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作者：Aghion, P; Alesina, A; Trebbi, F
作者单位：Center for Economic & Policy Research (CEPR); Harvard University; Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR); National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：A fundamental aspect of institutional design is how much society chooses to delegate unchecked power to its leaders. If, once elected, a leader cannot be restrained, society runs the risk of a tyranny of the majority, if not the tyranny of a dictator. If a leader faces too many ex post checks and balances, legislative action is too often blocked. As our critical constitutional choice, we focus upon the size of the minority needed to block legislation, or conversely the size of the (super)major...
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作者：Alcalá, F; Ciccone, A
作者单位：University of Murcia; Pompeu Fabra University
摘要：We find that international trade has an economically significant and statistically robust positive effect on productivity. Our trade measure is imports plus exports relative to purchasing power parity GDP (real openness), which we argue is preferable on theoretical grounds to the nominal measure conventionally used. We also find a significantly positive aggregate scale effect. Our estimates control for proxies of institutional quality as well as geography and take into account the endogeneity ...
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作者：Lizzeri, A; Persico, N
作者单位：New York University; University of Pennsylvania
摘要：A new rationale is presented for why an elite may want to expand the franchise even in the absence of threats to the established order. Expanding the franchise can turn politicians away from particularistic politics based on ad personam redistribution within the elite and foster competition based on programs with diffuse benefits. If these programs are valuable, a majority of the elite votes in favor of an extension of the franchise despite the absence of a threat from the disenfranchised. We ...
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作者：Yildiz, M
作者单位：Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Yale University
摘要：I analyze a sequential bargaining model in which players are optimistic about their bargaining power (measured as the probability of making offers), but learn as they play the game. I show that there exists a uniquely predetermined settlement date, such that in equilibrium the players always reach an agreement at that date, but never reach one before it. Given any discount rate, if the learning is sufficiently slow, the players agree immediately. 1 show that, for any speed of learning, the agr...
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作者：Finkelstein, A
作者单位：Harvard University; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：Public policies designed to increase utilization of existing technologies may also affect incentives to develop new technologies. This paper investigates this phenomenon by examining policies designed to increase usage of preexisting vaccines. I find that these policies were associated with a 2.5-fold increase in clinical trials for new vaccines. For several diseases, the induced innovation is socially wasteful, though small in magnitude. In one case, however, the dynamic social welfare benefi...
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作者：Morgan, DP; Rime, B; Strahan, PE
作者单位：Federal Reserve System - USA; Federal Reserve Bank - New York; Boston College; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：We investigate how integration of bank ownership across states has affected economic volatility within states. In theory, bank integration could cause higher or lower volatility, depending on whether credit supply or credit demand shocks predominate. In fact, year-to-year fluctuations in a state's economic growth fall as its banks become more integrated (via holding companies) with banks in other states. As the bank linkages between any pair of states increase, fluctuations in those two states...
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作者：Acemoglu, D; Linn, J
作者单位：Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
摘要：This paper investigates the effect of ( potential) market size on entry of new drugs and pharmaceutical innovation. Focusing on exogenous changes driven by U. S. demographic trends, we find a large effect of potential market size on the entry of nongeneric drugs and new molecular entities. These effects are generally robust to controlling for a variety of supply-side factors and changes in the technology of pharmaceutical research.
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作者：Hall, RE
作者单位：Stanford University; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：I estimate adjustment costs for labor and capital from the Euler equations for factor demand. For both factors, I find relatively strong evidence against substantial adjustment costs. My estimates use annual data from two-digit industries. My results support the view that rents arising from adjustment costs are relatively small and are not an important part of the explanation of the large movements of the values of corporations in relation to the reproduction costs of their capital. I investig...
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作者：King, RG; Wolman, AL
作者单位：Boston University; Federal Reserve System - USA; Federal Reserve Bank - Richmond; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：A discretionary policy-maker responds to the state of the economy each period. Private agents' current behavior determines the future state based on expectations of future policy. Discretionary policy thus can lead to dynamic complementarity between private agents and a policy-maker, which in turn can generate multiple equilibria. Working in a simple new Keynesian model with two-period staggered pricing-in which equilibrium is unique under commitment-we illustrate this interaction: if firms ex...
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作者：Bertrand, M; Duflo, E; Mullainathan, S
作者单位：University of Chicago; National Bureau of Economic Research; Centre for Economic Policy Research - UK; Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
摘要：Most papers that employ Differences-in-Differences estimation (DD) use many years of data and focus on serially correlated outcomes but ignore that the resulting standard errors are inconsistent. To illustrate the severity of this issue, we randomly generate placebo laws in state-level data on female wages from the Current Population Survey. For each law, we use OLS to compute the DD estimate of its effect as well as the standard error of this estimate. These conventional DD standard errors se...
