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作者：Heathcote, Jonathan; Storesletten, Kjetil; Violante, Giovanni L.
作者单位：Federal Reserve System - USA; Federal Reserve Bank - Minneapolis; Center for Economic & Policy Research (CEPR); University of Oslo; Princeton University; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：What shapes the optimal degree of progressivity of the tax and transfer system? On the one hand, a progressive tax system can counteract inequality in initial conditions and substitute for imperfect private insurance against idiosyncratic earnings risk. On the other hand, progressivity reduces incentives to work and to invest in skills, distortions that are especially costly when the government must finance public goods. We develop a tractable equilibrium model that features all of these trade...
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作者：Celerier, Claire; Vallee, Boris
作者单位：University of Toronto; Harvard University
摘要：This study investigates how banks design financial products to cater to yield-seeking investors. We focus on a large market of investment products targeted exclusively at households: retail structured products. These products typically offer a high return under their best-case scenario-the headline rate-that is nested in a complex payoff formula. Using a text analysis of the payoff formulas of the 55,000 products issued in Europe from 2002 to 2010, we measure product headline rates, complexity...
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作者：Muir, Tyler
作者单位：University of California System; University of California Los Angeles; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：I analyze the behavior of risk premia in financial crises, wars, and recessions in an international panel spanning over 140 years and 14 countries. I document that expected returns, or risk premia, increase substantially in financial crises, but not in the other episodes. Asset prices decline in all episodes, but the decline in financial crises is substantially larger than the decline in fundamentals so that expected returns going forward are large. However, drops in consumption and consumptio...
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作者：Kogan, Leonid; Papanikolaou, Dimitris; Seru, Amit; Stoffman, Noah
作者单位：Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); National Bureau of Economic Research; Northwestern University; Indiana University System; Indiana University Bloomington; IU Kelley School of Business
摘要：We propose a new measure of the economic importance of each innovation. Our measure uses newly collected data on patents issued to U.S. firms in the 1926 to 2010 period, combined with the stock market response to news about patents. Our patent-level estimates of private economic value are positively related to the scientific value of these patents, as measured by the number of citations the patent receives in the future. Our new measure is associated with substantial growth, reallocation, and ...
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作者：Bhargava, Saurabh; Loewenstein, George; Sydnor, Justin
作者单位：Carnegie Mellon University
摘要：We examine the health plan choices that 23,894 employees at a U.S. firm made from a large menu of options that differed only in financial cost-sharing and premium. These decisions provide a clear test of the predictions of the standard economic model of insurance choice in the absence of choice frictions because plans were priced so that nearly every plan with a lower deductible was financially dominated by an otherwise identical plan with a high deductible. We document that the majority of em...
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作者：Arezki, Rabah; Ramey, Valerie A.; Sheng, Liugang
作者单位：International Monetary Fund; University of Oxford; University of California System; University of California San Diego; National Bureau of Economic Research; Chinese University of Hong Kong
摘要：This article explores the effect of news shocks in open economies using worldwide giant oil and gas discoveries as a directly observable measure of news shocks about future output-the delay between a discovery and production is on average four to six years. We first analyze the effects of a discovery in a two-sector small open economymodel with a resource sector. We then estimate the effects of giant oil and gas discoveries on a large panel of countries. Our empirical estimates are consistent ...
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作者：Giroud, Xavier; Mueller, Holger M.
作者单位：Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); National Bureau of Economic Research; Centre for Economic Policy Research - UK; New York University
摘要：This article argues that firms' balance sheets were instrumental in the transmission of consumer demand shocks during the Great Recession. Using micro-level data from the U.S. Census Bureau, we find that establishments of more highly levered firms experienced significantly larger employment losses in response to declines in local consumer demand. These results are not driven by firms being less productive, having expanded too much prior to the Great Recession, or being generally more sensitive...
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作者：Scheuer, Florian; Werning, Ivan
作者单位：Stanford University; University of Zurich; Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
摘要：How are optimal taxes affected by superstar phenomena? To answer this question, we extend the Mirrlees model to incorporate an assignment problem in the labor market that generates superstar effects. Perhaps surprisingly, rather than providing a rationale for higher taxes, we show that superstar effects provide a force for lower marginal taxes conditional on the observed distribution of earnings. Superstar effects make the earnings schedule convex, which increases the responsiveness of individ...
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作者：Atkin, David; Khandelwal, Amit K.; Osman, Adam
作者单位：Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Columbia University; University of Illinois System; University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
摘要：We conduct a randomized experiment that generates exogenous variation in the access to foreign markets for rug producers in Egypt. Combined with detailed survey data, we causally identify the impact of exporting on firm performance. Treatment firms report 16-26% higher profits and exhibit large improvements in quality alongside reductions in output per hour relative to control firms. These findings do not simply reflect firms being offered higher margins to manufacture high-quality products th...
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作者：Goldschmidt, Deborah; Schmieder, Johannes F.
作者单位：Boston University; National Bureau of Economic Research; Center for Economic & Policy Research (CEPR)
摘要：The nature of the relationship between employers and employees has been changing over the past three decades, with firms increasingly relying on contractors, temp agencies, and franchises rather than hiring employees directly. We investigate the impact of this transformation on the wage structure by following jobs that are moved outside the boundary of lead employers to contracting firms. We develop a new method for identifying outsourcing of food, cleaning, security, and logistics services in...
