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作者:Chambru, Cedric; Henry, Emeric; Marx, Benjamin
作者单位:Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS); Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon (ENS de LYON); Institut d'Etudes Politiques Paris (Sciences Po); Boston University; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要:How do radical reforms shape economic development over time? In 1790, the French Constituent Assembly overhauled the kingdom's organization to establish new local capitals. In some departments, the choice of local capitals over rival candidate cities was plausibly exogenous. We study how changes in administrative presence affect state capacity and development in the ensuing decades. In the short run, administrative proximity increases taxation and investments in law enforcement. In the long ru...
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作者:Higgins, Sean
作者单位:Northwestern University
摘要:Do coordination failures constrain financial technology adoption? Exploiting the Mexican government's rollout of1 million debit cards to poor households from 2009 to 2012, I examine responses on both sides of the market and find important spillovers and distributional impacts. On the supply side, small retail firms adopted point-of-sale terminals to accept card payments. On the demand side, this led to a 21 percent increase in other consumers' card adoption. The supply-side technology adoption...
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作者:Piguillem, Facundo; Riboni, Alessandro
作者单位:Centre for Economic Policy Research - UK
摘要:Once established, government spending programs tend to continue. A commonly held view is that spending inertia leads to unsustainable debt, ultimately requiring fiscal adjustments such as sequestration. We show that by insuring against political turnover, inertia may reduce politicians' incentives to accumulate debt. However, large preexisting commitments and the prospect of future stabilization can lead to overspending to dilute past administrations' commitments. Finally, we show that politic...
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作者:Narasimhan, Veda; Weaver, Jeffrey
作者单位:New York University; New York University Abu Dhabi; University of Southern California
摘要:Developing countries have increasingly decentralized power to local governments. This paper studies the implications of a central element of decentralization (polity size) using population-based discontinuities that determine local government boundaries for over 100,000 Indian villages. Over the short and long run, individuals allocated into local governments with smaller populations have better access to public goods. We provide suggestive evidence that these results are related to heightened...
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作者:Aguiar, Mark; Amador, Manuel; Arellano, Cristina
作者单位:Princeton University; National Bureau of Economic Research; University of Minnesota System; University of Minnesota Twin Cities; Federal Reserve System - USA; Federal Reserve Bank - Minneapolis
摘要:We provide conditions for the feasibility of robust Pareto-improving (RPI) policies when markets are incomplete and the interest rate is below the growth rate. We allow for arbitrary heterogeneity in preferences and income risk and a wedge between the return to capital and bonds. An RPI improves risk sharing and can induce a more efficient level of capital. Elasticities of aggregate savings to changes in interest rates are the crucial ingredients to the feasibility of RPIs. Government debt may...
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作者:Fujiwara, Ippei; Matsuyama, Kiminori
作者单位:Keio University; Australian National University; Northwestern University
摘要:We propose a parsimonious mechanism for generating premature deindustrialization ( PD ) . In the baseline model, the Baumol effect drives the hump-shaped path of the manufacturing share. Countries follow different paths due to the difference in the sector-specific adoption lags. The condition for PD under which countries differ only in technology gap implies that the cross-country productivity dispersion is the largest in agriculture. Moreover, when calibrated to match Rodrik's ( 2016 ) findin...
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作者:Bassetto, Marco; Huo, Zhen; Rios-Rull, Jose-Victor
作者单位:Federal Reserve System - USA; Federal Reserve Bank - Minneapolis; Yale University; National Bureau of Economic Research; University of Pennsylvania; Center for Economic & Policy Research (CEPR); University of London; University College London
摘要:We propose a theory of gradualism in the implementation of good policies, suitable for environments featuring time consistency. We downplay the role of the initial period by allowing agents both to wait for future agents to start equilibrium play and to restart the equilibrium by ignoring past history. The allocation gradually transits toward one that weighs both short- and long-term concerns, stopping short of the Ramsey outcome but greatly improving upon Markovian equilibria. We use the theo...
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作者:Sher, Itai
作者单位:University of Massachusetts System; University of Massachusetts Amherst
摘要:This paper concerns Saez and Stantcheva's ( 2016 ) generalized social marginal welfare weights, which aggregate losses and gains due to tax policies while incorporating nonutilitarian ethical considerations. The approach evaluates local tax changes without a global social objective. I show that local tax policy comparisons implicitly entail global comparisons. Moreover, whenever welfare weights do not have a utilitarian structure, these implied global comparisons are inconsistent. I argue that...
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作者:Aghamolla, Cyrus; Karaca-Mandic, Pinar; Li, Xuelin; Thakor, Richard T.
作者单位:Rice University; University of Minnesota System; University of Minnesota Twin Cities; National Bureau of Economic Research; Columbia University
摘要:This study examines the link between credit supply and hospital health outcomes. We use bank stress tests as exogenous shocks to credit access for hospitals that have lending relationships with tested banks. We find that affected hospitals shift their operations to increase resource utilization following a negative credit shock but reduce the quality of their care to patients across a variety of measures, including a significant increase in risk-adjusted readmission and mortality rates. The re...
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作者:Gagnon-Bartsch, Tristan; Rosato, Antonio
作者单位:University of Iowa; University of Queensland; University of Naples Federico II
摘要:We study how misperceptions of others' tastes influence beliefs, demand, and prices in markets with observational learning. Consumers infer a good's quality from the quantity demanded and price paid by others. When consumers exaggerate the similarity between their and others' tastes, such taste projection generates discrepant quality perceptions, which are decreasing in a projector's taste and increasing in the observed price. These biased inferences produce an excessively elastic market deman...