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作者：Avis, Eric; Ferraz, Claudio; Finan, Frederico
作者单位：University of California System; University of California Berkeley; Pontificia Universidade Catolica do Rio de Janeiro; IZA Institute Labor Economics; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：This paper examines the extent to which government audits of public resources can reduce corruption by enhancing political and judiciary accountability. We do so in the context of Brazil's anticorruption program, which randomly audits municipalities for their use of federal funds. We find that being audited in the past reduces future corruption by 8 percent, while also increasing the likelihood of experiencing a subsequent legal action by 20 percent. We interpret these reduced-form findings th...
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作者：Halevy, Yoram; Persitz, Dotan; Zrill, Lanny
作者单位：University of Toronto; Tel Aviv University
摘要：Revealed preference theory is brought to bear on the problem of recovering approximate parametric preferences from consistent and inconsistent consumer choices. We propose measures of the incompatibility between the revealed preference ranking implied by choices and the ranking induced by the considered parametric preferences. These incompatibility measures are proven to characterize well-known inconsistency indices. We advocate a recovery approach that is based on such incompatibility measure...
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作者：Thompson, Owen
作者单位：University of Wisconsin System; University of Wisconsin Milwaukee
摘要：Blacks and whites in the United States adopt widely different parental behaviors, but the underlying causes of these differences are not well understood. This paper documents large-scale increases in cognitively stimulating parenting among southern black mothers who came of age in the period immediately following the civil rights movement. The total magnitude of these improvements was approximately 0.5 standard deviations between the 1957 and 1964 birth cohorts, while no significant trends occ...
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作者：Anderson, Soren T.; Kellogg, Ryan; Salant, Stephen W.
作者单位：Michigan State University; National Bureau of Economic Research; University of Chicago; University System of Maryland; University of Maryland College Park; Resources for the Future
摘要：We show that oil production from existing wells in Texas does not respond to oil prices, while drilling activity and costs respond strongly. To explain these facts, we reformulate Hotelling's classic model of exhaustible resource extraction as a drilling problem: firms choose when to drill, but production from existing wells is constrained by reservoir pressure, which decays as oil is extracted. The model implies a modified Hotelling rule for drilling revenues net of costs, explains why the pr...
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作者：Jones, Charles I.; Kim, Jihee
作者单位：Stanford University; National Bureau of Economic Research; Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST)
摘要：Top income inequality rose sharply in the United States over the last 40 years but increased only slightly in France and Japan. Why? We explore a model in which heterogeneous entrepreneurs, broadly interpreted, exert effort to generate exponential growth in their incomes, which tends to raise inequality. Creative destruction by outside innovators restrains this expansion and induces top incomes to obey a Pareto distribution. Economic forces that affect these two mechanismsincluding information...
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作者：Akcigit, Ufuk; Kerr, William R.
作者单位：University of Chicago; National Bureau of Economic Research; Center for Economic & Policy Research (CEPR); Harvard University; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：We build a tractable growth model in which multiproduct incumbents invest in internal innovations to improve their existing products, while new entrants and incumbents invest in external innovations to acquire new product lines. External and internal innovations generate heterogeneous innovation qualities, and firm size affects innovation incentives. We analyze how different types of innovation contribute to economic growth and the role of the firm size distribution. Our model aligns with many...
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作者：Armstrong, Mark; Vickers, John
作者单位：University of Oxford; University of Oxford
摘要：We study multiproduct firms in the contexts of unregulated monopoly, regulated monopoly, and Cournot oligopoly. Using the concept of consumer surplus as a function of quantities (rather than prices), we present simple formulas for optimal prices and show that Cournot equilibrium exists and corresponds to a Ramsey optimum. We then discuss a tractable class of preferences that involve a generalized form of homotheticity. Profit-maximizing quantities are proportional to efficient quantities. We d...
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作者：Aguiar, Luis; Waldfogel, Joel
作者单位：University of Minnesota System; University of Minnesota Twin Cities; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：We explore the consequence of quality unpredictability for the welfare benefit of new products, using recent developments in recorded music as our context. We quantify the effects of new music on welfare using an explicit structural model of demand and entry with potentially unpredictable product quality. On the basis of plausible forecasting models of expected appeal, a tripling of the choice set according to expected quality adds substantially more consumer surplus as the usual long-tail ben...
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作者：Battaglini, Marco; Patacchini, Eleonora
作者单位：Cornell University
摘要：This paper studies how interest groups allocate campaign contributions when congressmen are connected by social ties. We establish conditions for the existence of a unique Nash equilibrium in pure strategies for the contribution game and characterize the associated allocation of the interest groups' moneys. While the allocations are generally complex functions of the environment (the voting function, the legislators' preferences, and the social network topology), they are simple, monotonically...
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作者：Durante, Ruben; Zhuravskaya, Ekaterina
作者单位：Pompeu Fabra University; Centre for Economic Policy Research - UK; Paris School of Economics
摘要：Politicians may strategically time unpopular measures to coincide with newsworthy events that distract the media and the public. We test this hypothesis in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We find that Israeli attacks are more likely to occur when US news on the following day is dominated by important predictable events. Strategic timing applies to attacks that bear risk of civilian casualties and are not too costly to postpone. Content analysis suggests that Israel's strategy ...
