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作者：Michalopoulos, Stelios; Papaioannou, Elias
作者单位：Brown University; University of London; London Business School
摘要：We investigate the role of deeply rooted pre-colonial ethnic institutions in shaping comparative regional development within African countries. We combine information on the spatial distribution of ethnicities before colonization with regional variation in contemporary economic performance, as proxied by satellite images of light density at night. We document a strong association between pre-colonial ethnic political centralization and regional development. This pattern is not driven by differ...
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作者：Antras, Pol; Chor, Davin
作者单位：Harvard University; National University of Singapore
摘要：We develop a property-rights model of the firm in which production entails a continuum of uniquely sequenced stages. In each stage, a final-good producer contracts with a distinct supplier for the procurement of a customized stage-specific component. Our model yields a sharp characterization for the optimal allocation of ownership rights along the value chain. We show that the incentive to integrate suppliers varies systematically with the relative position (upstream versus downstream) at whic...
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作者：Chernozhukov, Victor; Fernandez-Val, Ivan; Melly, Blaise
作者单位：Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Boston University; University of Bern
摘要：Counterfactual distributions are important ingredients for policy analysis and decomposition analysis in empirical economics. In this article, we develop modeling and inference tools for counterfactual distributions based on regression methods. The counterfactual scenarios that we consider consist of ceteris paribus changes in either the distribution of covariates related to the outcome of interest or the conditional distribution of the outcome given covariates. For either of these scenarios, ...
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作者：Soenmez, Tayfun; Switzer, Tobias B.
作者单位：Boston College; United States Department of Defense; United States Air Force
摘要：Branch selection is a key decision in a cadet's military career. Cadets at USMA can increase their branch priorities at a fraction of slots by extending their service agreement. This real-life matching problem fills an important gap in the market design literature, providing strong empirical legitimacy to a series of elegant theoretical works on matching with contracts. Although priorities fail a key substitutes condition, the agent-optimal stable mechanism is well defined, and in contrast to ...
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作者：Bloom, Nicholas; Schankerman, Mark; Van Reenen, John
作者单位：Stanford University; National Bureau of Economic Research; University of London; London School Economics & Political Science; University of London; London School Economics & Political Science
摘要：The impact of R&D on growth through spillovers has been a major topic of economic research over the last thirty years. A central problem in the literature is that firm performance is affected by two countervailing spillovers : a positive effect from technology (knowledge) spillovers and a negative business stealing effects from product market rivals. We develop a general framework incorporating these two types of spillovers and implement this model using measures of a firm's position in techno...
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作者：Athey, Susan; Segal, Ilya
作者单位：Stanford University; Stanford University
摘要：This paper constructs an efficient, budget-balanced, Bayesian incentive-compatible mechanism for a general dynamic environment with quasilinear payoffs in which agents observe private information and decisions are made over countably many periods. First, under the assumption of private values (other agents' private information does not directly affect an agent's payoffs), we construct an efficient, ex post incentive-compatible mechanism, which is not budget-balanced. Second, under the assumpti...
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作者：Chassang, Sylvain
作者单位：Princeton University
摘要：This paper studies a dynamic agency problem which includes limited liability, moral hazard, and adverse selection. The paper develops a robust approach to dynamic contracting based on calibrating the incentive properties of simple benchmark contracts that are attractive but infeasible, due to limited liability constraints. The resulting dynamic contracts are detail-free and satisfy robust performance bounds independently of the underlying process for returns, which need not be i.i.d. or even e...
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作者：Gershkov, Alex; Goeree, Jacob K.; Kushnir, Alexey; Moldovanu, Benny; Shi, Xianwen
作者单位：Hebrew University of Jerusalem; University of Zurich; University of Bonn; University of Toronto
摘要：We consider a standard social choice environment with linear utilities and independent, one-dimensional, private types. We prove that for any Bayesian incentive compatible mechanism there exists an equivalent dominant strategy incentive compatible mechanism that delivers the same interim expected utilities for all agents and the same ex ante expected social surplus. The short proof is based on an extension of an elegant result due to Gutmann, Kemperman, Reeds, and Shepp (1991). We also show th...
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作者：Li, Jia
作者单位：Duke University
摘要：We develop an asymptotic theory for the pre-averaging estimator when asset price jumps are weakly identified, here modeled as local to zero. The theory unifies the conventional asymptotic theory for continuous and discontinuous semimartingales as two polar cases with a continuum of local asymptotics, and explains the breakdown of the conventional procedures under weak identification. We propose simple bias-corrected estimators for jump power variations, and construct robust confidence sets wit...
