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作者：Helpman, Elhanan; Melitz, Marc; Rubinstein, Yona
作者单位：Harvard University; Brown University; Princeton University; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：We develop a simple model of international trade with heterogeneous firms that is consistent with a number of stylized features of the data. In particular, the model predicts positive as well as zero trade flows across pairs of countries, and it allows the number of exporting firms to vary across destination countries. As a result, the impact of trade frictions on trade flows can be decomposed into the intensive and extensive margins, where the former refers to the trade volume per exporter an...
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作者：Miller, Grant
作者单位：Stanford University; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：Women's choices appear to emphasize child welfare more than those of men. This paper presents new evidence on how suffrage rights for American women helped children to benefit from the scientific breakthroughs of the bacteriological revolution. Consistent with standard models of electoral competition, suffrage laws were followed by immediate shifts in legislative behavior and large, sudden increases in local public health spending. This growth in public health spending fueled large-scale door-...
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作者：Qian, Nancy
作者单位：Brown University
摘要：Economists have long argued that the sex imbalance in developing countries is caused by underlying economic conditions. This paper uses exogenous increases in sex-specific agricultural income caused by post-Mao reforms in China to estimate the effects of total income and sex-specific income on sex-differential survival of children. Increasing female income, holding male income constant, improves survival rates for girls, whereas increasing male income, holding female income constant, worsens s...
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作者：Ferguson, Thomas; Voth, Hans-Joachim
作者单位：University of Massachusetts System; University of Massachusetts Boston; ICREA; Pompeu Fabra University; Centre de Recerca en Economia Internacional (CREI)
摘要：This paper examines the value of connections between German industry and the Nazi movement in early 1933. Drawing on previously unused contemporary sources about management and supervisory board composition and stock returns, we find that one out of seven firms, and a large proportion of the biggest companies, had substantive links with the National Socialist German Workers' Party. Firms supporting the Nazi movement experienced unusually high returns, outperforming unconnected ones by 5% to 8%...
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作者：Klenow, Peter J.; Kryvtsov, Oleksiy
作者单位：Stanford University
摘要：In the 1988-2004 microdata collected by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics for the Consumer Price Index, price changes are frequent (every 4-7 months, depending on the treatment of sale prices) and large in absolute value (on the order of 10%). The size and timing of price changes vary considerably for a given item, but the size and probability of a price change are unrelated to the time since the last price change. Movements in aggregate inflation reflect movements in the size of price chang...
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作者：Hastings, Justine S.; Weinstein, Jeffrey M.
作者单位：Yale University; Syracuse University; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：We examine a natural experiment and a field experiment that provided direct information on school test scores to lower-income families in a public school choice plan. Receiving information significantly increases the fraction of parents choosing higher-performing schools. Parents with high-scoring alternatives nearby were more likely to choose nonguaranteed schools with higher test scores. Using random variation from each experiment, we find that attending a higher-scoring school increases stu...
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作者：Ferraz, Claudio; Finan, Frederico
作者单位：University of California System; University of California Los Angeles; Instituto de Pesquisa Economica Aplicada (IPEA); IZA Institute Labor Economics
摘要：This paper uses publicly released audit reports to study the effects of disclosing information about corruption practices on electoral accountability. In 2003, as part of an anticorruption program, Brazil's federal government began to select municipalities at random to audit their expenditures of federally transferred funds. The findings of these audits were then made publicly available and disseminated to media sources. Using a data set on corruption constructed from the audit reports, we com...
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作者：Nunn, Nathan
作者单位：Harvard University; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：Can part of Africa's current underdevelopment be explained by its slave trades? To explore this question, I use data from shipping records and historical documents reporting slave ethnicities to construct estimates of the number of slaves exported from each country during Africa's slave trades. I find a robust negative relationship between the number of slaves exported from a country and current economic performance. To better understand if the relationship is causal, I examine the historical ...
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作者：Kircher, Philipp; Postlewaite, Andrew
作者单位：University of Pennsylvania
摘要：Better-informed consumers may be treated preferentially by firms because their consumption serves as a quality signal for other customers. For normal goods this results in wealthy individuals being treated better than poor individuals. We investigate this phenomenon in an equilibrium model of social learning with heterogeneous consumers and firms that act strategically. Consumers search for high-quality firms and condition their choices on observed actions of other consumers. When they observe...
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作者：Qian, Yi
作者单位：Northwestern University
摘要：This paper uses a natural experiment to test the impact of counterfeiting under weak intellectual property rights. I collect new panel data from Chinese shoe companies from 1993-2004. By exploiting the discontinuity of government enforcement efforts for the footwear sector in 1995 and the differences in authentic companies' relationships with the government, I identify and measure the effects of counterfeit entry on authentic prices, qualities, and other market outcomes. The results show that ...
