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作者：Bidner, Chris; Francois, Patrick
作者单位：University of New South Wales Sydney; University of British Columbia
摘要：When and how do democratic institutions deliver accountable government? In addressing this broad question, we focus on the role played by political norms-specifically, the extent to which leaders abuse office for personal gain and the extent to which citizens punish such transgressions. We show how qualitatively distinct political norms can coexist because of a dynamic complementarity, in which citizens' willingness to punish transgressions is raised when they expect such punishments to be use...
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作者：Duflo, Esther; Greenstone, Michael; Pande, Rohini; Ryan, Nicholas
作者单位：Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Harvard University
摘要：In many regulated markets, private, third-party auditors are chosen and paid by the firms that they audit, potentially creating a conflict of interest. This article reports on a two-year field experiment in the Indian state of Gujarat that sought to curb such a conflict by altering the market structure for environmental audits of industrial plants to incentivize accurate reporting. There are three main results. First, the status quo system was largely corrupted, with auditors systematically re...
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作者：Rothschild, Casey; Scheuer, Florian
作者单位：Wellesley College; Stanford University; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：We consider,optimal redistribution in a model where individuals can self-select into one of several possible sectors based on heterogeneity in a multidimensional skill vector. We first show that when the government does not observe the sectoral choice or underlying skills of its citizens, the constrained Pareto frontier can be implemented with a single nonlinear income tax. We then characterize this optimal tax schedule. If sectoral inputs are complements, a many-sector model with self-selecti...
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作者：Young, Alwyn
作者单位：University of London; London School Economics & Political Science
摘要：Using population and product consumption data from the Demographic and Health Surveys, I construct comparable measures of inequality and migration for 65 countries, including some of the poorest countries in the world. I find that the urban-rural gap accounts for 40% of mean country inequality and much of its cross-country variation. One out of every four or five individuals raised in rural areas moves to urban areas as a young adult, where they earn much higher incomes than nonmigrant rural p...
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作者：Mian, Atif; Rao, Kamalesh; Sufi, Amir
作者单位：Princeton University; National Bureau of Economic Research; University of Chicago
摘要：We investigate the consumption consequences of the 2006-9 housing collapse using the highly unequal geographic distribution of wealth losses across the United States. We estimate a large elasticity of consumption with respect to housing net worth of 0.6 to 0.8, which soundly rejects the hypothesis of full consumption risk-sharing. The average marginal propensity to consume (MPC) out of housing wealth is 5-7 cents with substantial heterogeneity across ZIP codes. ZIP codes with poorer and more l...
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作者：Giroud, Xavier
作者单位：Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
摘要：Proximity to plants makes it easier for headquarters to monitor and acquire information about plants. In this article, I estimate the effects of headquarters' proximity to plants on plant-level investment and productivity. Using the introduction of new airline routes as a source of exogenous variation in proximity, I find that new airline routes that reduce the travel time between headquarters and plants lead to an increase in plant-level investment of 8% to 9% and an increase in plants' total...
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作者：Ben-David, Itzhak; Graham, John R.; Harvey, Campbell R.
作者单位：University System of Ohio; Ohio State University; National Bureau of Economic Research; Duke University
摘要：Using a unique 10-year panel that includes more than 13,300 expected stock market return probability distributions, we find that executives are severely miscalibrated, producing distributions that are too narrow: realized market returns are within the executives' 80% confidence intervals only 36% of the time. We show that executives reduce the lower bound of the forecast confidence interval during times of high market uncertainty; however, ex post miscalibration is worst during periods of high...
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作者：Carvalho, Jean-Paul
作者单位：University of California System; University of California Irvine
摘要：Veiling among Muslim women is modeled as a commitment mechanism that limits temptation to deviate from religious norms of behavior. The analysis suggests that veiling is a strategy for integration, enabling women to take up outside economic opportunities while preserving their reputation within the community. This accounts for puzzling features of the new veiling movement since the 1970s. Veiling also has surprising effects on the intergenerational transmission of values. Compulsory veiling la...
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作者：Acemoglu, Daron; Egorov, Georgy; Sonin, Konstantin
作者单位：Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR); Northwestern University; New Economic School
摘要：When voters fear that politicians may be influenced or corrupted by the rich elite, signals of integrity are valuable. As a consequence, an honest politician seeking reelection chooses populist policies-that is, policies to the left of the median voter-as a way of signaling that he is not beholden to the interests of the right. Politicians that are influenced by right-wing special interests respond by choosing moderate or even left-of-center policies. This populist bias of policy is greater wh...
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作者：Kuziemko, Ilyana
作者单位：National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：Over the past 30 years, many states have abolished parole boards, which traditionally have had the discretion to release inmates before the expiration of their full sentence, in favor of fixed-sentence regimes in which the original sentence is binding. However, if prison time lowers recidivism risk and if parole boards can accurately estimate inmates' recidivism risk, then relative to a fixed-sentence regime, parole can provide allocative-efficiency benefits (costly prison space is allocated t...
