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作者：Diamond, Alexis; Sekhon, Jasjeet S.
作者单位：University of California System; University of California Berkeley
摘要：This paper presents genetic matching, a method of multivariate matching that uses an evolutionary search algorithm to determine the weight each covariate is given. Both propensity score matching and matching based on Mahalanobis distance are limiting cases of this method. The algorithm makes transparent certain issues that all matching methods must confront. We present simulation studies that show that the algorithm improves covariate balance and that it may reduce bias if the selection on obs...
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作者：Giuri, Paola; Mariani, Myriam
作者单位：University of Bologna; Bocconi University
摘要：This paper discusses the role of education in shaping the geographical breadth of knowledge spillovers. Data pertaining to 6,051 European inventions reveal that inventors with a high level of education, such as a university or doctoral degree, rely more on external spillovers regardless of the geographical location of their sources. Controlling for this effect, they also access geographically wider knowledge spillovers. This result holds after controlling for alternative explanations, such as ...
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作者：Ahmed, Faisal Z.
作者单位：University of Oxford
摘要：I use a natural experiment of oil-price-driven remittance flows to poor, non-oil-producing Muslim countries to demonstrate that remittances deteriorate the quality of governance, especially in countries with weak democratic institutions. The results indicate that a 1 standard deviation increase in remittances raises corruption by 1.5 index points (on a 6-point scale), which is equivalent to a $ 600 decrease in per capita GDP. Concomitantly, remittances may enable governments to reduce their de...
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作者：Bell, Brian; Fasani, Francesco; Machin, Stephen
作者单位：University of Oxford; University of London; London School Economics & Political Science; Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC); CSIC - Institut d'Analisi Economica (IAE); University of London; University College London
摘要：This paper focuses on empirical connections between crime and immigration, studying two large waves of recent U. K. immigration ( the late 1990s/early 2000s asylum seekers and the post-2004 inflow from EU accession countries). The first wave led to a modest but significant rise in property crime, while the second wave had a small negative impact. There was no effect on violent crime; arrest rates were not different, and changes in crime cannot be ascribed to crimes against immigrants. The find...
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作者：Leduc, Sylvain; Sill, Keith
作者单位：Federal Reserve System - USA; Federal Reserve Bank - San Francisco; Federal Reserve System - USA; Federal Reserve Bank - Philadelphia
摘要：Using survey-based measures of future U.S. economic activity from the Livingston Survey and the Survey of Professional Forecasters, we study how changes in expectations and their interaction with monetary policy contribute to fluctuations in macroeconomic aggregates. We find that changes in expected future economic activity are a quantitatively important driver of economic fluctuations: a perception that good times are ahead typically leads to a significant rise in current measures of economic...
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作者：Alix-Garcia, Jennifer; McIntosh, Craig; Sims, Katharine R. E.; Welch, Jarrod R.
作者单位：University of Wisconsin System; University of Wisconsin Madison; University of California System; University of California San Diego; Amherst College
摘要：We study the consequences of poverty-alleviation programs for environmental degradation. We exploit the community-level eligibility discontinuity for a conditional cash transfer program in Mexico to identify the impacts of income increases on deforestation and use the program's initial randomized rollout to explore household responses. We find that additional income raises consumption of land-intensive goods and increases deforestation. The observed production response and deforestation increa...
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作者：Chen, Yu-Chin; Tsang, Kwok Ping
作者单位：University of Washington; University of Washington Seattle; Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University
摘要：Since the term structure of interest rates embodies information about future economic activity, we extract relative Nelson-Siegel (1987) factors from cross-country yield curve differences to proxy expected movements in future exchange rate fundamentals. Using monthly data for the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, and the United States, we show that the yield curve factors predict exchange rate movements and explain excess currency returns one month to two years ahead. Our results provide support ...
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作者：Shen, Chan
作者单位：Georgetown University
摘要：This paper studies three interrelated health care decisions: insurance, utilization, and expenditures. The model treats insurance as an endogenous variable with respect to both utilization and expenditures, addresses potential selection issues, and takes into account that the decisions to use health care and the level of treatment are determined by different decision makers. We employ semiparametric methods to avoid making distributional assumptions. Using the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey ...
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作者：Cavallo, Eduardo; Galiani, Sebastian; Noy, Ilan; Pantano, Juan
作者单位：Inter-American Development Bank; University System of Maryland; University of Maryland College Park; University of Hawaii System; Victoria University Wellington; Washington University (WUSTL)
摘要：We examine the average causal impact of catastrophic natural disasters on economic growth by combining information from comparative case studies. For each country affected by a large disaster, we compute the counterfactual by constructing synthetic controls. We find that only extremely large disasters have a negative effect on output in both the short and the long runs. However, we also show that this results from two events where radical political revolutions followed the disasters. Once we c...
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作者：Carey, Colleen; Shore, Stephen H.
作者单位：Johns Hopkins University; University System of Georgia; Georgia State University
摘要：Countercyclical variation in individuals' idiosyncratic labor income risk could generate substantial welfare costs. Following past research, we infer income volatility the variance of permanent income shocks, a standard proxy for income risk from the rate at which cross-sectional variances of income rise over the life cycle for a given cohort. Our novelty lies in exploiting cross-state variation in state economic conditions or state sensitivity to national economic conditions. We find that inc...
