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作者：Caselli, Francesco; Gennaioli, Nicola
作者单位：National Bureau of Economic Research; Pompeu Fabra University
摘要：In a model with heterogeneity in managerial talent, we compare the economic and political consequences of reforms aimed at reducing fixed costs of entry (deregulation) and improving the efficiency of financial markets (financial reform). The effects of these reforms depend on the market where control rights over incumbent firms are traded. In the absence of a market for control, both reforms increase the number and the average quality of firms, and are politically equivalent. When a market for...
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作者：Iyigun, Murat
作者单位：University of Colorado System; University of Colorado Boulder; Harvard University
摘要：Various historical accounts have suggested that the Ottomans' rise helped the Protestant Reformation as well as its offshoots, such as Zwinglianism, Anabaptism, and Calvinism, survive their infancy and mature. Utilizing a comprehensive data set on violent confrontations for the interval between 1401 and 1700 CE, I show that the incidence of military engagements between the Protestant Reformers and the Counter-Reformation forces between the 1520s and 1650s depended negatively on the Ottomans' m...
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作者：Mullainathan, Sendhil; Schwartzstein, Joshua; Shleifer, Andrei
作者单位：Harvard University
摘要：We present a model of uninformative persuasion in which individuals think coarsely: they group situations into categories and apply the same model of inference to all situations within a category. Coarse thinking exhibits two features that persuaders take advantage of: W transference, whereby individuals transfer the informational content of a given message from situations in a category where it is useful to those where it is not, and (ii) framing, whereby objectively useless information influ...
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作者：Gabaix, Xavier; Landier, Augustin
作者单位：New York University; New York University; National Bureau of Economic Research
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作者：Currie, Janet; Macleod, W. Bentley
作者单位：Columbia University; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：In the 1980s and 1990s many states adopted tort reforms. It has been argued that these reforms have reduced the practice of defensive medicine arising from excess tort liability. We find that this does not appear to be true for a large and important class of cases-childbirth in the United States. Using data from national vital statistics natality files on millions of individual births from 1989 to 2001, we ask whether specific tort reforms affect the types of procedures that are performed, and...
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作者：Doepke, Matthias; Zilibotti, Fabrizio
作者单位：University of California System; University of California Los Angeles; University of Zurich
摘要：The British Industrial Revolution triggered a socioeconomic transformation whereby the landowning aristocracy was replaced by industrial capitalists rising from the middle classes as the economically dominant group. We propose a theory of preference formation under financial market imperfections that can account for this pattern. Parents shape their children's preferences in response to economic incentives. Middle-class families in occupations requiring effort, skill, and experience develop pa...
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作者：Gentzkow, Matthew; Shapiro, Jesse M.
作者单位：University of Chicago; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：We use heterogeneity in the timing of television's introduction to different local markets to identify the effect of preschool television exposure on standardized test scores during adolescence. Our preferred point estimate indicates that an additional year of preschool television exposure raises average adolescent test scores by about 0.02 standard deviations. We are able to reject negative effects larger than about 0.03 standard deviations per year of television exposure. For reading and gen...
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作者：Ranciere, Romain; Tornell, Aaron; Westermann, Frank
作者单位：International Monetary Fund; Paris School of Economics; University of California System; University of California Los Angeles; National Bureau of Economic Research; University Osnabruck
摘要：Countries that have experienced occasional financial crises have, on average, grown faster than countries with stable financial conditions. Because financial crises are realizations of downside risk, we measure their incidence by the skewness of credit growth. Unlike variance, negative skewness isolates the impact of the large, infrequent, and abrupt credit busts associated with crises. We find a robust negative link between skewness and GDP growth in a large sample of countries over 1960-2000...
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作者：Benmelech, Efraim; Bergman, Nittai K.
作者单位：Harvard University; National Bureau of Economic Research; Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
摘要：How do liquidation values affect financial contract renegotiation? While the incomplete-contracting theory of financial contracting predicts that liquidation values determine the allocation of bargaining power between creditors and debtors, there is little empirical evidence on financial contract renegotiations and the role asset values play in such bargaining. This paper attempts to fill this gap. We develop an incomplete-contracting model of financial contract renegotiation and estimate it u...
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作者：Lizzeri, Alessandro; Siniscalchi, Marciano
作者单位：New York University; Northwestern University
摘要：We propose a simple theoretical model of supervised learning that is potentially useful to interpret a number of empirical phenomena relevant to the nature-nurture debate. The model captures a basic trade-off between sheltering the child from the consequences of his mistakes and allowing him to learn from experience. We characterize the optimal parenting policy and its comparative-statics properties. We then show that key features of the optimal policy can be useful to interpret provocative fi...
