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作者:Bennardo, Alberto; Piccolo, Salvatore
作者单位:University of Salerno; Catholic University of the Sacred Heart
摘要:We study an economy where agents' productivity and labor endowment depend on their health status, and indivisible occupational choices affect individual health distributions. We show that Pareto efficiency requires cross-transfers across occupations. Moreover, workers with relatively less safe jobs must get positive transfers whenever labor supply is not very reactive to wages, a condition in line with the findings of a large empirical literature. In these instances, compensating wage differen...
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作者:Nava, Francesco; Schiraldi, Pasquale
作者单位:University of London; London School Economics & Political Science
摘要:Sales are a widespread and well-known phenomenon documented in several product markets. This paper presents a novel rationale for sales that does not rely on consumer heterogeneity, or on any form of randomness to explain such periodic price fluctuations. The analysis is carried out in the context of a simple repeated price competition model, and establishes that firms must periodically reduce prices in order to sustain collusion when goods are storable and the market is large. The largest equ...
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作者:Pancs, Romans
作者单位:University of Rochester
摘要:A significant fraction of trade in stock exchanges (e.g., Euronext and NASDAQ) involves iceberg orders', which are orders to sell or buy a certain number of shares with the caveat that only a part of that number be made public. This paper provides a normative justification for the lack of transparency in this kind of order: imperfect disclosure is shown to be a necessary feature of any optimal mechanism when the asset's potential buyers must incur a cost in order to become active and learn the...
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作者:Dalgaard, Carl-Johan; Strulik, Holger
作者单位:University of Copenhagen; University of Gottingen
摘要:Does prosperity lead to greater longevity? If so, what is the strength of the income channel? To address these questions we develop a life cycle model in which households are subject to physiological aging. In modeling aging we draw on recent research in the fields of biology and medicine. The speed of the aging process, and thus the age of death, are endogenously determined by optimal health investments. A calibrated version of the model accounts well for the observed nonlinear cross-country ...
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作者:Duernecker, Georg
作者单位:University of Mannheim
摘要:Starting in the late 1970s, European unemployment began to increase while US unemployment remained constant. At the same time, capital-embodied technical change began to accelerate, and the United States adopted the new capital much faster than Europe. I argue that these two facts are related. The main idea is that if there is capital-embodied technical change, then the unemployment rate depends critically on how obsolete the installed capital stock is compared to the frontier. In particular, ...
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作者:Bellettini, Giorgio; Ceroni, Carlotta Berti; Prarolo, Giovanni
作者单位:University of Bologna; Leibniz Association; Ifo Institut
摘要:We use a political economy model of Schumpeterian growth with entry to investigate how an incumbent politician can strategically use the level of red tape to acquire incumbency advantage. By setting sufficiently high red tape, the politician induces the incumbent firm in the intermediate sector to invest in political connections, which are valued also by voters, who recognize that bureaucratic costs can be reduced by connected firms. Within this framework, we study the Markov perfect equilibri...
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作者:Iossa, Elisabetta; Rey, Patrick
作者单位:University of Rome Tor Vergata; Universite de Toulouse; Universite Toulouse 1 Capitole; Toulouse School of Economics; Center for Economic & Policy Research (CEPR)
摘要:We study how career concerns affect the dynamics of incentives in a multi-period contract, when the agent's productivity is a stochastic function of his past productivity and investment. We show that incentives are stronger and performance is higher when the contract approaches its expiry date. Contrary to common wisdom, long-term contracts may strengthen reputational effects whereas short-term contracting may be optimal when investment has persistent, long-term effects.
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作者:Kramarz, F.; Thesmar, D.
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作者:Atalay, Enghin
作者单位:University of Chicago
摘要:There is substantial within-industry variation in the prices that plants pay for their material inputs. Using plant-level data from the US Census Bureau, I explore the consequences and sources of this variation in materials prices. For a sample of industries with relatively homogeneous products, the standard deviation of plant-level productivity would be 7% smaller if all plants faced the same materials prices. Moreover, plant-level materials prices are persistent, spatially correlated, and po...
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作者:Fenske, James
作者单位:University of Oxford
摘要:State capacity matters for growth. I test Bates' explanation of pre-colonial African states. He argues that trade across ecological boundaries promoted states. I find that African societies in ecologically diverse environments had more centralized states. This is robust to reverse causation, omitted heterogeneity, and alternative interpretations of the link between diversity and states. The result survives including non-African societies. I test mechanisms connecting trade to states, and find ...