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作者：Rubin, Jared
作者单位：Chapman University System; Chapman University
摘要：The causes of the Protestant Reformation have long been debated. This paper seeks to revive and econometrically test the theory that the spread of the Reformation is linked to the spread of the printing press. I test this theory by analyzing data on the spread of the press and the Reformation at the city level. An econometric analysis that instruments for omitted variable bias with a city's distance from Mainz, the birthplace of printing, suggests that cities with at least one printing press b...
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作者：Kesternich, Iris; Siflinger, Bettina; Smith, James P.; Winter, Joachim K.
作者单位：University of Munich; RAND Corporation; Rand Health
摘要：We investigate long-run effects of World War II on socioeconomic status and health of older individuals in Europe. We analyze data from SHARELIFE, a retrospective survey conducted as part of SHARE in Europe in 2009. SHARELIFE provides detailed data on events in childhood during and after the war for over 20,000 individuals in thirteen European countries. We construct several measures of war exposure: experience of dispossession, persecution, combat in local areas, and hunger periods. Exposure ...
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作者：Allcott, Hunt; Wozny, Nathan
作者单位：New York University; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：Policymakers often assert that consumers undervalue future gasoline costs when they buy automobiles. We test this by measuring whether relative prices of vehicles with different fuel economy ratings fully adjust to variation in gasoline prices. Vehicle prices move as if consumers are indifferent between $1.00 in discounted future gas cost and $0.76 in vehicle purchase price. We show how corrections for endogenous market shares and utilization, measurement error, and different gasoline price fo...
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作者：Einioe, Elias
作者单位：University of London; London School Economics & Political Science; University of London; London School Economics & Political Science
摘要：Despite the prevalence of R&D support programs, evaluation studies based on explicit differences in support allocation are rare. In this paper, the identification of the causal effect of R&D support on company performance is based on geographic variation in government funding arising from a population-density rule. I find positive impacts on R&D investment, employment, and sales among the participants who were granted an R&D subsidy as a result of additional aggregate R&D support funding in th...
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作者：Bartelsman, Eric J.; Wolf, Zoltan
作者单位：Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam; Tinbergen Institute
摘要：In this paper, we explore whether information from firm-level data can improve forecasts of aggregate productivity growth. We generate firm-level productivity measures and aggregate them into time-series components that capture within-firm productivity and the productivity contribution of reallocation. We show that these components improve aggregate total factor productivity forecasts in a simple univariate setting, even when firm-level data are available with a time lag. Lagged firm-level inf...
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作者：Ballester, Coralio; Vorsatz, Marc
作者单位：Universitat d'Alacant; Universidad Nacional de Educacion a Distancia (UNED)
摘要：We propose an intuitive way of how to measure segregation in social and spatial networks. Using random walks, we define the segregation index as the probability that an individual meets an individual from the same social group. The segregation index is a generalization of the isolation index and a homophily index introduced in Currarini, Jackson, and Pin (2009), and it has a closed-form relation to PageRank that facilitates its computation. We also show that the Spectral Segregation Index prop...
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作者：Anderson, D. Mark
作者单位：Montana State University System; Montana State University Bozeman
摘要：This paper examines the relationship between the minimum high school dropout age and juvenile arrest rates by exploiting state-level variation in dropout age laws. County-level arrest data for the period 1980 to 2008 and difference-in-difference-in-difference-type empirical strategy are used to compare the arrest rates over time of various age groups within counties that differ by their state's minimum dropout age. The evidence suggests that minimum dropout age requirements have a significant ...
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作者：Miravete, Eugenio J.; Palacios-Huerta, Ignacio
作者单位：University of Texas System; University of Texas Austin; Center for Economic & Policy Research (CEPR); University of London; London School Economics & Political Science; Basque Foundation for Science
摘要：Understanding when and how individuals think about real-life problems is a central question in economics. This paper studies the role of inertia (inattention), state dependence, and learning. The empirical setting is a tariff experiment, when optional measured tariffs for local telephone calls were introduced unanticipatedly. We find that consumers tend to align their choices of tariff and telephone use levels correctly. Despite low potential savings, mistakes are not permanent, as individuals...
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作者：Staub, Kevin E.
作者单位：University of Melbourne
摘要：This note proposes a new decomposition of average treatment effects on nonnegative outcomes. It represents the total effect as a population-weighted sum of the effects for two groups: those induced to participate by the treatment and those participating regardless of it. The usual decomposition into extensive and intensive margins used in the literature is generally incompatible with such a causal interpretation. The difference between decompositions can be substantial and yield diametrically ...
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作者：Knittel, Christopher R.; Metaxoglou, Konstantinos
作者单位：Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：We document the numerical challenges we experienced estimating random-coefficient demand models as in Berry, Levinsohn, and Pakes (1995) using two well-known data sets and a thorough optimization design. The optimization algorithms often converge at points where the first-and second-order optimality conditions fail. There are also cases of convergence at local optima. On convergence, the variation in the values of the parameter estimates translates into variation in the models' economic predic...
