The Latest NBER Working Papers(2024-11-25)
NBER最新工作论文
2024-11-25
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目录
1. How Institutions Interact with Exchange Rates After the 2024 US Presidential Election: New High-Frequency Evidence
Joshua Aizenman and Jamel Saadaoui #33193
2. Generative AI for Economic Research: LLMs Learn to Collaborate and Reason
Anton Korinek #33198
3. Labor Force Transitions
Rui Castro, Fabian Lange, and Markus Poschke #33200
4. The Forward Guidance Puzzle is not a Puzzle
Gauti B. Eggertsson and Finn D. Schüle #33180
5. Racial Screening on the Big Screen? Evidence from the Motion Picture Industry
Liang Zhong, Angela Crema, and M. Daniele Paserman #33186
6. Market Power and Redeemable Loyalty Token Design
Kenneth S. Rogoff, Zhiheng He, and Yang You #33201
7. Development Mismatch? Evidence from Agricultural Projects in Pastoral Africa
Eoin F. McGuirk and Nathan Nunn #33191
8. Why Has Construction Productivity Stagnated? The Role of Land-Use Regulation
Leonardo D'Amico, Edward L. Glaeser, Joseph Gyourko, William R. Kerr, and Giacomo A.M. Ponzetto #33188
9. Shifting Patterns of Social Interaction: Exploring the Social Life of Urban Spaces Through A.I.
Arianna Salazar-Miranda, Zhuangyuan Fan, Michael B. Baick, Keith N. Hampton, Fabio Duarte, Becky P.Y. Loo, Edward L. Glaeser, and Carlo Ratti #33185
10. Using Stock Price Movements to Estimate the Harm from Anticompetitive Drug Patent Litigation Settlements
Keith M. Drake and Thomas McGuire #33196
11. The Economics of Net Zero Banking
Adair Morse and Parinitha R. Sastry #33148
12. Adverse Selection and (un)Natural Monopoly in Insurance Markets
Edward Kong, Timothy Layton, and Mark Shepard #33187
13. Liquidity Traps: A Unified Theory of the Great Depression and Great Recession
Gauti B. Eggertsson and Sergey K. Egiev #33195
14. Overcoming Racial Gaps in School Preferences: The Effect of Peer Diversity on School Choice
Clemence M. Idoux and Viola Corradini #33179
15. Long-Run Effects of Food Assistance: Evidence from the Food Stamp Program and Administrative Data
Marianne Bitler and Theodore F. Figinski #33182
16. How Important Are Cultural Frictions for Internal Migration? Evidence from the Nineteenth Century United States
Taylor Jaworski, Erik O. Kimbrough, and Nicole Saito #33192
17. Taxing the Wealth of the Poor: Evidence from the Danish Old-Age Support Asset Test
Niels Johannesen, Johan Sæverud, and Emmanuel Saez #33189
18. Fintech, Visual Attention, and Financial Inclusion: A Field Experiment on Migrant Remittances
Eduardo Nakasone, Máximo Torero, and Angelino Viceisza #33183
19. The Effects of Lump-Sum Food Benefits during the COVID-19 Pandemic on Spending, Hardship, and Health
Lauren L. Bauer, Krista J. Ruffini, and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach #33199
20. Gender-Based Violence in Schools and Girls’ Education: Experimental Evidence from Mozambique
Sofia Amaral, Aixa Garcia-Ramos, Selim Gulesci, Alejandra Ramos, Sarita P. Ore-Quispe, and Maria Micaela Sviatschi #33203
21. Assortative Matching and Wages: The Role of Selection
Katarína Borovičková and Robert Shimer #33184
22. The Color of Ideas: Racial Dynamics and Citations in Economics
Marlène Koffi, Roland Pongou, and Leonard Wantchekon #33150
23. The Rise of E-Wallet Super-Apps and Buy-Now-Pay-Later
Wenlong Bian, Lin William Cong, and Yang Ji #33178
24. Flexible Pay and Labor Supply: Evidence from Uber’s Instant Pay
M. Keith Chen, Katherine Feinerman, and Kareem Haggag #33177
25. Household Saving in Japan: The Past, Present, and Future
Charles Yuji Horioka #33181
26. Sticky Inflation: Monetary Policy when Debt Drags Inflation Expectations
Saki Bigio, Nicolas Caramp, and Dejanir Silva #33190
27. Private Equity for Pension Plans? Evaluating Private Equity Performance from an Investor's Perspective
Arthur Korteweg, Stavros Panageas, and Anand Systla #33194
28. r-g before and after the Great Wars 1507-2023
Kenneth S. Rogoff and Paul Schmelzing #33202
摘要
1. How Institutions Interact with Exchange Rates After the 2024 US Presidential Election: New High-Frequency Evidence
Joshua Aizenman and Jamel Saadaoui #33193
