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作者：Weil, David N.
作者单位：Brown University; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：I use microeconomic estimates of the effect of health on individual outcomes to construct macroeconomic estimates of the proximate effect of health on GDP per capita. I employ a variety of methods to construct estimates of the return to health, which I combine with cross-country and historical data on height, adult survival rates, and age at menarche. Using my preferred estimate, eliminating health differences among countries would reduce the variance of log GDP per worker by 9.9 percent and r...
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作者：Chetty, Raj; Szeidl, Adam
作者单位：University of California System; University of California Berkeley; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：Many households devote a large fraction of their budgets to consumption commitments-goods that involve transaction costs and are infrequently adjusted. This paper characterizes risk preferences in an expected utility model with commitments. We show that commitments affect risk preferences in two ways: (1) they amplify risk aversion with respect to moderate-stake shocks, and (2) they create a motive to take large-payoff gambles. The model thus helps resolve two basic puzzles in expected utility...
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作者：Echenique, Federico; Fryer, Roland G., Jr.
作者单位：California Institute of Technology; Harvard University; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：We develop an index of segregation based on two premises: (1) a measure of segregation should disaggregate to the level of individuals, and (2) an individual is more segregated the more segregated are the agents with whom she interacts. We present an index that satisfies (1) and (2) and that is based on agents' social interactions: the extent to which blacks interact with blacks, whites with whites, etc. We use the index to measure school and residential segregation. Using detailed data on fri...
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作者：Besley, Timothy; Preston, Ian
作者单位：University of London; London School Economics & Political Science; University of London; University College London
摘要：This paper develops an approach to studying how bias in favor of one party due to the pattern of electoral districting affects policy choice. We tie a commonly used measure of electoral bias to the theory of party competition and show how this affects party strategy in theory. The usefulness of the approach is illustrated using data on local government in England. The results suggest that reducing electoral bias leads parties to moderate their policies.
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作者：Aguiar, Mark; Hurst, Erik
作者单位：University of Rochester; University of Chicago; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：In this paper, we use five decades of time-use surveys to document trends in the allocation of time within the United States. We find that a dramatic increase in leisure time lies behind the relatively stable number of market hours worked between 1965 and 2003. Specifically, using a variety of definitions for leisure, we show that leisure for men increased by roughly six to nine hours per week (driven by a decline in market work hours) and for women by roughly four to eight hours per week (dri...
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作者：Mortimer, Julie Holland
作者单位：Harvard University; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：U. S. copyright law effectively prevents direct price discrimination for copyright holders that sell to different markets. In response, these firms can engage in indirect price discrimination. I derive theoretical predictions about the use of indirect price discrimination, and I analyze how optimal pricing strategies differ for different products. Using data on VHS and DVD movie distribution, I find that firms' pricing choices are consistent with the predictions of theory and that firms' use o...
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作者：Bandiera, Oriana; Barankay, Iwan; Rasul, Imran
作者单位：University of London; London School Economics & Political Science; University of Essex; University of London; University College London
摘要：We present evidence from a firm level experiment in which we engineered an exogenous change in managerial compensation from fixed wages to performance pay based on the average productivity of lower-tier workers. Theory suggests that managerial incentives affect both the mean and dispersion of workers' productivity through two channels. First, managers respond to incentives by targeting their efforts towards more able workers, implying that both the mean and the dispersion increase. Second, man...
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作者：Black, Sandra E.; Devereux, Paul J.; Salvanes, Kjell G.
作者单位：University of California System; University of California Los Angeles; University College Dublin; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：Lower birth weight babies have worse outcomes, both short-run in terms of one-year mortality rates and longer run in terms of educational attainment and earnings. However, recent research has called into question whether birth weight itself is important or whether it simply reflects other hard-to-measure characteristics. By applying within twin techniques using an unusually rich dataset from Norway, we examine the effects of birth weight on both short-run and long-run outcomes for the same coh...
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作者：Snowberg, Erik; Wolfers, Justin; Zitzewitz, Eric
作者单位：Stanford University; Center for Economic & Policy Research (CEPR); University of Pennsylvania; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：Analyses of the effects of election outcomes on the economy have been hampered by the problem that economic outcomes also influence elections. We sidestep these problems by analyzing movements in economic indicators caused by clearly exogenous changes in expectations about the likely winner during election day. Analyzing high frequency financial fluctuations following the release of flawed exit poll data on election day 2004, and then during the vote count we find that markets anticipated high...
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作者：Shimer, Robert; Werning, Ivan
作者单位：University of Chicago; Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
摘要：This paper argues that a risk-averse worker's after-tax reservation wage encodes all the relevant information about her welfare. This insight leads to a novel test for the optimality of unemployment insurance based on the responsiveness of reservation wages to unemployment benefits. Some existing estimates imply significant gains to raising the current level of unemployment benefits in the United States but highlight the need for more research on the determinants of reservation wages. Our appr...
