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作者:Besley, Timothy; Robinson, James A.
作者单位:University of London; London School Economics & Political Science; Harvard University
摘要:The question of who guards the guards is intimately connected with broader questions of state capacity and the establishment of a monopoly of violence in society, something which is often viewed as the defining feature of the modern state. But to establish such a monopoly, civilian rulers need not only to build an effective military, but also to control it. In this paper we study how governments may solve this problem when they recognize that their decisions to build a strong army may have ram...
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作者:Kubler, Felix; Schmedders, Karl
作者单位:Swiss Finance Institute (SFI); University of Zurich
摘要:In this paper we examine the likelihood of multiple real steady states in deterministic exchange economies with overlapping generations. There is a single good and a single agent per generation with constant relative risk aversion expected utility. In order to test for multiple equilibria we employ methods from computational algebraic geometry. In our examples, we find that multiplicity becomes less likely as the life span of agents increases but becomes more likely as the coefficient of risk ...
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作者:Hennig-Schmidt, Heike; Rockenbach, Bettina; Sadrieh, Abdolkarim
作者单位:University of Bonn; University of Erfurt; Otto von Guericke University
摘要:We present a field experiment to assess the effect of own and peer wage variations on actual work effort of employees with hourlywages. Work effort neither reacts to an increase of the own wage, nor to a positive or negative peer comparison. This result seems at odds with numerous laboratory experiments that show a clear own wage sensitivity on effort. In an additional real-effort laboratory experiment we show that explicit cost and surplus information that enables an exact calculation of an e...
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作者:Brock, William A.; Durlauf, Steven N.
作者单位:University of Wisconsin System; University of Wisconsin Madison
摘要:This paper considers the observational implications of social influences on adoption decisions for an environment of perfect foresight adopters. We argue that social influences can produce two observable effects: (1) discontinuities in unconditional adoption curves and (2) pattern reversals in conditional adoption curves, in which earlier adoption is found for one group of actors versus another when fundamentals suggest the reverse ordering should occur; in turn the presence of either of these...
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作者:Messina, Julian; Duarte, Claudia Filipa; Izquierdo, Mario; Du Caju, Philip; Hansen, Niels Lynggard
作者单位:Universitat de Girona; The World Bank; Banco de Portugal; Banco de Espana; European Central Bank; National Bank of Belgium
摘要:This paper presents estimates based on individual data of downward nominal and real wage rigidities for 13 sectors in Belgium, Denmark, Spain, and Portugal. Our methodology follows the approach recently developed for the International Wage Flexibility Project, whereby resistance to nominal and real wage cuts is measured through departures of observed individual wage change histograms from an estimated counterfactual wage change distribution that would have prevailed in the absence of rigidity....
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作者:Bean, Charles
作者单位:Bank of England
摘要:This lecture examines the causes of the recent financial crisis and subsequent recession. On the macroeconomic side, the Great Moderation encouraged an overly optimistic assessment of risk. Combined with low interest rates, reflecting both loose monetary policy and relatively high Asian savings rates, that encouraged a build-up of excessive leverage in the banking system. On the microeconomic side, distorted incentives led to a concentration and mispricing of risk. Informational complexities a...
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作者:Stern, Nicholas
作者单位:University of London; London School Economics & Political Science
摘要:The economics of public policy has suffered from collective amnesia: we have forgotten or ignored much of the tradition of public policy in imperfect economies whose foundations were laid by James Meade and Paul Samuelson. This has been associated with a period of around two decades from the early 1980s to the early 2000s where the economics of public policy has bent to political windsand has fed arguments for government to get out of the way and leave everything to the markets, to self-intere...
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作者:Kerr, William R.; Nanda, Ramana
作者单位:Harvard University
摘要:We examine the effect of U. S. branch banking deregulations on the entry size of new firms, using micro-data from the U. S. Census Bureau. We find that the average entry size for startups did not change following the deregulations. However, among firms that survived at least four years, a greater proportion of firms entered either at their maximum size or closer to the maximum size in the first year. The magnitude of these effects were small compared to the much larger changes in entry rates o...
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作者:Ghiglino, Christian; Goyal, Sanjeev
作者单位:University of Essex; University of Cambridge
摘要:We consider a world in which individuals have private endowments and trade in markets while their utility is negatively affected by the consumption of their neighbors. Our interest is in understanding how the social structure of comparisons, taken together with the familiar fundamentals of the economy (endowments, technology, and preferences), shapes equilibrium prices, allocations, and welfare. We show that equilibrium prices and consumption are a function of a single network statistic: centr...
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作者:Bandiera, Oriana; Goldstein, Markus; Rasul, Imran; Burgess, Robin; Gulesci, Selim; Sulaiman, Munshi
作者单位:University of London; London School Economics & Political Science; University of London; University College London; University of London; London School Economics & Political Science
摘要:Almost one-third of the population in developing countries is under age 15. Hence improving the effectiveness of policy interventions that target adolescents might be especially important. We analyze the intention to participate in training programs of adolescent girls in Uganda, a country with perhaps the most skewed age distribution anywhere in the world. The training program we focus on is BRAC's Adolescent Development Program, which emphasizes the provision of life skills, entrepreneurship...