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作者：Hjort, Jonas; Moreira, Diana; Rao, Gautam; Santini, Juan Francisco
作者单位：Columbia University; Center for Economic & Policy Research (CEPR); National Bureau of Economic Research; University of California System; University of California Davis; Harvard University; Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA)
摘要：Can research findings change political leaders' beliefs and policies? We use experiments with 2,150 Brazilian municipalities to measure mayors' demand for and response to research information. In one experiment, we find that mayors are willing to pay to learn the results of evaluation studies, and update their beliefs when informed of the findings. They value-larger-sample studies more, while not distinguishing between studies in rich and poor countries. In a second experiment, we find that in...
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作者：Fehr, Ernst; Powell, Michael; Wilkening, Tom
作者单位：University of Zurich; Northwestern University; University of Melbourne
摘要：We study subgame-perfect implementation (SPI) mechanisms that have been proposed as a solution to incomplete contracting problems. We show that these mechanisms, which are based on off-equilibrium arbitration clauses that impose large fines for lying and the inappropriate use of arbitration, have severe behavioral constraints because the fines induce retaliation against legitimate uses of arbitration. Incorporating reciprocity preferences into the theory explains the observed behavioral patter...
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作者：Arora, Ashish; Belenzon, Sharon; Sheer, Lia
作者单位：Duke University; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：Using data on 800,000 corporate publications and patent citations to these publications between 1980 and 2015, we study how corporate investment in research is linked to its use in the firm's inventions, and to spillovers to rivals. We find that private returns to corporate research depend on the balance between two opposing forces: the benefits from the use of science in own downstream inventions, and the costs of spillovers to rivals. Consistent with this, firms produce more research when it...
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作者：Dippel, Christian; Heblich, Stephan
作者单位：University of California System; University of California Los Angeles; National Bureau of Economic Research; University of Toronto; University of Toronto; IZA Institute Labor Economics
摘要：This paper studies the role of leaders in the social movement against slavery that culminated in the US Civil War Our analysis is organized around a natural experiment: leaders of the failed German revolution of 1848-1849 were expelled to the United States and became antislavery campaigners who helped mobilize Union Army volunteers. Towns where Forty-Eighters settled show two-thirds higher Union Army enlistments. Their influence worked through local newspapers and social clubs. Going beyond en...
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作者：Oprea, Ryan
作者单位：University of California System; University of California Santa Barbara
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作者：Gagnon-Bartsch, Tristan; Pagnozzi, Marco; Rosato, Antonio
作者单位：Harvard University; Harvard University; University of Naples Federico II; University of Technology Sydney
摘要：We explore how taste projection-the tendency to overestimate how similar others' tastes are to one's own affects bidding in auctions. In first-price auctions with private values, taste projection leads bidders to exaggerate the intensity of competition and, consequently, to overbid-irrespective of whether values are independent, affiliated, or (a)symmetric. Moreover, the optimal reserve price is lower than the rational benchmark, and decreasing in the extent of projection and the number of bid...
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作者：Gratton, Gabriele; Guiso, Luigi; Michelacci, Claudio; Morelli, Massimo
作者单位：University of New South Wales Sydney; Bocconi University
摘要：With inefficient bureaucratic institutions, the effects of laws are hard to assess and incompetent politicians may pass laws to build a reputation as skillful reformers. Since too many laws curtail bureaucratic efficiency, this mechanism can generate a steady state with Kafkaesque bureaucracy. Temporary surges in political instability heighten the incentives to overproduce laws and can shift the economy towards the Kafkaesque state. Consistent with the theory, after a surge in political instab...
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作者：Chahrour, Ryan; Nimark, Kristoffer; Pitschner, Stefan
作者单位：Boston College; Cornell University; Uppsala University
摘要：We formalize the editorial role of news media in a multisector economy and show that media can be an independent source of business cycle fluctuations, even when they report accurate information. Public reporting about a subset of sectoral developments that are newsworthy but unrepresentative causes firms across all sectors to hire too much or too little labor. We construct historical measures of US sectoral news coverage and use them to calibrate our model. Time-varying media focus generates ...
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作者：Mogstad, Magne; Torgovitsky, Alexander; Walters, Christopher R.
作者单位：University of Chicago; Statistics Norway; National Bureau of Economic Research; University of California System; University of California Berkeley
摘要：Empirical researchers often combine multiple instrumental variables (IVs) for a single treatment using two-stage least squares (2SLS). When treatment effects are heterogeneous, a common justification for including multiple IVs is that the 2SLS estimand can be given a causal interpretation as a positively weighted average of local average treatment effects (LATEs). This justification requires the well-known monotonicity condition. However, we show that with more than one instrument, this condit...
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作者：Pennings, Steven
作者单位：The World Bank
摘要：US federal transfers to individuals are large, countercyclical, vary geographically, and are often credited with helping to stabilize regional economies. This paper estimates the -short-run effects of these transfers using plausibly exogenous regional variation in temporary stimulus payments and permanent Social Security benefit increases. States that received larger transfers tended to grow faster contemporaneously, with a multiplier of around 1.5 for permanent transfers and 1/ 3 for temporar...