This paper is a case study of the exchange rate adjustments during the first week following the swapping US election results. We compute three measures of exchange rate depreciation: the maximum depreciation during the 1st trading day after November 6 UTC 0:00 to capture the reaction on the FOREX immediately after the news for our sample of 73 currencies against the USD, practically all currencies depreciated sharply at the news. Second, the depreciation after 4 days to capture the reaction of monetary authorities and the global markets to the news; third, the depreciation 1 week after the shock to observe whether some countries have experienced a further depreciation or a return to the pre-shock exchange rate level. In 26 countries out of a sample of 73 bilateral exchange rates against the US Dollar, the depreciation after 1 week was even more pronounced than just after the election. We also find that the correlation between the depreciation rate after a week from the ini! tial news and the ICRG institutional score is positive and significant at the 1 percent level. A multivariate regression for exchange rate movements indicates that after a week, the bilateral trade surplus with the US, and better institutional scores are associated with stronger depreciations. Exchange rate interventions have helped to stabilize the currencies at all time horizons. The exposure to policy changes, measured by EIU’s Trump Risk Index seems to be at play after 4 days.
2. Generative AI for Economic Research: LLMs Learn to Collaborate and Reason
Anton Korinek #33198
Large language models (LLMs) have seen remarkable progress in speed, cost efficiency, accuracy, and the capacity to process larger amounts of text over the past year. This article is a practical guide to update economists on how to use these advancements in their research. The main innovations covered are (i) new reasoning capabilities, (ii) novel workspaces for interactive LLM collaboration such as Claude's Artifacts, ChatGPT's Canvas or Microsoft's Copilot, and (iii) recent improvements in LLM-powered internet search. Incorporating these capabilities in their work allows economists to achieve significant productivity gains. Additionally, I highlight new use cases in promoting research, such as automatically generated blog posts, presentation slides and interviews as well as podcasts via Google's NotebookLM.
3. Labor Force Transitions
Rui Castro, Fabian Lange, and Markus Poschke #33200
Labor Force States and flows between are useful tools to model individual dynamics in the labor market. This chapter reviews recent literature uncovering substantial heterogeneity in transitions across Labor Force States. We review methods and results by replicating leading studies using Canadian data and relate our findings to important literatures on recall non-employment, duration dependence, and job ladders.
4. The Forward Guidance Puzzle is not a Puzzle
Gauti B. Eggertsson and Finn D. Schüle #33180
In standard New Keynesian models, future interest rate cuts have larger effects than current cuts—this is called the forward guidance puzzle. We argue that the forward guidance puzzle is not a puzzle. We show the puzzle arises from an implausibly large monetary regime change, exceeding anything in U.S. history since the Great Depression. By calibrating our model to four regime changes during the U.S. Great Depression, disciplined by changes in long-term bond yields, we find the model’s predictions are broadly consistent with historical data.
5. Racial Screening on the Big Screen? Evidence from the Motion Picture Industry
Liang Zhong, Angela Crema, and M. Daniele Paserman #33186
We develop a model of discrimination that allows us to interpret observed differences in outcomes across groups, conditional on passing a screening test, as taste-based (employer,) statistical, or customer discrimination. We apply this framework to investigate the nature of non-white underrepresentation in the US motion picture industry. Leveraging a novel data set with racial identifiers for the cast of 7,000 motion pictures, we show that, conditional on production, non-white movies exhibit higher average revenues and a smaller variance. Our findings can be rationalized in the context of our model if non-white movies are held to higher standards for production.
6. Market Power and Redeemable Loyalty Token Design
Kenneth S. Rogoff, Zhiheng He, and Yang You #33201
Digitalization led to a rapid expansion of loyalty tokens typically bundled as part of product price. An open question is whether issuers are incentivized to make loyalty tokens tradable, raising regulation issues for monetary and banking authorities. This paper argues that an issuer earns more revenue by making to- kens non-tradable even though consumers would pay a higher price for tradable tokens. We further show that an issuer with stronger market power makes its revenue more token-dependent. We test the model’s predictions with data on airline mileage and hotel reward programs and document consistent empirical results that align with our theory.
