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作者:Bentzen, Jeanet Sinding; Kaarsen, Nicolai; Wingender, Asger Moll
作者单位:University of Copenhagen
摘要:Irrigated agriculture makes societies more likely to be ruled by authoritarian regimes. Ancient societies have long been thought to follow this pattern. We empirically show that irrigation affects political regimes even in the present. To avoid endogeneity, we use geographical and climatic variation to identify irrigation dependent societies. We find that countries whose agriculture depended on irrigation are about six points less democratic on the 21-point polity2 scale than countries where a...
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作者:Dillenberger, David; Postlewaite, Andrew; Rozen, Kareen
作者单位:University of Pennsylvania; Brown University
摘要:Maximizing subjective expected utility is the classic model of decision making under uncertainty. Savage [Savage, Leonard J. (1954). The Foundation of Statistics. Wiley, New York] provides axioms on preference over acts that are equivalent to the existence of a subjective expected utility representation, and further establishes that such a representation is essentially unique. We show that there is a continuum of other expected utility representations in which the probability distributions ov...
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作者:Ahlfeldt, Gabriel; Koutroumpis, Pantelis; Valletti, Tommaso
作者单位:University of London; London School Economics & Political Science; Imperial College London; University of Rome Tor Vergata
摘要:This paper shows that having access to a fast Internet connection is an important determinant of capitalization effects in property markets. Our empirical strategy combines a boundary discontinuity design with controls for time-invariant effects and arbitrary macroeconomic shocks at a very local level to identify the causal effect of broadband speed on property prices from variation that is plausibly exogenous. Applying this strategy to a micro data set from England between 1995 and 2010 we fi...
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作者:Couttenier, Mathieu; Grosjean, Pauline; Sangnier, Marc
作者单位:University of Geneva; University of New South Wales Sydney; Aix-Marseille Universite; Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS); Aix-Marseille Universite
摘要:We document interpersonal violence as a dimension of the resource curse. We rely on a historical natural experiment in the United States, where mineral discoveries occurred sometimes before, sometimes after formal institutions were established in the county of discovery. In places where mineral discoveries occurred before formal institutions were established, there were more homicides per capita historically and the effect has persisted to this day. Today, the share of homicides and assaults e...
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作者:Feyrer, James; Politi, Dimitra; Weil, David N.
作者单位:Dartmouth College; University of Edinburgh; Brown University
摘要:Iodine deficiency is the leading cause of preventable mental retardation in the world today. The condition, which was common in the developed world until the introduction of iodized salt in the 1920s, is connected to low iodine levels in the soil and water. We examine the impact of salt iodization on cognitive outcomes in the United States by taking advantage of this natural geographic variation. Salt was iodized over a short period of time beginning in 1924. We use military data collected dur...
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作者:Armstrong, Mark
作者单位:University of Oxford; University of Oxford
摘要:The paper discusses situations in which consumers search through their options in a deliberate order. Topics include: the existence of ordered search equilibria with symmetric sellers (all consumers first inspect the seller they anticipate will set the lowest price, and a seller that is inspected first by consumers will set the lowest price); the use of price and non-price advertising to direct search; how purchase history can guide future search; and the incentive a seller can have to raise i...
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作者:Gneezy, Uri; Goette, Lorenz; Sprenger, Charles; Zimmermann, Florian
作者单位:University of California System; University of California San Diego; University of Bonn; University of Zurich
摘要:Theories of expectations-based reference-dependent preferences have provided a critical modeling innovation, incorporating a structured theory of the formation of reference points. An important prediction of these models is a monotone response in behavior to changes in expectations. To test such models we conduct a real-effort experiment manipulating expectations and examining consequences on effort provision. In contrast to the theory, we document substantial nonmonotonicities in the effort r...
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作者:Zilibotti, Fabrizio
作者单位:Yale University
摘要:This article is based on the presidential address delivered at the EEA Annual Congress 2016. It discusses China's institutional and economic transformation through the lens of the model of growth and convergence developed in Acemoglu, Aghion, and Zilibotti (JEEA 2006), which emphasizes the dichotomy between investment- and innovation-led growth. The economic reforms introduced in the 1980s and 1990s have enabled the Chinese economy to grow at historically unprecedented rates through fostering ...
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作者:Acemoglu, Daron; Jackson, Matthew O.
作者单位:Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Stanford University; The Santa Fe Institute
摘要:We examine the interplay between social norms and the enforcement of laws. Agents choose a behavior (e.g., tax evasion, production of low-quality products, corruption, harassing behavior, substance abuse, etc.) and then are randomly matched with another agent. There are complementarities in behaviors so that an agent's payoff decreases with the mismatch between her behavior and her partner's, and with overall negative externalities created by the behavior of others. A law is an upper bound (ca...
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作者:Cappelen, Alexander W.; Halvorsen, Trond; Sorensen, Erik O.; Tungodden, Bertil
作者单位:Norwegian School of Economics (NHH); SINTEF
摘要:We study the relative importance of intrinsic moral motivation and extrinsic social motivation in explaining moral behavior. The key feature of our experiment is that we introduce a dictator game design that manipulates these two sources of motivation. In one set of treatments, we manipulate the moral argument for sharing, in another we manipulate the information given to the recipient about the context of the experiment and the dictator's decision. The paper offers two main findings. First, w...