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作者:Legros, Patrick; Newman, Andrew F.; Proto, Eugenio
作者单位:Centre for Economic Policy Research - UK; Boston University
摘要:We model technological progress as an external effect of organizational design, focusing on how factories, based on labor division, could spawn the Industrial Revolution. Dividing labor, as Adam Smith argued, facilitates invention by observers of production processes. However, entrepreneurs cannot internalize this benefit and choose labor division to facilitate monitoring. Equilibrium with few entrepreneurs features low wage shares, and high specialization, but a limited market for innovations...
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作者:Lind, Jo Thori; Moene, Karl Ove; Willumsen, Fredrik
作者单位:University of Oslo
摘要:To explain the rise in Afghan opium production, we explore how rising conflicts change the incentives of farmers. Conflicts make illegal opportunities more profitable as they increase the perceived lawlessness and destroy infrastructure crucial to alternative crops. Exploiting a unique data set, we show that Western hostile casualties, our proxy for conflict, have a strong impact on subsequent local opium production. Using the period after the planting season as a placebo test, we show that co...
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作者:Baten, Joerg; Crayen, Dorothee; Voth, Hans-Joachim
作者单位:Eberhard Karls University of Tubingen; University of Zurich
摘要:Using census-based data on the ability to recall one's age, we show that low levels of nutrition impaired numeracy in industrializing England, 1780 to 1850: cognitive ability declined among those born during the Napoleonic wars. The effect was stronger in areas where grain was expensive and relief for the poor, an early form of welfare support was limited. Nutritional shortages had a nonlinear effect on numeracy, with, severe shortages impairing numeracy more. Nutrition during childhood also m...
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作者:Jia, Ruixue
作者单位:Stockholm University
摘要:This paper investigates the long-run development of China's treaty ports from the mid-eighteenth century until today. Focusing on a sample of prefectures on the coast or on the Yangtze River, I document the dynamic development paths of treaty ports and their neighbors in alternate phases of closedness and openness. I also provide suggestive evidence on migration and sector-wise growth to understand the advantage of treaty ports in the long run.
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作者:Zhou, Fujin; Oostendorp, Remco
作者单位:Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam; Tinbergen Institute; Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam; Tinbergen Institute; University of Oxford
摘要:This paper uses firm-level survey data matched with official tax records to estimate the unobserved true sales of formal firms in Mongolia. Taking into account firm-level incentives to comply with taxes and a production function technology linking unobserved true sales with observable firm-level production characteristics, we derive a multiple-indicators, multiple-causes model predicting true sales. We find that firms underreport sales to the tax office by 38.6%, but firm-level survey data als...
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作者:Jensen, Vibeke Myrup
摘要:Physician-induced demand, whereby physicians alter patient treatment for personal gain, lies at the heart of concerns about publicly provided health care. However, little is known about how payment systems affect the ultimate outcome of patient health. Exploiting a unique policy induced variation in Denmark, I investigate the impact of physician payment contracts on infant health. In a difference-in-differences framework, I find that firstborn infants exposed in the womb to the care of general...
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作者:Chandra, Ambarish; Head, Keith; Tappata, Mariano
作者单位:University of Toronto; University of British Columbia; Center for Economic & Policy Research (CEPR)
摘要:We model the decision to travel across an international border as a trade-off between benefits derived from buying a range of products at lower prices and the costs of travel. We estimate the model using microdata on Canada-United States travel. Price differences motivate cross-border travel; a 10% home appreciation raises the propensity to cross by 8% to 26%. The larger elasticity arises when the home currency is strong, a result predicted by the model. Distance to the border strongly inhibit...
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作者:Madsen, Jakob B.
作者单位:Monash University
摘要:This paper examines the productivity growth effects of educational attainment and its interaction with the distance to the world technology frontier, which is the percentage distance to the country with the highest total factor productivity (TIP) (the United Kingdom or United States), while allowing for the endogeneity of educational attainment in some of the estimates. For this purpose, a new annual data set for educational attainment is constructed for 21 industrialized countries over the pe...
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作者:Andrews, Donald W. K.; Guggenberger, Patrik
作者单位:Yale University; Pennsylvania Commonwealth System of Higher Education (PCSHE); Pennsylvania State University; Pennsylvania State University - University Park
摘要:This paper introduces a new confidence interval (CI) for the autoregressive parameter (AR) in an AR(1) model that allows for conditional heteroskedasticity of a general form and AR parameters that are less than or equal to unity. The CI is a modification of Mikusheva's (2007a) modification of Stock's (1991) CI that employs the least squares estimator and a heteroskedasticity-robust variance estimator. The CI is shown to have correct asymptotic size and to be asymptotically similar (in a unifor...
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作者:Gelber, Alexander M.
作者单位:University of California System; University of California Berkeley
摘要:I examine the response of husbands' and wives' earnings to a tax reform in which husbands' and wives' tax rates changed independently, allowing me to examine the effect of both spouses' incentives on each spouse's behavior. I analyze the large Swedish tax reform of 1990-1991 and find that in response to a compensated fall in one spouse's tax rate, each spouse's earnings rise. I compare these results to those of simplified econometric models used in the typical setting in which independent vari...