive margins, where the former refers to the trade volume per exporter an...
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作者：Ferraz, Claudio; Finan, Frederico
作者单位：University of California System; University of California Los Angeles; Instituto de Pesquisa Economica Aplicada (IPEA); IZA Institute Labor Economics
摘要：This paper uses publicly released audit reports to study the effects of disclosing information about corruption practices on electoral accountability. In 2003, as part of an anticorruption program, Brazil's federal government began to select municipalities at random to audit their expenditures of federally transferred funds. The findings of these audits were then made publicly available and disseminated to media sources. Using a data set on corruption constructed from the audit reports, we com...
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作者：Kircher, Philipp; Postlewaite, Andrew
作者单位：University of Pennsylvania
摘要：Better-informed consumers may be treated preferentially by firms because their consumption serves as a quality signal for other customers. For normal goods this results in wealthy individuals being treated better than poor individuals. We investigate this phenomenon in an equilibrium model of social learning with heterogeneous consumers and firms that act strategically. Consumers search for high-quality firms and condition their choices on observed actions of other consumers. When they observe...
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作者：Mullainathan, Sendhil; Schwartzstein, Joshua; Shleifer, Andrei
作者单位：Harvard University
摘要：We present a model of uninformative persuasion in which individuals think coarsely: they group situations into categories and apply the same model of inference to all situations within a category. Coarse thinking exhibits two features that persuaders take advantage of: W transference, whereby individuals transfer the informational content of a given message from situations in a category where it is useful to those where it is not, and (ii) framing, whereby objectively useless information influ...
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作者：Currie, Janet; Macleod, W. Bentley
作者单位：Columbia University; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：In the 1980s and 1990s many states adopted tort reforms. It has been argued that these reforms have reduced the practice of defensive medicine arising from excess tort liability. We find that this does not appear to be true for a large and important class of cases-childbirth in the United States. Using data from national vital statistics natality files on millions of individual births from 1989 to 2001, we ask whether specific tort reforms affect the types of procedures that are performed, and...
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作者：Doepke, Matthias; Zilibotti, Fabrizio
作者单位：University of California System; University of California Los Angeles; University of Zurich
摘要：The British Industrial Revolution triggered a socioeconomic transformation whereby the landowning aristocracy was replaced by industrial capitalists rising from the middle classes as the economically dominant group. We propose a theory of preference formation under financial market imperfections that can account for this pattern. Parents shape their children's preferences in response to economic incentives. Middle-class families in occupations requiring effort, skill, and experience develop pa...
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作者：Caplin, Andrew; Dean, Mark
作者单位：City University of New York (CUNY) System
摘要：The neurotransmitter dopamine has been found to play a crucial role in choice, learning, and belief formation. The best-developed current theory of dopaminergic function is the reward prediction error hypothesis-that dopamine encodes the difference between the experienced and predicted reward of an event. We provide axiomatic foundations for this hypothesis to help bridge the current conceptual gap between neuroscience and economics. Continued research in this area of overlap between social an...
