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作者:Board, Simon; Lu, Jay
作者单位:University of California System; University of California Los Angeles
摘要:Buyers often search across sellers to learn which product best fits their needs. We study how sellers manage these search incentives through their disclosure strategies (e.g., product trials, reviews, and recommendations) and ask how competition affects information provision. If sellers can observe the beliefs of buyers or can coordinate their strategies, then there is an equilibrium in which sellers provide the monopoly level of information. In contrast, if buyers' beliefs are private, then t...
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作者:Ortner, Juan; Chassang, Sylvain
作者单位:Boston University; New York University
摘要:We model criminal investigation as a principal-agent-monitor problem in which the agent can bribe the monitor to destroy evidence. Building on insights from Laffont and Martimort's 1997 paper, we study whether the principal can profitably introduce asymmetric information between agent and monitor by randomizing the monitor's incentives. We show that it can be the case, but the optimality of random incentives depends on unobserved preexisting patterns of private information. We provide a data-d...
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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: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:Philippe, Arnaud; Ouss, Aurelie
作者单位:University of Bristol; University of Pennsylvania
摘要:We explore how television broadcasting of unrelated criminal justice events affects sentencing. Exploiting as-good-as-random variation in news content before a verdict, we find that sentences are 3 months longer when the verdict is reached after coverage of crime. Sentences increase with media exposure to crime, not crime itself, and the effect tapers off quickly. Our results suggest that professional experience and expertise mitigate the effect of irrelevant external information. This paper h...
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作者:Alan, Sule; Ertac, Seda
作者单位:University of Essex; Koc University
摘要:We evaluate the impact of a randomized educational intervention on children's intertemporal choices. The intervention aims to improve the ability to imagine future selves and encourages forward-looking behavior using a structured curriculum delivered by children's own trained teachers. We find that treated students make more patient intertemporal decisions in incentivized experimental tasks. The results persist almost 3 years after the intervention, replicate well in a different sample, and ar...
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作者:Alan, Sule; Browning, Martin; Ejrnaes, Mette
作者单位:University of Essex; University of Oxford; University of Copenhagen
摘要:We develop a model of consumption and income that allows for pervasive heterogeneity in the parameters of both processes. Introducing codependence between household income parameters and preference parameters, we also allow for heterogeneity in the impact of income shocks on consumption. We estimate the parameters of the model using a sample from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, covering the period 1968-2009. We find considerable codependent heterogeneity in the parameters governing income ...
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作者:Jackson, C. Kirabo
作者单位:Northwestern University; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要:Teachers affect a variety of student outcomes through their influence on both cognitive and noncognitive skill. I proxy for students' noncognitive skill using non-test score behaviors. These behaviors include absences, suspensions, course grades, and grade repetition in ninth grade. Teacher effects on test scores and those on behaviors are weakly correlated. Teacher effects on behaviors predict larger impacts on high school completion and other longer-run outcomes than their effects on test sc...
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作者:Ilut, Cosmin; Kehrig, Matthias; Schneider, Martin
作者单位:Duke University; National Bureau of Economic Research; Centre for Economic Policy Research - UK; Stanford University
摘要:Concave hiring rules imply that firms respond more to bad shocks than to good shocks. They provide a unified explanation for several seemingly unrelated facts about employment growth in macro- and microdata. In particular, they generate countercyclical movement in both aggregate conditional macro volatility and cross-sectional micro volatility, as well as negative skewness in the cross section and in the time series at different levels of aggregation. Concave establishment-level responses of e...