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作者：Coville, Aidan; Galiani, Sebastian; Gertler, Paul; Yoshida, Susumu
作者单位：The World Bank; University System of Maryland; University of Maryland Baltimore; National Bureau of Economic Research; University of California System; University of California Berkeley
摘要：We test two ways to improve revenue collection efficiency for water and sanitation utilities: (i) face-to-face engagement between utility staff and customers and (ii) contract enforcement for service disconnection due to nonpayment in the form of transparent and credible disconnection notices. Engagement has no effect, while enforcement significantly increases payment. We find no effect on access to water, perceptions of the utility, relationships between tenants and property owners, or on ten...
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作者：Bortolotti, Stefania; Soraperra, Ivan; Sutter, Matthias; Zoller, Claudia
作者单位：Max Planck Society
摘要：Income inequalities within societies are often associated with evidence that the rich are more likely to behave unethically and evade more taxes. We study how fairness views and preferences for redistribution are affected when cheating may, but need not, be the cause of income inequalities. In our experiment, we let third parties redistribute income between a rich and a poor stakeholder. In one treatment, income inequality was due only to luck, whereas in two others rich stakeholders might hav...
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作者：Shi, Zhentao; Su, Liangjun; Xie, Tian
作者单位：University System of Georgia; Georgia Institute of Technology; Chinese University of Hong Kong; Tsinghua University; Shanghai University of Finance & Economics
摘要：We propose & ell;( 2)-relaxation, which is a novel convex optimization problem, to tackle a forecast combination with many forecasts or a minimum variance portfolio with many assets. & ell;( 2)-relaxation minimizes the squared Euclidean norm of the weight vector subject to a set of relaxed linear inequalities to balance the bias and variance. It delivers optimality with approximately equal within-group weights when latent block equicorrelation patterns dominate the high-dimensional sample vari...
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作者：Akbar, Prottoy A.; Hickly, Sijie Li; Shertzer, Allison; Walsh, Randall P.
作者单位：Aalto University; Freddie Mac; Federal Reserve System - USA; Federal Reserve Bank - Philadelphia; Pennsylvania Commonwealth System of Higher Education (PCSHE); University of Pittsburgh; National Bureau of Economic Research
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作者：Avery, Mallory; Giuntella, Osea; Jiao, Peiran
作者单位：Monash University; Pennsylvania Commonwealth System of Higher Education (PCSHE); University of Pittsburgh; National Bureau of Economic Research; Maastricht University; University of Oxford
摘要：This study investigates the mechanisms affecting sleep choice and explores whether commitment devices and monetary incentives can be used to promote healthier sleep habits. To this end, we conducted a field experiment with college students, providing them incentives to sleep and collecting data from wearable activity trackers, surveys, and time-use diaries. Monetary incentives were effective in increasing sleep duration with some evidence of persistence after the incentive was removed. We unco...
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作者：Barsanetti, Bruno
摘要：I examine the long-run effects of the timing of railroad construction on city sizes. I first present a stylized model that predicts that towns that are railroad end points for a longer period of time become persistently larger. I then show that, in a sample of Brazilian railroad towns, time as end point strongly predicts town size: each additional year that a town was a railroad end point in the past is associated with a town population 0.107 log points larger in 2010. Additional testable impl...
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作者：Gehring, Kai; Langlotz, Sarah; Kienberger, Stefan
作者单位：University of Bern; University of Gottingen; Salzburg University
摘要：We provide evidence on the mechanisms linking resource-related income shocks to conflict, focusing on illegal crops. We hypothesize that the degree of group competition over resources and the extent of law enforcement explain whether opportunity cost or contest effects dominate. Combining temporal variation in international drug prices with spatial variation in the suitability to produce opium, we show that higher prices increase household living standards and reduce conflict in Afghanistan. A...
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作者：Mueller, Ulrich K.
作者单位：Princeton University
摘要：The paper combines extreme value theory for the smallest and largest k observations for some given k > 1 with a normal approximation for the average of the remaining observations to construct a more robust alternative to the usual t-test. The new test is found to control size much more successfully in small samples compared to existing methods. This holds for the canonical inference for the mean problem based on an i.i.d. sample, but also when comparing two population means and when conducting...
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作者：Lee, Kwok Hao; Tan, Brandon Joel
作者单位：National University of Singapore; Harvard University
摘要：We propose a quantitative spatial model featuring heterogeneous worker groups and their travel to consume nontradable goods and services. We consider the opening of the Downtown Line in Singapore, which connected regions where high-income households have residential amenities to where nontraded sectors are productive. Leveraging transit farecard data, we show that high-income workers saw large welfare gains but low-income workers gained little. Everyone enjoyed improved access to consumption o...
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作者：Antras, Pol; Fadeev, Evgenii; Fort, Teresa C.; Tintelnot, Felix
作者单位：Harvard University; National Bureau of Economic Research; Duke University
摘要：Multinational firms (MNEs) dominate trade flows, yet their foreign production decisions are often ignored in firm-level studies of exporting and importing. Using newly merged data on U.S. firms' trade and global production, we show that MNEs are more likely to trade with countries that are proximate to their affiliates. We rationalize these patterns with a new source of firm-level scale economies that arises when fixed costs to source from, or sell in, a market are shared across the MNE's plan...
