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作者：Qian, Nancy; Yanagizawa, David
作者单位：Brown University; Stockholm University
摘要：This paper uses a country-level panel data set to test the hypothesis that the United States biases its human rights reports of countries based on the latters' strategic value. We use the difference between the U. S. State Department's and Amnesty International's reports as a measure of U. S. bias. For plausibly exogenous variation in strategic value to the U. S., we compare this bias between U. S. Cold War (CW) allies to non-CW allies, before and after the CW ended. The results show that ally...
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作者：Stiroh, Kevin J.
摘要：This paper examines the declining volatility of U. S. output growth from a production perspective. At the aggregate level, increased output stability reflects decreased volatility in both labor productivity growth and hours growth, as well as a significant decline in the covariance. The decline in output volatility can also be traced to less volatile labor input and total factor productivity growth and the smaller covariance between them. At the industry level, the decline in volatility appear...
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作者：Norback, Pehr-Johan; Persson, Lars
摘要：We construct a model where incumbents can either acquire basic innovations from entrepreneurs, or wait and acquire developed innovations from entrepreneurial firms supported by venture capitalists. We show that venture-backed entrepreneurial firms have an incentive to overinvest in development vis vis incumbents due to strategic product market effects on the sales price of a developed innovation. This will trigger preemptive acquisitions by incumbents, thus increasing the reward for entreprene...
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作者：Laubach, Thomas
作者单位：Goethe University Frankfurt
摘要：Estimating the effects of government debt and deficits on Treasury yields is complicated by the need to isolate the effects of fiscal policy from other influences. To control for the effects of the business cycle, and associated monetary policy actions, on debt, deficits, and interest rates, this paper studies the relationship between long-horizon forward rates and future federal government deficits and debt as projected by the Congressional Budget Office. For the entire 30-year sample for whi...
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作者：Biais, Bruno; Mariotti, Thomas
作者单位：Universite de Toulouse; Universite Toulouse 1 Capitole; Toulouse School of Economics; Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)
摘要：We analyze how bankruptcy laws affect the general equilibrium interactions between credit and wages. Soft laws reduce the frequency of liquidations and thus ex post inefficiencies, but they worsen credit rationing ex ante. This hinders firm creation and thus depresses labor demand. Rich agents who need few outside funds can invest even if creditor rights are weak. Hence, they favor soft laws that exclude poorer agents from the credit market and reduce the competition for labor. Such laws can g...
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作者：Cesarini, David; Lichtenstein, Paul; Johannesson, Magnus; Wallace, Bjoern
作者单位：Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Karolinska Institutet; Stockholm School of Economics
摘要：Empirical evidence suggests that people on average overestimate their own ability in a variety of circumstances. Little is known, however, about the origins of such overconfidence. To shed some light on this issue, we use the classic twin design to estimate the genetic and environmental contributions to individual differences in overconfidence. We collect data on overconfidence among 460 twin pairs. Overconfidence is measured as the difference between the perceived and actual rank in cognitive...
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作者：Desmet, Klaus; Ortuno-Ortin, Ignacio; Weber, Shlomo
作者单位：Universidad Carlos III de Madrid; Southern Methodist University
摘要：This paper investigates the effect of linguistic diversity on redistribution in a broad cross-section of countries. We use the notion of linguistic distances and show that the commonly used fractionalization index, which ignores linguistic distances, yields insignificant results. However, once distances between languages are accounted for, linguistic diversity has both a statistically and economically significant effect on redistribution. With an average level of redistribution of 9.5% of GDP ...
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作者：Maier, Norbert; Ottaviani, Marco
作者单位：University of London; London School Economics & Political Science; Northwestern University
摘要：When should principals dealing with a common agent share their individual performance measures about the agent's unobservable effort for producing a public good? In a model with two principals who offer linear incentive schemes, we show that information sharing always increases total expected welfare if the principal who is less informed about the agent's effort also cares more about the agent's output. If the less-informed principal cares somewhat ( but not too much) less than the other princ...
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作者：Ganguli, Jayant Vivek; Yang, Liyan
作者单位：University of Cambridge; Cornell University
摘要：If traders can obtain private information about the payoff and the supply of a stock then there can exist (i) complementarity in information acquisition and (ii) multiple equilibria in the financial and information markets. The additional dimension of supply information increases coordination possibilities in the financial market, leading to multiple equilibria. The existence of two information sources can lead to information acquisition being complementary. The multiplicity of equilibria is s...
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作者：Clark, Andrew E.; Kristensen, Nicolai; Westergard-Nielsen, Niels
作者单位：Paris School of Economics; Aarhus University
摘要：We contribute to the literature on well-being and comparisons by appealing to new Danish data dividing the country up into around 9,000 small neighbourhoods. Administrative data provides us with the income of every person in each of these neighbourhoods. This income information is matched to demographic and economic satisfaction variables from eight years of Danish ECHP data. Panel regression analysis shows that, conditional on own household income, respondents report higher satisfaction level...
