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作者：Charles, Kerwin Kofi; Li, Yiming; Stephens, Melvin, Jr.
作者单位：University of Chicago; National Bureau of Economic Research; University of Michigan System; University of Michigan
摘要：Exploiting county-level variation in oil-producing areas from shocks to world oil and gas prices, we study how local labor market conditions affect disability take-up. We extend well-known previous work using a similar research design by analyzing a different price shock; a larger, more representative set of labor markets; and a more recent period marked by skyrocketing disability payments. Our estimated elasticity for SSDI payments with respect to earnings of -0.29 is surprisingly similar to ...
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作者：White, T. Kirk; Reiter, Jerome P.; Petrin, Amil
作者单位：Duke University; University of Minnesota System; University of Minnesota Twin Cities; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：In the U.S. Census Bureau's 2002 and 2007 Censuses of Manufactures, 79% and 73% of observations, respectively, have imputed data for at least one variable used to compute total factor productivity (TFP). The bureau primarily imputes for missing values using mean-imputation methods, which can reduce the underlying variance of the imputed variables. For five variables entering TFP, we show that dispersion is significantly smaller in the Census mean-imputed versus the nonimputed data. We use clas...
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作者：Becker, Sascha O.; Woessmann, Ludger
作者单位：University of Warwick; Center for Economic & Policy Research (CEPR); Leibniz Association; Ifo Institut; IZA Institute Labor Economics; University of Munich; IZA Institute Labor Economics; Leibniz Association; Ifo Institut
摘要：In an economic theory of suicide, we model social cohesion of the religious community and religious beliefs about afterlife as two mechanisms by which Protestantism increases suicide propensity. We build a unique microregional data set of 452 Prussian counties for 1816 to 1821 and 1869 to 1871, when religiousness was still pervasive. Exploiting the concentric dispersion of Protestantism around Wittenberg, our instrumental variable model finds that Protestantism had a substantial positive effec...
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作者：Diallo, Boubacar; Koch, Wilfried
作者单位：Qatar University; University of Quebec; University of Quebec Montreal
摘要：This paper investigates the relationship between economic growth and bank concentration. We introduce imperfect competition within the banking system according to the Schumpeterian growth paradigm, and we theoretically and empirically show that the effects of bank concentration on economic growth depend on the proximity to the world technology frontier. The theory predicts that when a country reaches a sufficient level of financial development, bank concentration has a negative effect on devel...
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作者：Stahl, Dale O.
作者单位：University of Texas System; University of Texas Austin
摘要：Can a toolbox of simple heuristic rules help explain lottery choices relative to expected utility theory (EUT)? While a mixture model of EUT plus heuristic rules will obviously fit data better than EUT only, given the small sample sizes, there is a danger of overfitting. Therefore, instead of goodness-of-fit measures, we focus on forecasting performance. Using two data sets of binary lottery choices and reasonable holdout subsets for testing forecasting performance, we find that the EUT-only m...
