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作者：Ambrus, Attila; Field, Erica; Gonzalez, Robert
作者单位：Duke University; University of South Carolina System; University of South Carolina Columbia
摘要：How do geographically concentrated income shocks influence the long-run spatial distribution of poverty within a city? We examine the impact on housing prices of a cholera epidemic in one neighborhood of nineteenth century London. Ten years after the epidemic, housing prices are significantly lower just inside the catchment area of the water pump that transmitted the disease. Moreover, differences in housing prices persist over the following 160 years. We make sense of these patterns by buildi...
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作者：Sadler, Evan
作者单位：Columbia University
摘要：Behaviors and information often spread via person-to-person diffusion. This paper highlights how diffusion processes can facilitate coordination. I study contagion in a discrete network with Bayesian players. In addition to characterizing the extent and rate of adoption, we uncover a new effect: when large cascades are possible in equilibrium, exposure conveys information about a player's network position. This effect underscores a novel trade-off in the design of marketing campaigns, suggesti...
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作者：Matsumoto, Brett
摘要：Fang and Gong (2017) develop a procedure to detect potential over-billing of Medicare by physicians. In their empirical analysis, they use aggregated claims data that can overstate the number of services performed due to features of Medicare billing. In this comment, I show how auditors can use detailed claims-level data to better target improper overbilling.
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作者：Grant, Matthew
作者单位：Stanford University
摘要：Tariffs are generally assumed to depend on the product, not the identity of the importer. However, special economic zones are a common, economically important policy used worldwide to lower tariffs on selected goods for selected manufacturers. I show this is motivated by policymakers' desire to discriminate across buyers when a tax is intended to raise prices for sellers, through a mechanism distinct from existing theories of optimal taxation. Using a new dataset compiled from public records a...
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作者：Dovis, Alessandro; Kirpalani, Rishabh
作者单位：University of Pennsylvania; University of Wisconsin System; University of Wisconsin Madison
摘要：Expectations of transfers by central governments incentivize overborrowing by local governments. In this paper, we ask if fiscal rules can reduce overborrowing if central governments cannot commit to enforce penalties when rules are violated. We study a model in which the central government's type is unknown and show that fiscal rules increase overborrowing if the central government's reputation is low. In contrast, fiscal rules are effective in lowering debt if the central government's reputa...
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作者：Bahel, Eric; Sprumont, Yves
作者单位：Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University; Universite de Montreal; Universite de Montreal
摘要：We model uncertain social prospects as acts mapping states of nature to (social) outcomes. A social choice function (or SCF) assigns an act to each profile of subjective expected utility preferences over acts. An SCF is strategyproof if no agent ever has an incentive to misrepresent her beliefs about the states of nature or her valuation of the outcomes. It is unanimous if it picks the feasible act that all agents find best whenever such an act exists. We offer a characterization of the class ...
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作者：Squicciarini, Mara P.
作者单位：Bocconi University
摘要：This paper studies when religion can hamper diffusion of knowledge and economic development, and through which mechanism. I examine Catholicism in France during the Second Industrial Revolution (1870-1914). In this period, technology became skill-intensive, leading to the introduction of technical education in primary schools. I find that more religious locations had lower economic development after 1870. Schooling appears to be the key mechanism: more religious areas saw a slower adoption of ...
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作者：Jakobsen, Alexander M.
作者单位：University of Calgary
摘要：I study a mechanism design problem involving a principal and a single, boundedly rational agent. The agent transitions among belief states by combining current beliefs with up to K pieces of information at a time. By expressing a mechanism as a complex contract- a collection of clauses, each providing limited information about the mechanism the principal manipulates the agent into believing truthful reporting is optimal. I show that such bounded rationality expands the set of implementable fun...
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作者：Glitz, Albrecht; Meyersson, Erik
作者单位：Pompeu Fabra University; Pompeu Fabra University; Barcelona School of Economics
摘要：In this paper, we investigate the economic returns to industrial espionage. We show that the flow of information provided by East German informants in the West over the period 1970-1989 led to a significant narrowing of sectoral TFP gaps between West and East Germany. These economic returns were primarily driven by relatively few high-quality pieces of information and particularly large in sectors closer to the West German technological frontier. Our findings suggest that the East-to-West Germ...
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作者：Liu, Qingmin
作者单位：Columbia University
摘要：We propose a criterion of stability for two-sided markets with asymmetric information. A central idea is to formulate off-path beliefs conditional on counterfactual pairwise deviations and on-path beliefs in the absence of such deviations. A matching-belief configuration is stable if the matching is individually rational with respect to the system of on-path beliefs and is not blocked with respect to the system of off-path beliefs. The formulation provides a language for assessing matching out...
