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作者:Klemp, Marc; Weisdorf, Jacob
作者单位:University of Copenhagen; Brown University; Harvard University; Center for Economic & Policy Research (CEPR); University of Southern Denmark
摘要:Exploiting a genealogy of English individuals living in the 16th to the 19th centuries, this study shows that lower parental reproductive capacity positively affected the socio-economic achievements of offspring. Using the time interval between the date of marriage and the first birth as a measure of reproductive capacity, we find that parental fecundity positively affected the number of siblings and that children of parents with lower fecundity were more likely to become literate and employed...
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作者:Hu, Audrey; Matthews, Steven A.; Zou, Liang
作者单位:City University of Hong Kong; University of Pennsylvania; University of Amsterdam
摘要:A standard result in auction theory is that a seller's profit-maximising reserve price is no less than his own value for the good. In practice, however, reserve prices often appear to be less than sellers' values. This article revisits the theory of optimal reserves in the context of second-price auctions. The main result is that an optimal reserve is less than the seller's value if the bidders are sufficiently risk averse and if their values are sufficiently interdependent. The resulting outc...
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作者:Albagli, Pinjas; Rau, Tomas
作者单位:Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile; Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile
摘要:This article studies a change in paid maternity leave entitlements in Chile. We exploit a reform that increased paid leave from 12 to 24 weeks for mothers of children born on 25 July 2011 or later. We estimate the effects of reform exposure on different children and maternal outcomes finding significant and positive effects on children's cognitive abilities, especially for those with less educated mothers. There is an increase in the probability of breastfeeding at least six months and breastf...
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作者:Palfrey, Thomas R.; Pogorelskiy, Kirill
作者单位:California Institute of Technology; University of Warwick
摘要:How does communication among voters affect turnout? In a laboratory experiment, subjects, divided into two competing parties, choose between costly voting and abstaining. Pre-play communication treatments, relative to the no communication control, are public communication (subjects exchange public messages through computers) and party communication (messages are public within one's own party). Communication benefits the majority party by increasing its turnout margin, hence its winning probabi...
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作者:Bandiera, Oriana; Mohnen, Myra; Rasul, Imran; Viarengo, Martina
作者单位:University of London; London School Economics & Political Science; University of Essex; University of London; University College London
摘要:Why did America introduce compulsory schooling laws at a time when financial investments in education and voluntary school attendance were high? We provide qualitative and quantitative evidence that states adopted compulsory schooling laws as a nation-building tool to instil civic values to the culturally diverse migrants during the 'Age of Mass Migration' between 1850 and 1914.. We show the adoption of compulsory schooling laws occurred significantly earlier in states that hosted European mig...
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作者:Saran, Rene; Tumennasan, Norovsambuu
作者单位:University System of Ohio; University of Cincinnati; Yale NUS College; Dalhousie University
摘要:We study the effectiveness of sortition to elicit and aggregate information that is dispersed among groups of individuals facing a collective choice problem. Sortition is the process of selecting decision-makers by a kleroterion (lottery machine). In environments with private consumption, we identify a large class of kleroteria that is as effective as direct democracy in (fully) implementing social choice functions. Examples include an opinion poll, where a random sample of two (or more) indiv...
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作者:Godefroy, Raphael
作者单位:Universite de Montreal; Universite de Montreal
摘要:This article estimates the impact on fertility of a 1999 reform that reduced litigants' rights for Muslim women in certain states of Nigeria. Using data from Demographic and Health Surveys, I find that, where enforced, the Reform increased the yearly probability of giving birth by 0.026. This effect stems from both a shift of fertility decisions within marriage towards husbands' preferences and an increase in the probability of being married. The change in marital status alone may explain 60% ...
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作者:Herrera, Helios; Llorente-Saguer, Aniol; McMurray, Joseph C.
作者单位:University of Warwick; University of Warwick; Center for Economic & Policy Research (CEPR); University of London; Queen Mary University London; Brigham Young University
摘要:The swing voter's curse is useful for explaining patterns of voter participation, but arises because voters restrict attention to the rare event of a pivotal vote. Recent empirical evidence suggests that electoral margins influence policy outcomes, even away from the 50% threshold. If so, voters should also pay attention to the marginal impact of a vote. Adopting this assumption, we find that a marginal voter's curse gives voters a new reason to abstain: to avoid diluting the pool of informati...
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作者:Perroni, Carlo; Pogrebna, Ganna; Sandford, Sarah; Scharf, Kimberley
作者单位:University of Warwick; Leibniz Association; Ifo Institut; University of Birmingham; Alan Turing Institute; ESSEC Business School; Center for Economic & Policy Research (CEPR)
摘要:We study contestability in charity markets where non-commercial, not-for-profit providers supply a homogeneous collective good through increasing-returns-to-scale technologies. Unlike in the case of for-profit competition, the absence of price-based sales contracts for charities means that fixed costs can translate into entry barriers, protecting the position of an inefficient incumbent; or, conversely, they can make it possible for inefficient newcomers to contest the position of a more effic...
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作者:Gould, Eric D.
作者单位:Hebrew University of Jerusalem
摘要:This article investigates whether the increasing residual wage inequality' trend, which is responsible for most of the wage inequality phenomenon, is related to manufacturing decline and the influx of low-skilled immigrants. The analysis exploits variation across locations in the United States, and shows that a shrinking manufacturing sector increases inequality. This effect strengthens with an influx of low-skilled immigrants. Similar results are found for the increasing return to education a...