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作者：Koren, Miklos; Tenreyro, Silvana
作者单位：Federal Reserve System - USA; Federal Reserve Bank - New York; University of London; London School Economics & Political Science
摘要：Why is GDP growth so much more volatile in poor countries than in rich ones? We identify three possible reasons: G) poor countries specialize in fewer and more volatile sectors; GO poor countries experience more frequent and more severe aggregate shocks (e.g., from macroeconomic policy); and (iii) poor countries' macroeconomic fluctuations are more highly correlated with the shocks affecting the sectors they specialize in. We show how to decompose volatility into the various sources, quantify ...
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作者：Banerjee, Abhijit V.; Cole, Shawn; Duflo, Esther; Linden, Leigh
作者单位：Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Harvard University; Columbia University; Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
摘要：This paper presents the results of two randomized experiments conducted in schools in urban India. A remedial education program hired young women to teach students lagging behind in basic literacy and numeracy skills. It increased average test scores of all children in treatment schools by 0.28 standard deviation, mostly due to large gains experienced by children at the bottom of the test-score distribution. A computer-assisted learning program focusing on math increased math scores by 0.47 st...
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作者：Nunn, Nathan
作者单位：University of British Columbia
摘要：Is a country's ability to enforce contracts an important determinant of comparative advantage? To answer this question, I construct a variable that measures, for each good, the proportion of its intermediate inputs that require relationship-specific investments. Combining this measure with data on trade flows and judicial quality, 1 find that countries with good contract enforcement specialize in the production of goods for which relationship-specific investments are most important. According ...
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作者：Bloom, Nicholas; Van Reenen, John
作者单位：University of Cambridge; University of London; London School Economics & Political Science
摘要：We use an innovative survey tool to collect management practice data from 732 medium-sized firms in the United States, France, Germany and the United Kingdom. These measures of managerial practice are strongly associated with firm-level productivity, profitability, Tobin's Q, and survival rates. Management practices also display significant cross-country differences, with U.S. firms on average better managed than European firms, and significant within-country differences, with a long tail of e...
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作者：Golosov, Mikhail; Tsyvinski, Aleh
作者单位：Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); National Bureau of Economic Research; Harvard University
摘要：We study optimal taxation in an economy where the skills of agents evolve stochastically over time and are private information and in which agents can trade unobservably in competitive markets. We show that competitive equilibria are constrained inefficient. The government can improve welfare by distorting capital accumulation with the sign of the distortion depending on the nature of the skill process. Finally, we show that private insurance provision responds endogenously to policy, that gov...
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作者：Di Tella, Rafael; Galiani, Sebastian; Schargrodsky, Ernesto
作者单位：Harvard University; Washington University (WUSTL); Universidad Torcuato Di Tella
摘要：We study the formation of beliefs in a squatter settlement in the outskirts of Buenos Aires exploiting a natural experiment that induced an allocation of property rights that is exogenous to the characteristics of the squatters. There are significant differences in the beliefs that squatters with and without land titles declare to hold. Lucky squatters who end up with legal titles report beliefs closer to those that favor the workings of a free market. Examples include materialist and individu...
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作者：Kremer, Michael; Miguel, Edward
作者单位：Harvard University
摘要：We use a randomized evaluation of a Kenyan deworming program to estimate peer effects in technology adoption and to shed light on foreign aid donors' movement towards sustainable community provision of public goods. Deworming is a public good since much of its social benefit comes through reduced disease transmission. People were less likely to take deworming if their direct first-order or indirect second-order social contacts were exposed to deworming. Efforts to replace subsidies with sustai...
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作者：Hall, Robert E.; Jones, Charles I.
作者单位：Stanford University; National Bureau of Economic Research; University of California System; University of California Berkeley
摘要：Over the past half century, Americans spent a rising share of total economic resources on health and enjoyed substantially longer lives as a result. Debate on health policy often focuses on limiting the growth of health spending. We investigate an issue central to this debate: Is the growth of health spending a rational response to changing economic conditions-notably the growth of income per person? We develop a model based on standard economic assumptions and argue that this is indeed the ca...
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作者：Alessandria, George; Choi, Horag
作者单位：University of Auckland; Federal Reserve System - USA; Federal Reserve Bank - Philadelphia
摘要：Firms start and stop exporting. Previous research suggests that these export participation decisions alter the comovement of net exports with the real exchange rate. We evaluate these predictions in a general equilibrium environment. Specifically, assuming firms face an up-front, sunk cost of entering foreign markets, and a smaller period-by-period continuation cost, we derive the discrete entry and exit decisions yielding exporter dynamics in an open economy business cycle model. The model's ...
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作者：Cremer, Jacques; Garicano, Luis; Prat, Andrea
作者单位：Universite PSL; Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS); Universite de Toulouse; Universite Toulouse 1 Capitole; Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS); University of Chicago; Centre for Economic Policy Research - UK; University of London; London School Economics & Political Science
摘要：We characterize efficient technical languages and study their interaction with the scope and structure of organizations. Efficient languages use precise words for frequent events and vague words for unusual ones. A broader organizational scope allows for more synergies to be captured, but reduces within-unit efficiency, since it requires a more generic language. A manager working as specialized translator may also be used to achieve between-unit coordination while maintaining separate language...
