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作者:Abaluck, Jason; Gruber, Jonathan
作者单位:Yale University; National Bureau of Economic Research; Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
摘要:We study the impact of changing choice set size on the quality of choices in health insurance markets. Using novel data on enrolment and medical claims for school district employees in the state of Oregon, we document that the average employee could save $600 by switching to a lower cost plan. Structural modelling reveals large choice inconsistencies such as non-equalization of the dollar spent on premiums and out of pocket, and a novel form of approximate inertia where enrolees are excessivel...
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作者:Ball, Laurence; Mankiw, N. Gregory
作者单位:Johns Hopkins University; Harvard University
摘要:This article examines the optimal accumulation of capital and the effects of government debt in neoclassical growth models in which firms have market power and therefore charge prices above marginal cost. In this environment, the real interest rate earned by savers is less than the net marginal product of capital. We establish a new method for evaluating dynamic efficiency that can be applied in such economies. A plausible calibration suggests that the wedge between the real interest rate and ...
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作者:Galle, Simon; Rodriguez-Clare, Andres; Yi, Moises
作者单位:BI Norwegian Business School; University of California System; University of California Berkeley; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要:We develop a multi-sector gravity model with heterogeneous workers to quantify the aggregate and group-level welfare effects of trade. The model generalizes the specific-factors intuition to a setting with labour reallocation, leads to a parsimonious formula for the group-level welfare effects from trade, and nests the aggregate results in Arkolakis, Costinot and Rodriguez-Clare (2012, New Trade Models, Same Old Gains?, American Economic Review, 102, 94-130). We estimate the model using the st...
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作者:Kowalski, Amanda E.
作者单位:University of Michigan System; University of Michigan
摘要:Mammography guidelines have weakened in response to evidence that mammograms diagnose breast cancers that would never eventually cause symptoms, a phenomenon called overdiagnosis. Given concerns about overdiagnosis, instead of recommending mammograms, US guidelines encourage women aged 40-49 to get them as they see fit. To assess whether these guidelines target women effectively, I propose an approach that examines mammography behaviour within an influential clinical trial that followed partic...
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作者:Molavi, Pooya; Tahbaz-Salehi, Alireza; Vedolin, Andrea
作者单位:Northwestern University; Centre for Economic Policy Research - UK; Boston University; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要:This paper analyses how limits to the complexity of statistical models used by market participants can shape asset prices. We consider an economy in which the stochastic process that governs the evolution of economic variables may not have a simple representation, and yet, agents are only capable of entertaining statistical models with a certain level of complexity. As a result, they may end up with a lower-dimensional approximation that does not fully capture the intertemporal complexity of t...
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作者:Costinot, Arnaud; Werning, Ivan
作者单位:Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
摘要:Technological change, from the advent of robots to expanded trade opportunities, creates winners and losers. How should government policy respond? We provide a general theory of optimal technology regulation in a second-best world, with rich heterogeneity across households, linear taxes on the subset of firms affected by technological change, and a non-linear tax on labour income. Our first set of results consists of optimal tax formulas, with minimal structural assumptions, involving sufficie...
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作者:Beach, Brian; Hanlon, W. Walker
作者单位:Vanderbilt University; National Bureau of Economic Research; Northwestern University; Centre for Economic Policy Research - UK
摘要:The historical transition to a low fertility regime was central for long-run growth, but what caused it? Existing economic explanations largely focus on the economic incentives to limit fertility. This article presents new evidence highlighting the importance of cultural forces as a complementary driver of the fertility transition. We leverage a sharp change in fertility in Britain in 1877 and document large synchronized declines in fertility among culturally British households residing outsid...
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作者:Deb, Rahul; Kitamura, Yuichi; Quah, John K. H.; Stoye, Jorg
作者单位:University of Toronto; Yale University; Johns Hopkins University; National University of Singapore; Cornell University
摘要:To determine the welfare implications of price changes in demand data, we introduce a revealed preference relation over prices. We show that the absence of cycles in this relation characterizes a consumer who trades off the utility of consumption against the disutility of expenditure. Our model can be applied whenever a consumer's demand over a strict subset of all available goods is being analysed; it can also be extended to settings with discrete goods and non-linear prices. To illustrate it...
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作者:Cerreia-Vioglio, Simone; Corrao, Roberto; Lanzani, Giacomo
作者单位:Bocconi University; Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
摘要:This article proposes a model of non-Bayesian social learning in networks that accounts for heuristics and biases in opinion aggregation. The updating rules are represented by non-linear opinion aggregators from which we extract two extreme networks capturing strong and weak links. We provide graph-theoretic conditions for these networks that characterize opinions' convergence, consensus formation, and efficient or biased information aggregation. Under these updating rules, agents may ignore s...
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作者:Daruich, Diego; Di Addario, Sabrina; Saggio, Raffaele
作者单位:European Central Bank; Bank of Italy; University of British Columbia; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要:We combine matched employer-employee data with firms' financial records to study a 2001 Italian reform that lifted constraints on the employment of temporary contract workers while maintaining rigid employment protection regulations for employees hired under permanent contracts. Exploiting the staggered implementation of the reform across different collective bargaining agreements, we find that this policy change led to an increase in the share of temporary contracts but failed to raise employ...