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作者：Hjort, Jonas
作者单位：Columbia University
摘要：A body of literature suggests that ethnic heterogeneity limits economic growth. This article provides microeconometric evidence on the direct effect of ethnic divisions on productivity. In team production at a plant in Kenya, an upstream worker supplies and distributes flowers to two downstream workers, who assemble them into bunches. The plant uses an essentially random rotation process to assign workers to positions, leading to three types of teams: (i) ethnically homogeneous teams, and team...
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作者：Kline, Patrick; Moretti, Enrico
作者单位：University of California System; University of California Berkeley; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：We study the long-run effects of one of the most ambitious regional development programs in U.S. history: the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). Using as controls authorities that were proposed but never approved by Congress, we find that the TVA led to large gains in agricultural employment that were eventually reversed when the program's subsidies ended. Gains in manufacturing employment, by contrast, continued to intensify well after federal transfers had lapsed-a pattern consistent with the...
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作者：Hodler, Roland; Raschky, Paul A.
作者单位：University of St Gallen; Monash University
摘要：We complement the literature on distributive politics by taking a systematic look at regional favoritism in a large and diverse sample of countries and by employing a broad measure that captures the aggregate distributive effect of many different policies. In particular, we use satellite data on nighttime light intensity and information about the birthplaces of the countries' political leaders. In our panel of 38,427 subnational regions from 126 countries with yearly observations from 1992 to ...
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作者：Hsieh, Chang-Tai; Klenow, Peter J.
作者单位：University of Chicago; National Bureau of Economic Research; Stanford University
摘要：In the United States, the average 40-year-old plant employs more than seven times as many workers as the typical plant 5 years or younger. In contrast, surviving plants in India and Mexico exhibit much slower growth, roughly doubling in size over the same age range. The divergence in plant dynamics suggests lower investments by Indian and Mexican plants in process efficiency, quality, and in accessing markets at home and abroad. In simple general equilibrium models, we find that the difference...
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作者：Blattman, Christopher; Fiala, Nathan; Martinez, Sebastian
作者单位：Columbia University; Leibniz Association; DIW Berlin - Deutsches Institut fur Wirtschaftsforschung; Inter-American Development Bank
摘要：We study a government program in Uganda designed to help the poor and unemployed become self-employed artisans, increase incomes, and thus promote social stability. Young adults in Uganda's conflict-affected north were invited to form groups and submit grant proposals for vocational training and business start-up. Funding was randomly assigned among screened and eligible groups. Treatment groups received unsupervised grants of $382 per member. Grant recipients invest some in skills training bu...
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作者：Madestam, Andreas; Shoag, Daniel; Veuger, Stan; Yanagizawa-Drott, David
作者单位：Stockholm University; Harvard University
摘要：Can protests cause political change, or are they merely symptoms of underlying shifts in policy preferences? We address this question by studying the Tea Party movement in the United States, which rose to prominence through coordinated rallies across the country on Tax Day, April 15, 2009. We exploit variation in rainfall on the day of these rallies as an exogenous source of variation in attendance. We show that good weather at this initial, coordinating event had significant consequences for ...
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作者：Avery, Christopher N.; Glickman, Mark E.; Hoxby, Caroline M.; Metrick, Andrew
作者单位：Boston University; Stanford University
摘要：We present a method of ranking U.S. undergraduate programs based on students' revealed preferences. When a student chooses a college among those that have admitted him, that college wins his tournament. Our method efficiently integrates the information from thousands of such tournaments. We implement the method using data from a national sample of high-achieving students. We demonstrate that this ranking method has strong theoretical properties, eliminating incentives for colleges to adopt str...
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作者：Simsek, Alp
作者单位：Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：I investigate the effect of financial innovation on portfolio risks when traders have belief disagreements. I decompose traders' average portfolio risks into two components: the uninsurable variance, defined as portfolio risks that would obtain without belief disagreements, and the speculative variance, defined as portfolio risks that result from speculation. My main result shows that financial innovation always increases the speculative variance through two distinct channels: by generating ne...
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作者：Gennaioli, Nicola; La Porta, Rafael; Lopez-de-Silanes, Florencio; Shleifer, Andrei
作者单位：Bocconi University; Dartmouth College; Harvard University
摘要：We investigate the determinants of regional development using a newly constructed database of 1,569 subnational regions from 110 countries covering 74% of the world's surface and 97% of its GDP. We combine the cross-regional analysis of geographic, institutional, cultural, and human capital determinants of regional development with an examination of productivity in several thousand establishments located in these regions. To organize the discussion, we present a new model of regional developme...
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作者：Koszegi, Botond; Szeidl, Adam
作者单位：Central European University; University of California System; University of California Berkeley; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：We present a generally applicable theory of focusing based on the hypothesis that a person focuses more on, and hence overweights, attributes in which her options differ more. Our model predicts that the decision maker is too prone to choose options with concentrated advantages relative to alternatives, but maximizes utility when the advantages and disadvantages of alternatives are equally concentrated. Applying our model to intertemporal choice, these results predict that a person exhibits pr...
