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作者：McKenzie, David; Mohpal, Aakash; Yang, Dean
作者单位：The World Bank; University of Michigan System; University of Michigan; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：A randomized experiment among poor entrepreneurs tested the impact of exogenously inducing higher financial aspirations. In theory, raising aspirations could have positive effects by inducing higher effort, but could also reduce effort if unmet aspirations lead to frustration. Treatment resulted in more ambitious savings goals, but nearly all individuals fell far short of reaching these goals. Two years later, treated individuals had not saved more, and actually had lower borrowing and busines...
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作者：Cai, Xiqian; Jiang, Wei; Song, Hong; Xie, Huihua
作者单位：Xiamen University; Xiamen University; Shanghai University of International Business & Economics; Fudan University; The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen
摘要：This paper examines workers' response to a nonlinear payment system with a penalty and a reward design in a manufacturing firm in China. Using bunching methods, our estimates show that about 31% of workers make decisions with errors, and the structural elasticity of output response to the piece rate is 0.28. The focal nonlinear payment scheme generates 4% output gains compared with a linear payment scheme given the same total wage costs. Further decomposition analysis shows that the reward asp...
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作者：Blattman, Christopher; Dercon, Stefan; Franklin, Simon
作者单位：University of Chicago; National Bureau of Economic Research; University of Oxford; University of Oxford; University of London; Queen Mary University London
摘要：We study two interventions for poor and underemployed Ethiopian youth: a $300 grant to spur self-employment, and a job offer to an industrial firm. Each one is designed to help overcome two common barriers to employment: financial market imperfections and matching frictions. We find significant impacts on occupational choice, income, and health in the first year. After five years, however, we see no evidence of long run effects of either intervention. The grant led short-run increases in self-...
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作者：Shukla, Pallavi; Pullabhotla, Hemant K.; Baylis, Kathy
作者单位：Johns Hopkins University; Stanford University; University of California System; University of California Santa Barbara; Deakin University
摘要：Do users value a free technology less than one they pay for? In a two-stage randomized trial of improved grain storage technology in India, we test whether subsequent user willingness-to-pay is affected by free distribution compared to a small positive price. We find paying an initial price of zero has a strong negative effect on users' long-run willingness-to-pay but is not associated with differences in either reported use or benefits derived from the technology. The lower valuation implies ...
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作者：Lichtenberg, Erik; Iglesias, Eva
作者单位：University System of Maryland; University of Maryland College Park; Universidad Politecnica de Madrid; Centro de Estudios e Investigacion para la Gestion de Riesgos Agrarios Medioambientales CEIGRAM; Universidad Politecnica de Madrid
摘要：Index insurance has been seen as an important tool for managing the risks faced by farmers in developing countries but uptake has been disappointingly low. Basis risk is often cited as one of the main reasons for the lack of uptake. We investigate the role of basis risk in greater depth by considering contracts that allow farmers to choose the level of the index that triggers an indemnity in addition to coverage. We show that risk averse farmers will select trigger levels to protect against ca...
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作者：Mayoral, Laura; Ray, Debraj
作者单位：Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC); CSIC - Institut d'Analisi Economica (IAE); Barcelona School of Economics; New York University; University of Warwick
摘要：This paper studies costly conflict over private and public goods. Oil is an example of the former, political and civil rights an example of the latter. Our theory predicts that groups in conflict are likely to be small when the prize is private, and large when the prize is public. We examine these implications empirically using a global dataset of conflict at the ethnic group level. Our theoretical predictions find significant confirmation in this setting, and the analysis sheds new light on g...
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作者：Hillberry, Russell; Karabay, Bilgehan; Tan, Shawn W.
作者单位：Purdue University System; Purdue University; Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT); The World Bank
摘要：As part of their commitments under the WTO's Agreement on Trade Facilitation, many developing countries will adopt risk management, a strategy for selecting import shipments for inspection. In this paper we formalize key enforcement issues related to risk management. We argue that the complexities of international trade oversight mean that inspecting agencies lack certainty about the conditional probability that a given shipment will comply with import regulations. Ambiguity of this sort is li...
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作者：Berry, James; Kim, Hyuncheol Bryant; Son, Hyuk Harry
作者单位：University of Delaware; Hong Kong University of Science & Technology; Utrecht University; Cornell University
摘要：We study how the structure of tournament incentive schemes in education can influence the level and distribution of student outcomes. Through a field experiment among upper-primary students in Malawi, we evaluate two scholarship programs: a Population-based scholarship that rewarded overall top performers on an exam and a Bin-based scholarship that rewarded the top performers within smaller groups of students with similar baseline scores. We find that the Population-based scholarship decreased...
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作者：Dinlersoz, Emin M.; Fu, Zhe
摘要：During the period 2003-2016, China's infrastructure investment as a share of GDP outpaced, by a large margin, the average GDP share of entire government investment in advanced, developing, or emerging economies. A dynamic multi-sector model is constructed to assess the growth effects of this extraordinary investment episode. The model features sectoral heterogeneity in infrastructure intensity and positive externalities from aggregate infrastructure for firms and consumers. Along the model's t...
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作者：Nyarko, Yaw; Pellegrina, Heitor S.
作者单位：New York University; New York University Abu Dhabi
摘要：Several African countries have recently centralized their agricultural markets by launching a commodity exchange. What will be the impact of such a move? Who will be the winners and the losers? We develop a simple search model to study the impact of introducing a commodity exchange in a village economy where traders and farmers exchange on a bilateral basis. We study the efficiency gains from moving from the status quo to a trading regime where farmers have the option of selling their produce ...
