-
作者：Jensen, Robert; Oster, Emily
作者单位：University of California System; University of California Los Angeles; Brown University; National Bureau of Economic Research; University of Chicago
摘要：Cable and satellite television have spread rapidly throughout the developing world. These media sources expose viewers to new information about the outside world and other ways of life, which may affect attitudes and behaviors. This paper explores the effect of the introduction of cable television on women's status in rural India. Using a three-year, individual-level panel data set, we find that the introduction of cable television is associated with significant decreases in the reported accep...
-
作者：Bjoerkman, Martina; Svensson, Jakob
作者单位：Bocconi University; Stockholm University
摘要：This paper presents a randomized field experiment on community-based monitoring of public primary health care providers in Uganda. Through two rounds of village meetings, localized nongovernmental organizations encouraged communities to be more involved with the state of health service provision and strengthened their capacity to hold their local health providers to account for performance. A year after the intervention, treatment communities are more involved in monitoring the provider, and t...
-
作者：Calvet, Laurent E.; Campbell, John Y.; Sodini, Paolo
作者单位：Hautes Etudes Commerciales (HEC) Paris; National Bureau of Economic Research; Harvard University; Stockholm School of Economics
摘要：This paper investigates the dynamics of individual portfolios in a unique data set containing the disaggregated wealth of all households in Sweden. Between 1999 and 2002, we observe little aggregate rebalancing in the financial portfolio of participants. These patterns conceal strong household-level evidence of active rebalancing, which on average offsets about one-half of idiosyncratic passive variations in the risky asset share. Wealthy, educated investors with better diversified portfolios ...
-
作者：Brown, Alexander L.; Chua, Zhikang Eric; Camerer, Colin F.
作者单位：California Institute of Technology
摘要：This paper tests two explanations for apparent undersaving in life cycle models: bounded rationality and a preference for immediacy. Each was addressed in a separate experimental study. In the first study, subjects saved too little initially-providing evidence for bounded rationality-but learned to save optimally within four repeated life cycles. In the second study, thirsty subjects who consume beverage sips immediately, rather than with a delay, show greater relative overspending, consistent...
-
作者：Karlan, Dean; Mobius, Markus; Rosenblat, Tanya; Szeidl, Adam
作者单位：Yale University; Harvard University; National Bureau of Economic Research; Iowa State University; University of California System; University of California Berkeley
摘要：This paper builds a theory of trust based on informal contract enforcement in social networks. In our model, network connections between individuals can be used as social collateral to secure informal borrowing. We define network-based trust as the largest amount one agent can borrow from another agent and derive a reduced-form expression for this quantity, which we then use in three applications. (1) We predict that dense networks generate bonding social capital that allows transacting valuab...
-
作者：Bernheim, B. Douglas; Rangel, Antonio
作者单位：Stanford University; California Institute of Technology; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：We propose a broad generalization of standard choice-theoretic welfare economics that encompasses a wide variety of nonstandard behavioral models. Our approach exploits the coherent aspects of choice that those positive models typically attempt to capture. It replaces the standard revealed preference relation with an unambiguous choice relation: roughly, x is ( strictly) unambiguously chosen over y (written xP*y) iff y is never chosen when x is available. Under weak assumptions, P* is acyclic ...
-
作者：Malmendier, Ulrike; Tate, Geoffrey
作者单位：University of California System; University of California Berkeley; National Bureau of Economic Research; University of California System; University of California Los Angeles
摘要：Compensation, status, and press coverage of managers in the United States follow a highly skewed distribution: a small number of superstars enjoy the bulk of the rewards. We evaluate the impact of CEOs achieving superstar status on the performance of their firms, using prestigious business awards to measure shocks to CEO status. We find that award-winning CEOs subsequently underperform, both relative to their prior performance and relative to a matched sample of non-winning CEOs. At the same t...
-
作者：Guiso, Luigi; Sapienza, Paola; Zingales, Luigi
作者单位：European University Institute; Northwestern University; National Bureau of Economic Research; University of Chicago
摘要：How much do cultural biases affect economic exchange? We answer this question by using data on bilateral trust between European countries. We document that this trust is affected not only by the characteristics of the country being trusted, but also by cultural aspects of the match between trusting country and trusted country, such as their history of conflicts and their religious, genetic, and somatic similarities. We then find that lower bilateral trust leads to less trade between two countr...
-
作者：Hart, Oliver
作者单位：Harvard University
摘要：We study two parties who desire a smooth trading relationship under conditions of value and cost uncertainty. A contract fixing price works well in normal times because there is nothing to argue about. However, when value or cost is unusually high or low, one party will deviate from the contract and hold up the other party, causing deadweight losses as parties withhold cooperation. We show that allocating asset ownership and indexing contracts can reduce the incentives to engage in hold-up. In...
-
作者：Curcuru, Stephanie E.; Dvorak, Tomas; Warnock, Francis E.
作者单位：University of Virginia; Trinity College Dublin; Federal Reserve System - USA; Federal Reserve Bank - Dallas; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：Using a monthly data set on the foreign equity and bond portfolios of U.S. investors and the U.S. equity and bond portfolios of foreign investors, we find that the returns differential for portfolio securities is far smaller than previously reported. Examining all U.S. claims and liabilities, we find that previous estimates of large differentials are biased upward. The bias owes to computing implied returns from an internally inconsistent data set of revised data; original data produce a much ...
