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作者：Miller, Ray; Bairoliya, Neha
作者单位：Colorado State University System; Colorado State University Fort Collins; University of Southern California
摘要：We estimate the distribution of well-being among the older U.S. population using an expected utility framework that incorporates differences in consumption, leisure, health, and mortality. We find large disparities in welfare that have increased over time. Incorporating the cost of living with poor health into elderly welfare substantially increases the overall inequality. Disparity measures based on cross-sectional income or consumption underestimate the growth in aggregate welfare inequality...
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作者：Morrison, William; Taubinsky, Dmitry
作者单位：University of California System; University of California Berkeley; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：This paper tests costly attention models of consumers' misreaction to opaque taxes. We report an online shopping experiment that involves shrouded sales taxes that are exogenously varied within consumers over time. Some consumers systematically underreact to sales taxes whereas others systematically overreact, but higher stakes decrease both under- and overreaction. This is consistent with consumers using heterogeneous rules of thumb to compute the opaque tax when the stakes are low, but using...
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作者：Cumming, Fergus; Hubert, Paul
作者单位：Bank of England; European Central Bank; Bank of France; Institut d'Etudes Politiques Paris (Sciences Po)
摘要：We investigate whether the dynamic response of aggregate consumption to monetary policy depends on the distribution of household debt relative to income. Using U.K. loan-level microdata, we propose a novel approach to isolate the fraction of households with a limited ability to smooth consumption. By exploiting time and cross-sectional variation, we show that consumption responds more to monetary policy when the share of highly indebted households is large, but find no state contingency with r...
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作者：Ruzic, Dimitrije; Ho, Sui-Jade
作者单位：INSEAD Business School
摘要：Aggregate productivity suffers when workers and machines are not matched with their most productive uses. This paper builds a model that features industry-specific markups, industry-specific returns to scale, and establishment-specific distortions and uses it to measure the extent of this misallocation in the economy. Applying the model to restricted U.S. Census microdata on the manufacturing sector suggests that misallocation declined by 13% between 1982 and 2007. The finding of declining mis...
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作者：Berge, Travis J.
作者单位：Federal Reserve System - USA; Federal Reserve System Board of Governors
摘要：A factor stochastic volatility model estimates the common component to output gap estimates produced by the staff of the Federal Reserve, its time-varying volatility, and time-varying, horizon-specific forecast uncertainty. The output gap estimates are uncertain even well after the fact. Nevertheless, the common component is clearly procyclical, and positive innovations to the common component produce movements in macroeconomic variables consistent with an increase in aggregate demand. Heighte...
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作者：Manso, Gustavo; Balsmeier, Benjamin; Fleming, Lee
作者单位：University of California System; University of California Berkeley; University of Luxembourg
摘要：Schumpeter (1939) claims that recessions are periods of creative destruction, concentrating innovation that is useful for the long-term growth of the economy. However previous research finds that standard measures of firms' innovation, such as R&D expenditures or raw patent counts, concentrate in booms. We argue that these measures do not capture shifts in firms' innovative search strategies. We contemplate firms' choice between exploration versus exploitation over the business cycle and find ...
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作者：Bauer, Michael D.; Rudebusch, Glenn D.
作者单位：University of Hamburg; Leibniz Association; Ifo Institut; Brookings Institution; New York University
摘要：Social discount rates (SDRs) are crucial for evaluating the costs of climate change. We show that the fundamental anchor for market-based SDRs is the equilibrium or steady-state real interest rate. Empirical interest rate models that allow for shifts in this equilibrium real rate find that it has declined notably since the 1990s, and this decline implies that the entire term structure of SDRs has shifted lower as well. Accounting for this new normal of persistently lower interest rates substan...
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作者：Poyker, Michael
作者单位：University of Texas System; University of Texas Austin
摘要：I examine why the harmful tradition of female genital mutilation (FGM) persists in certain countries but in others it has been eradicated. People are more willing to abandon their traditions if they are confident that the government is durable enough to set up long-term replacements for them. Using a country-ethnicity panel data set spanning 23 countries from 1970 to 2013 and artificial partition of African ethnic groups by national borders, I show that a one-standard-deviation larger increase...
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作者：[Anonymous]
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作者：Downey, Mitch
作者单位：Stockholm University
摘要：Politicizing the investigation of politically active groups is harmful for both the justice system and democratic accountability. I test whether members of the U.S. Congress affect the investigation and prosecution of politically active labor unions. Union officers are 1.5 percentage points more likely to be prosecuted when their supported candidate barely loses instead of barely wins (compared to the 3% base rate). Anecdotal evidence and a novel decomposition suggest a role for both union-sup...
