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作者：Piketty, T; Saez, E
作者单位：Harvard University; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：This paper presents new homogeneous series on top shares of income and wages from 1913 to 1998 in the United States using individual tax returns data. Top income and wages shares display a U-shaped pattern over the century. Our series suggest that the large shocks that capital owners experienced during the Great Depression and World War II have had a permanent effect on top capital incomes. We argue that steep progressive income and estate taxation may have prevented large fortunes from fully ...
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作者：Baker, M; Stein, JC; Wurgler, J
作者单位：Harvard University; National Bureau of Economic Research; Harvard University; New York University
摘要：We use a simple model to outline the conditions under which corporate investment is sensitive to nonfundamental movements in stock prices. The key prediction is that stock prices have a stronger impact on the investment of equity-dependent firms-firms that need external equity to finance marginal investments. Using an index of equity dependence based on the work of Kaplan and Zingales, we find support for this hypothesis. In particular, firms that rank in the top quintile of the KZ index have ...
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作者：La Porta, R; Lopez-De-Silanes, F; Zamarripa, G
作者单位：Harvard University; Yale University
摘要：In many countries, banks lend to firms controlled by the bank's owners. We examine the benefits of related lending using a newly assembled data set for Mexico. Related lending is prevalent (20 percent of commercial loans) and takes place on better terms than arm's-length lending (annual interest rates are 4 percentage points lower). Related loans are 33 percent more likely to default and, when they do, have lower recovery rates (30 percent less) than unrelated ones. The evidence for Mexico in ...
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作者：Ariely, D; Loewenstein, G; Prelec, D
作者单位：Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Carnegie Mellon University
摘要：In six experiments we show that initial valuations of familiar products and simple hedonic experiences are strongly influenced by arbitrary anchors (sometimes derived from a person's social security number). Because subsequent valuations are also coherent with respect to salient differences in perceived quality or quantity of these products and experiences, the entire pattern of valuations can easily create an illusion of order, as if it is being generated by stable underlying preferences. The...
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作者：Rigobon, R; Sack, B
作者单位：Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); National Bureau of Economic Research; Federal Reserve System - USA
摘要：Movements in the stock market can have a significant impact on the macroeconomy and are therefore likely to be an important factor in the determination of monetary policy. However, little is known about the magnitude of the Federal Reserve's reaction to the stock market, in part because the simultaneous response of equity prices to interest rates makes it difficult to estimate. This paper uses an identification technique based on the heteroskedasticity of stock market returns to measure the re...
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作者：Krebs, T
作者单位：Brown University
摘要：This paper develops a tractable incomplete-markets model of economic growth in which households invest in risk-free physical capital and risky human capital. The paper shows that a reduction in uninsurable idiosyncratic labor income risk decreases physical capital investment, but increases human capital investment, growth, and welfare. A quantitative analysis based on a calibrated version of the model reveals that these effects are substantial and of the same order of magnitude as the effects ...
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作者：Fatás, A; Mihov, I
作者单位：INSEAD Business School
摘要：This paper studies the effects of discretionary fiscal policy on output volatility and economic growth. Using data for 91 countries, we isolate three empirical regularities: (1) governments that use fiscal policy aggressively induce significant macroeconomic instability; (2) the volatility of output caused by discretionary fiscal policy lowers economic growth by more than 0.8 percentage points for every percentage point increase in volatility; (3) prudent use of fiscal policy is explained to a...
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作者：Carroll, CD
作者单位：Johns Hopkins University
摘要：Economists have long emphasized the importance of expectations in determining macroeconomic outcomes. Yet there has been almost no recent effort to model actual empirical expectations data; instead, macroeconomists usually simply assume that expectations are rational. This paper shows that while empirical household expectations are not rational in the usual sense, expectational dynamics are well captured by a model in which households' views derive from news reports of the views of professiona...
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作者：McLaren, J
作者单位：University of Virginia; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：This paper presents an interpretation of rising regionalism in world trade as a coordination failure, based on (i) sector-specific sunk costs in production, and (ii) friction in trade negotiation. Given these elements, if a regional trade bloc is expected to form, private agents will make investments that will make bloc member countries more specialized toward each other, but bloc and nonbloc countries mutually less specialized. This diminishes the ex post demand for multilateral free trade. T...
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作者：Bresnahan, TF; Brynjolfsson, E; Hitt, LM
作者单位：Stanford University; Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); University of Pennsylvania
摘要：We investigate the hypothesis that the combination of three related innovations-1) information technology (IT), 2) complementary workplace reorganization, and 3) new products and services-constitute a significant skill-biased technical change affecting labor demand in the United States. Using detailed firm-level data, we find evidence of complementarities among all three of these innovations in factor demand and productivity regressions. In addition, firms that adopt these innovations tend to ...
