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作者：Reichling, Felix; Smetters, Kent
作者单位：Congressional Budget Office; University of Pennsylvania; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：The conventional wisdom since Yaari (1965) is that households without a bequest motive should fully annuitize their investments. Numerous frictions do not break this sharp result. We modify the Yaari framework by allowing a household's mortality risk itself to be stochastic due to health shocks. A lifetime annuity still helps to hedge longevity risk. But the annuity's remaining present value is correlated with medical costs, such as those for nursing home care, thereby reducing annuity demand,...
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作者：Di Tella, Rafael; Perez-Truglia, Ricardo; Babino, Andres; Sigman, Mariano
作者单位：Harvard University; Microsoft; University of Buenos Aires; University of Buenos Aires; Universidad Torcuato Di Tella
摘要：We present results from a corruption game (a dictator game modified so that recipients can take a side payment in exchange for accepting a reduction in the overall size of the pie). Dictators (silently) treated to be able to take more of the recipient's tokens, took more of them. They were also more likely to believe that recipients had accepted side payments, even if there was a prize for accuracy. The results favor the hypothesis that people avoid altruistic actions by distorting beliefs abo...
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作者：Calzolari, Giacomo; Denicolo, Vincenzo
作者单位：University of Bologna; Center for Economic & Policy Research (CEPR); University of Leicester; University of Bologna
摘要：We propose a new theory of exclusive dealing. The theory is based on the assumption that a dominant firm has a competitive advantage over its rivals, and that the buyers' willingness to pay for the product is private information. In this setting, the dominant firm can impose contractual restrictions on buyers without necessarily compensating them, implying that exclusive dealing contracts can be both profitable and anticompetitive. We discuss the general implications of the theory for competit...
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作者：Galiani, Sebastian; Murphy, Alvin; Pantano, Juan
作者单位：University System of Maryland; University of Maryland College Park; Arizona State University; Arizona State University-Tempe; Washington University (WUSTL)
摘要：We use data from a housing-assistance experiment to estimate a model of neighborhood choice. The experimental variation effectively randomizes the rents which households face and helps identify a key structural parameter. Access to two randomly selected treatment groups and a control group allows for out-of-sample validation of the model. We simulate the effects of changing the subsidy-use constraints implemented in the actual experiment. We find that restricting subsidies to even lower povert...
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作者：Krebs, Tom; Kuhn, Moritz; Wright, Mark L. J.
作者单位：University of Mannheim; University of Bonn; Federal Reserve System - USA; Federal Reserve Bank - Chicago
摘要：We use microdata to show that young households with children are underinsured against the risk that an adult member of the household dies. This empirical finding can be explained by a macroeconomic model with human capital risk, age-dependent returns to human capital investment, and endogenous borrowing constraints due to limited contract enforcement. When calibrated, the model quantitatively accounts for the observed life-cycle variation in life insurance holdings, financial wealth, earnings,...
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作者：MacLeod, W. Bentley; Urquiola, Miguel
作者单位：Columbia University
摘要：Stratification is a distinctive feature of competitive education markets that can be explained by a preference for good peers. Learning externalities can lead students to care about the ability of their peers, resulting in across-school sorting by ability. This paper shows that a preference for good peers, and therefore stratification, can also emerge endogenously from reputational concerns that arise when graduates use their college of origin to signal their ability. Reputational concerns can...
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作者：Fernandez-Villaverde, Jesus; Guerron-Quintana, Pablo; Kuester, Keith; Rubio-Ramirez, Juan
作者单位：University of Pennsylvania; Federal Reserve System - USA; Federal Reserve Bank - Philadelphia; University of Bonn; Emory University; Federal Reserve System - USA; Federal Reserve Bank - Atlanta
摘要：We study how unexpected changes in uncertainty about fiscal policy affect economic activity. First, we estimate tax and spending processes for the United States with time-varying volatility to uncover evidence of time-varying volatility. Second, we estimate a VAR for the US economy using the time-varying volatility found in the previous step. Third, we feed the tax and spending processes into an otherwise standard New Keynesian model. Both in the VAR and in the model, we find that unexpected c...
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作者：Gottardi, Piero; Kajii, Atsushi; Nakajima, Tomoyuki
作者单位：European University Institute; Kyoto University; Singapore Management University
摘要：We consider an economy where individuals face uninsurable risks to their human capital accumulation and analyze the optimal level of linear taxes on capital and labor income together with the optimal path of government debt. We show that in the presence of such risks, it is beneficial to tax both labor and capital and to issue public debt. We also assess the quantitative importance of these findings, and show that the benefits of government debt and capital taxes both increase with the magnitu...
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作者：Bhargava, Saurabh; Manoli, Dayanand
作者单位：Carnegie Mellon University; University of Texas System; University of Texas Austin
摘要：We address the role of psychological frictions in the incomplete take-up of EITC benefits with an IRS field experiment. We specifically assess the influence of program confusion, informational complexity, and stigma by evaluating response to experimental mailings distributed to 35,050 tax filers who failed to claim $26 million despite an initial notice. While the mere receipt of the mailing, simplification, and the heightened salience of benefits led to substantial additional claiming, attempt...
