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作者：Bhalotra, Sonia; Clarke, Damian; Gomes, Joseph Flavian; Venkataramani, Atheendar
作者单位：University of Warwick; Universidad de Chile; Universite Catholique Louvain; University of Pennsylvania
摘要：Millions of women continue to die during and soon after childbirth, even where the knowledge and resources to avoid this are available. We posit that raising the share of women in parliament can trigger action. Leveraging the timing of gender quota legislation across developing countries, we identify sharp sustained reductions of 7%-12% in maternal mortality. Investigating mechanisms, we find that gender quotas lead to increases in percentage points of 5-8 in skilled birth attendance and 4-8 i...
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作者：Lacroix, Jean
作者单位：Universite Paris Saclay
摘要：The extension of voting rights epitomizes the construction of modern democracies. This paper empirically investigates the effect of such an enfranchisement on political violence in the context of the US Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965, which forbade discrimination in voting. The formula the VRA used to determine the counties it applied to generated both geographic and temporal local discontinuities in enfranchisement. This paper's empirical strategy takes advantage of these features by compari...
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作者：Jung, Juergen; Tran, Chung
作者单位：University System of Maryland; Towson University; Australian National University
摘要：We study the optimal progressivity of personal income taxes in a general equilibrium overlapping generations model where individuals are exposed to idiosyncratic shocks to labor productivity and health status over the lifecycle. Our results-based on a calibration to the US economy-indicate that both, the presence of health risk and the available insurance institutions, have a strong effect on the optimal level of tax progressivity. Given the fragmented and non-universal health insurance system...
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作者：Gutierrez, German; Philippon, Thomas
作者单位：University of Washington; University of Washington Seattle; New York University
摘要：Over the past 20 years, Europe has deregulated many industries, protected consumer welfare, and created strongly independent regulators. These policies represent a stark departure from historical traditions in continental Europe. How and why did this turnaround happen? We build a political economy model of market regulation and we compare the design of national and supra-national regulators. We show that countries in a single market willingly promote a supranational regulator that enforces fre...
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作者：Mattozzi, Andrea; Nakaguma, Marcos Y.
作者单位：University of Bologna; Centre for Economic Policy Research - UK; Getulio Vargas Foundation
摘要：We study the effect of transparency of individual votes in committees where members are heterogeneous in competence and bias, they are career-concerned, and they can abstain. We show that public voting attenuates the biases of competent members and secret voting attenuates the biases of incompetent members. Public voting leads to better decisions when the magnitude of the bias is large, while secret voting performs better otherwise. We present novel experimental evidence consistent with our th...
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作者：Botticini, Maristella; Buri, Pietro; Marinacci, Massimo
作者单位：Bocconi University; Bocconi University; Princeton University; Bocconi University
摘要：Maritime insurance developed in medieval Europe is the ancestor of all forms of insurance that appeared subsequently. We address the question of why modern insurance was first invented in medieval Europe, and neither earlier nor elsewhere. Drawing from insights from the literature on uncertainty aversion, we show that medieval merchants had to bear more frequently natural risks (they traveled longer distances) and new human risks with unknown probabilities (they faced unpredictable attacks by ...
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作者：Coibion, Olivier; Georgarakos, Dimitris; Gorodnichenko, Yuriy; Weber, Michael
作者单位：University of Texas System; University of Texas Austin; European Central Bank; University of California System; University of California Berkeley; University of Chicago
摘要：We compare causal effects of forward guidance about future interest rates on households' expectations of inflation and nominal mortgage rates to the effects of communication about inflation in a randomized control trial using more than 20,000 U.S. consumers in the Nielsen Homescan Panel. We elicit consumers' expectations, and then provide 22 different forms of information regarding past, current, and/or future interest rates and inflation. Information treatments about current or future interes...
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作者：Merilainen, Jaakko; Mitrunen, Matti; Virkola, Tuomo
作者单位：Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico; University of Helsinki; VATT Institute for Economic Research
摘要：This paper employs newly collected historical data from Finland to present evidence of historically contingent, long-run consequences of a famine. We document high levels of local inequality in terms of income and land distribution until a violent uprising in 1918. These inequalities partly originated from the famine of 1866-1868, which increased the concentration of land and power to large landowners. We further show that regions with more exposure to the famine had more labor coercion by the...
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作者：Fetzer, Thiemo; Sen, Srinjoy; Souza, Pedro C. L.
作者单位：University of Warwick; University of London; Queen Mary University London
摘要：Homelessness and precarious living conditions are on the rise across much of the Western world. This paper exploits quasi-exogenous variation in the affordability of rents due to a cut in rent subsidies for low-income households in the United Kingdom in April 2011. Using comprehensive district-level administrative data, we show that the affordability shock caused a significant increase in financial distress, evictions, property crimes, insecure temporary housing arrangements, statutory homeles...
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作者：Carneiro, Pedro; Liu, Kai; Salvanes, Kjell G.
作者单位：University of London; University College London; London School Economics & Political Science; University of London; University College London; University of Cambridge; Norwegian School of Economics (NHH); Norwegian School of Economics (NHH)
摘要：We examine the labor market consequences of an exogenous increase in the supply of skilled labor in several municipalities in Norway, resulting from the construction of new colleges in the 1970s. We find that skilled wages increased as a response, suggesting that along with an increase in the supply there was also an increase in demand for skill. We also show that college openings led to an increase in the productivity of skilled labor and investments in R&D. Our findings are consistent with m...
