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作者:Atkin, David; Chaudhry, Azam; Chaudry, Shamyla; Khandelwal, Amit K.; Verhoogen, Eric
作者单位:Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Lahore School of Economics; Columbia University
摘要:This article studies technology adoption in a cluster of soccer-ball producers in Sialkot, Pakistan. We invented a new cutting technology that reduces waste of the primary raw material and gave the technology to a random subset of producers. Despite the clear net benefits for nearly all firms, after 15 months take-up remained puzzlingly low. We hypothesize that an important reason for the lack of adoption is a misalignment of incentives within firms: the key employees (cutters and printers) ar...
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作者:Angrist, Joshua D.; Hull, Peter D.; Pathak, Parag A.; Walters, Christopher R.
作者单位:Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); National Bureau of Economic Research; University of California System; University of California Berkeley
摘要:Conventional value-added models (VAMs) compare average test scores across schools after regression-adjusting for students' demographic characteristics and previous scores. This article tests for VAM bias using a procedure that asks whether VAM estimates accurately predict the achievement consequences of random assignment to specific schools. Test results from admissions lotteries in Boston suggest conventional VAM estimates are biased, a finding that motivates the development of a hierarchical...
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作者:Bhandari, Anmol; Evans, David; Golosov, Mikhail; Sargent, Thomas J.
作者单位:University of Minnesota System; University of Minnesota Twin Cities; University of Oregon; Princeton University; New York University
摘要:A Ramsey planner chooses a distorting tax on labor and manages a portfolio of securities in an economy with incomplete markets. We develop a method that uses second order approximations of Ramsey policies to obtain formulas for conditional and unconditional moments of government debt and taxes that include means and variances of the invariant distribution as well as speeds of mean reversion. The asymptotic mean of the planner's portfolio minimizes a measure of fiscal risk. We obtain analytic e...
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作者:Debortoli, Davide; Nunes, Ricardo; Yared, Pierre
作者单位:Pompeu Fabra University; Barcelona School of Economics; Federal Reserve System - USA; Federal Reserve Bank - Boston; Columbia University; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要:This article develops a model of optimal government debt maturity in which the government cannot issue state-contingent bonds and cannot commit to fiscal policy. If the government can perfectly commit, it fully insulates the economy against government spending shocks by purchasing short-term assets and issuing long-term debt. These positions are quantitatively very large relative to GDP and do not need to be actively managed by the government. Our main result is that these conclusions are not ...
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作者:Deming, David J.
作者单位:Harvard University; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要:The labor market increasingly rewards social skills. Between 1980 and 2012, jobs requiring high levels of social interaction grew by nearly 12 percentage points as a share of the U.S. labor force. Math-intensive but less social jobs-including many STEM occupations-shrank by 3.3 percentage points over the same period. Employment and wage growth were particularly strong for jobs requiring high levels of both math skill and social skills. To understand these patterns, I develop a model of team pr...
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作者:Drechsler, Itamar; Savov, Alexi; Schnabl, Philipp
作者单位:New York University; National Bureau of Economic Research; New York University; Center for Economic & Policy Research (CEPR)
摘要:We present a new channel for the transmission of monetary policy, the deposits channel. We show that when the Fed funds rate rises, banks widen the spreads they charge on deposits, and deposits flow out of the banking system. We present a model where this is due to market power in deposit markets. Consistent with the market power mechanism, deposit spreads increase more and deposits flow out more in concentrated markets. This is true even when we control for lending opportunities by only compa...
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作者:Larcom, Shaun; Rauch, Ferdinand; Willems, Tim
作者单位:University of Cambridge; University of Oxford; International Monetary Fund
摘要:We present evidence that a significant fraction of commuters on the London Underground do not travel on their optimal route. We show that a strike on the Underground, which forcedmany commuters to experiment with new routes, brought lasting changes in behavior. This effect is stronger for commuters who live in areas where the Underground map is more distorted, which points to the importance of informational imperfections. Information resulting from the strike improved network efficiency. Searc...
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作者:Cravino, Javier; Levchenko, Andrei A.
作者单位:University of Michigan System; University of Michigan; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要:We investigate how multinational firms contribute to the transmission of shocks across countries using a large multicountry firm-level data set that contains cross-border ownership information. We use these data to document two novel empirical patterns. First, foreign affiliate and headquarter sales exhibit strong positive comovement: a 10% growth in the sales of the headquarter is associated with a 2% growth in the sales of the affiliate. Second, shocks to the source country account for a sig...
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作者:Fajgelbaum, Pablo D.; Schaal, Edouard; Taschereau-Dumouchel, Mathieu
作者单位:University of California System; University of California Los Angeles; Pompeu Fabra University; Centre de Recerca en Economia Internacional (CREI); University of Pennsylvania
摘要:We develop a theory of endogenous uncertainty and business cycles in which short-lived shocks can generate long-lasting recessions. In the model, higher uncertainty about fundamentals discourages investment. Since agents learn from the actions of others, information flows slowly in times of low activity and uncertainty remains high, further discouraging investment. The economy displays uncertainty traps: self-reinforcing episodes of high uncertainty and low activity. Although the economy recov...
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作者:Glover, Dylan; Pallais, Amanda; Pariente, William
作者单位:Institut d'Etudes Politiques Paris (Sciences Po); Harvard University; National Bureau of Economic Research; Universite Catholique Louvain
摘要:Examining the performance of cashiers in a French grocery store chain, we find that manager bias negatively affects minority job performance. In the stores studied, cashiers work with different managers on different days and their schedules are determined quasi-randomly. When minority cashiers, but not majority cashiers, are scheduled to work with managers who are biased (as determined by an implicit association test), they are absent more often, spend less time at work, scan items more slowly...