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作者：Cohn, Alain; Fehr, Ernst; Herrmann, Benedikt; Schneider, Frederic
作者单位：University of Zurich; University of Nottingham
摘要：Social comparison has potentially far reaching consequences in many economic domains. We conducted a field experiment to examine how social comparison affects workers' effort provision if their own wage or that of a co-worker is cut. Workers were assigned to groups of two, performed identical individual tasks, and received the same performance-independent hourly wage. Cutting both group members' wages caused a decrease in performance. But when only one group member's wage was cut, the affected...
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作者：Bloom, Nicholas; Lemos, Renata; Sadun, Raffaella; Scur, Daniela; Van Reenen, John
作者单位：Stanford University; University of Cambridge; Harvard University; University of Oxford; University of London; London School Economics & Political Science
摘要：Over the last decade the World Management Survey (WMS) has collected firm-level management practices data across multiple sectors and countries. We developed the survey to try to explain the large and persistent total factor productivity (TFP) differences across firms and countries. This review paper discusses what has been learned empirically and theoretically from the WMS and other recent work on management practices. Our preliminary results suggest that about a quarter of cross-country and ...
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作者：Durante, Ruben; Putterman, Louis; van der Weele, Joel
作者单位：Yale University; Brown University; University of Amsterdam
摘要：We conduct a laboratory experiment to study how demand for redistribution of income depends on self-interest, insurance motives, and social concerns relating to inequality and efficiency. Our choice environments feature large groups of subjects and real-world framing, and differ with respect to the source of inequality (earned or arbitrary), the cost of taxation to the decision maker, the dead-weight loss of taxation, uncertainty about own pretax income, and whether the decision maker is affec...
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作者：De Graeve, Ferre; Karas, Alexei
作者单位：Sveriges Riksbank; Utrecht University
摘要：This paper empirically tests theories of bank runs. We use a structural panel VAR to extract runs from deposit market data. Identification exploits cross-sectional heterogeneity in deposit insurance: we identify bank runs as adverse deposit market supply shocks hitting uninsured banks harder compared to insured. Conditional on a run, we study the behavior of uninsured banks with bad and good fundamentals. We find that both experience runs, but deposit outflows at the former are more severe. Pa...
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作者：Geys, Benny; Vermeir, Jan
作者单位：BI Norwegian Business School; Vrije Universiteit Brussel
摘要：In federal countries, voters' ability to evaluate the performance of their leaders might be reduced when different levels of government shape policy outcomes. This can blur political accountability. In this article, we analyze how party cues (i.e., politicians' party membership acting as a cue towards their characteristics) affect voters' incomplete information in a federal setting. We theoretically show that party cues allow indirect inference regarding politicians using observed policy outco...
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作者：Baeriswyl, Romain; Cornand, Camille
作者单位：Swiss National Bank (SNB)
摘要：Financial markets are known for overreacting to public information. Central banks can reduce this overreaction either by disclosing information to only a fraction of market participants (partial publicity) or by disclosing information to all participants but with ambiguity (partial transparency). In theory, overreaction can be similarly reduced by either communication strategy. A laboratory experiment shows that both communication strategies succeed in reducing overreaction, though not as much...
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作者：Conconi, Paola; Sahuguet, Nicolas; Zanardi, Maurizio
作者单位：Universite Libre de Bruxelles; Universite de Montreal; HEC Montreal; Lancaster University
摘要：Democracies rarely engage in conflicts with one another, though they are not averse to fighting autocracies. We exploit the existence in many countries of executive term limits to show that electoral accountability is the key reason behind this democratic peace phenomenon. We construct a new dataset of term limits for a sample of 177 countries over the 1816-2001 period, and combine this information with a large dataset of interstate conflicts. Our empirical analysis shows that, although democr...
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作者：Dercon, Stefan; Porter, Catherine
作者单位：University of Oxford; Heriot Watt University
摘要：In 1984, the world was shocked at the scale of a famine in Ethiopia that caused over half a million deaths, making it one of the worst in recent history. The mortality impacts are clearly significant. But what of the survivors? This paper provides the first estimates of the long-term impact of the famine 20 years later, on the height of young adults aged 19-22 years who experienced this severe shock as infants during the crisis. An innovative feature of the analysis is that famine intensity is...
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作者：Lin, Ming-Jen; Liu, Jin-Tan; Qian, Nancy
作者单位：National Taiwan University; Yale University
摘要：This study finds that the introduction of sex-selective abortion in Taiwan due to the legalization of abortion when prenatal sex-detection technology was already available increased the fraction of males born at higher parities and changed the composition of mothers choosing to give birth. Controlling for compositional changes, we find that access to sex-selective abortion reduced relative neonatal female mortality rates for higher-parity births.
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作者：Guajardo, Jaime; Leigh, Daniel; Pescatori, Andrea
作者单位：International Monetary Fund
摘要：This paper investigates the short-term effects of fiscal consolidation on economic activity in OECD economies. We examine contemporaneous policy documents to identify changes in fiscal policy motivated by a desire to reduce the budget deficit and not by responding to prospective economic conditions. Using this new dataset, our estimates suggest that fiscal consolidation has contractionary effects on private demand and GDP. By contrast, estimates based on conventional measures of the fiscal pol...
