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作者：Romer, Christina D.; Romer, David H.
作者单位：University of California System; University of California Berkeley
摘要：This paper uses Social Security benefit increases from 1952 to 1991 to investigate the macroeconomic effects of changes in transfers. It finds a large, immediate, and significant positive response of consumption to permanent benefit increases. The response declines after about five months, and does not appear to spread to industrial production or employment. The effects of transfers are faster, but much less persistent and much smaller overall, than those of tax changes. Finally, monetary poli...
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作者：Schoellman, Todd
作者单位：Arizona State University; Arizona State University-Tempe
摘要：A growing literature stresses the importance of early childhood human capital. I ask whether variation in early childhood investments can help explain cross-country income differences. I provide new empirical evidence: the adult outcomes of refugees are independent of age at arrival to the United States up to age six, despite dramatic improvements in income and environment upon arrival. A standard model is consistent with this finding if parents but not country are important for early childhoo...
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作者：Karabarbounis, Marios
作者单位：Federal Reserve System - USA; Federal Reserve Bank - Richmond
摘要：This paper characterizes optimal labor income taxes that depend on age, household assets, and filing status (one or two earners) within a life-cycle model with heterogeneous, two-member households. The key innovation is a labor supply elasticity that varies endogenously among households. I find that tax distortions should be hump shaped in age, decrease in household assets, and be lower for joint relative to single filers. Age and assets act as complements within the optimal tax policy. Overal...
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作者：Magnani, Jacopo; Gorry, Aspen; Oprea, Ryan
作者单位：Purdue University System; Purdue University; Utah System of Higher Education; Utah State University; University of California System; University of California Santa Barbara
摘要：Flow earnings in a laboratory experiment decline the further a Brownian state variable, z, evolves from its optimal level, z*. Optimal state dependent models predict subjects will pay a fixed cost to return z to z* only when z strays outside a critical inaction region around the optimum. On average, subjects adjust at states remarkably close to optimal threshold levels but, as in the field, do not establish true state dependent inaction regions, suggesting significant time dependent components...
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作者：Ellison, Martin; Sargent, Thomas J.
作者单位：University of Oxford; New York University
摘要：The welfare cost of random consumption fluctuations is known from De Santis (2007) to be increasing in the level of uninsured idiosyncratic consumption risk. It is known from Barillas, Hansen, and Sargent (2009) to increase if agents care about robustness to model misspecification. We calculate the cost of business cycles in an economy where agents face idiosyncratic consumption risk and fear model misspecification, finding that idiosyncratic risk has a greater impact on the cost of business c...
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作者：Mian, Atif; Sufi, Amir; Trebbi, Francesco
作者单位：Princeton University; National Bureau of Economic Research; University of Chicago; University of British Columbia
摘要：Countries become more politically polarized and fractionalized following financial crises, reducing the likelihood of major financial reforms precisely when they might have especially large benefits. The evidence from a large sample of countries provides strong support for the hypotheses that following a financial crisis, voters become more ideologically extreme and ruling coalitions become weaker, independently of whether they were initially in power. The evidence that increased polarization ...
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作者：Morris, Stephen; Shin, Hyun Song
作者单位：Princeton University
摘要：We illustrate the corrosive effect of even small amounts of adverse selection in an asset market and show how it can lead to the total breakdown of trade. The problem is the failure of market confidence, defined as approximate common knowledge of an upper bound on expected losses. Small probability events can unravel market confidence. We discuss the role of contagious adverse selection and the problem of toxic assets in the recent financial crisis.
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作者：Alvarez-Cuadrado, Francisco; Poschke, Markus
作者单位：McGill University
摘要：A declining agricultural employment share is a key feature of economic development. Its main drivers are: improvements in agricultural technology combined with Engel's law release resources from agriculture (labor push), and improvements in industrial technology attract labor out of agriculture (labor pull). We present a model with both channels and evaluate the importance using data on 12 industrialized countries since the nineteenth century. Results suggest that the pull channel dominated un...
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作者：Ravenna, Federico; Walsh, Carl E.
作者单位：Universite de Montreal; HEC Montreal; University of California System; University of California Santa Cruz
摘要：We derive a linear-quadratic model that is consistent with sticky prices and search and matching frictions in the labor market. We show that the second-order approximation to the welfare of the representative agent depends on inflation and gaps that involve current and lagged unemployment. Our approximation makes explicit how welfare costs are generated by the presence of search frictions. These costs are distinct from the costs associated with relative price dispersion and fluctuations in con...
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作者：Jones, Benjamin F.; Olken, Benjamin A.
作者单位：Northwestern University; Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
摘要：Assassinations are a persistent feature of the political landscape. Using a new dataset of assassination attempts on all world leaders from 1875 to 2004, we exploit inherent randomness in the success or failure of assassination attempts to identify the effects of assassination. We find that, on average, successful assassinations of autocrats produce sustained moves toward democracy. We also find that assassinations affect the intensity of small-scale conflicts. The results document a contempor...