7. Development Mismatch? Evidence from Agricultural Projects in Pastoral Africa
Eoin F. McGuirk and Nathan Nunn #33191
We study the consequences of a clash between contemporary development initiatives and traditional economic practices in Africa. Crop agriculture has expanded considerably across the continent in recent years. Much of this expansion has occurred in traditionally pastoral areas, where land is typically managed according to customary arrangements. This is believed to be a major cause of conflict between pastoral and agricultural ethnic groups. We test this hypothesis using geocoded data on agricultural development projects across Africa from 1995-2014. We find that implementing agricultural projects in traditionally pastoral areas leads to an almost two-fold increase in the risk of conflict. We find no equivalent effect for agricultural projects implemented in traditionally agricultural areas, nor for non-agricultural projects implemented in either location. We also find that this mechanism contributes to the spread of extremist-religious conflict in the form of jihadist attack! s. The effects are muted when agricultural projects are paired with pastoral projects. This is more likely to occur when pastoral groups have more political power. Despite these effects on conflict, we find that crop agriculture projects increase nighttime luminosity in both agricultural and pastoral areas. Evidence from survey data suggests that the gains in pastoral areas are concentrated in non-pastoral households. Our findings indicate that "development mismatch"---i.e., imposing projects that are misaligned with local populations---can be costly.
8. Why Has Construction Productivity Stagnated? The Role of Land-Use Regulation
Leonardo D'Amico, Edward L. Glaeser, Joseph Gyourko, William R. Kerr, and Giacomo A.M. Ponzetto #33188
We document a Kuznets curve for construction productivity in 20th-century America. Homes built per construction worker remained stagnant between 1900 and 1940, boomed after World War II, and then plummeted after 1970. The productivity boom from 1940 to 1970 shows that nothing makes technological progress inherently impossible in construction. What stopped it? We present a model in which local land-use controls limit the size of building projects. This constraint reduces the equilibrium size of construction companies, reducing both scale economies and incentives to invest in innovation. Our model shows that, in a competitive industry, such inefficient reductions in firm size and technology investment are a distinctive consequence of restrictive project regulation, while classic regulatory barriers to entry increase firm size. The model is consistent with an extensive series of key facts about the nature of the construction sector. The post-1970 productivity decline coincides ! with increases in our best proxies for land-use regulation. The size of development projects is small today and has declined over time. The size of construction firms is also quite small, especially relative to other goods-producing firms, and smaller builders are less productive. Areas with stricter land use regulation have particularly small and unproductive construction establishments. Patenting activity in construction stagnated and diverged from other sectors. A back-of-the-envelope calculation indicates that, if half of the observed link between establishment size and productivity is causal, America’s residential construction firms would be approximately 60 percent more productive if their size distribution matched that of manufacturing.
9. Shifting Patterns of Social Interaction: Exploring the Social Life of Urban Spaces Through A.I.
Arianna Salazar-Miranda, Zhuangyuan Fan, Michael B. Baick, Keith N. Hampton, Fabio Duarte, Becky P.Y. Loo, Edward L. Glaeser, and Carlo Ratti #33185
We analyze changes in pedestrian behavior over a 30-year period in four urban public spaces located in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. Building on William Whyte's observational work from 1980, where he manually recorded pedestrian behaviors, we employ computer vision and deep learning techniques to examine video footage from 1979-80 and 2008-10. Our analysis measures changes in walking speed, lingering behavior, group sizes, and group formation. We find that the average walking speed has increased by 15%, while the time spent lingering in these spaces has halved across all locations. Although the percentage of pedestrians walking alone remained relatively stable (from 67% to 68%), the frequency of group encounters declined, indicating fewer interactions in public spaces. This shift suggests that urban residents increasingly view streets as thoroughfares rather than as social spaces, which has important implications for the role of public spaces in fostering social engage! ment.
10. Using Stock Price Movements to Estimate the Harm from Anticompetitive Drug Patent Litigation Settlements
Keith M. Drake and Thomas McGuire #33196
Drug patent litigation settlements containing brand-to-generic “reverse payments” are a decades old antitrust concern that has been estimated to cost drug purchasers billions of dollars per year. Most estimates of the harm rely on the Federal Trade Commission’s calculation that such payments delay generic entry by 17 months, which is based on 15-20-year-old data. This paper takes a different approach, using stock price movements to quantify the harm. Costs to purchasers from an anticompetitive agreement are approximately equal to the brand firm’s increase in profits. If new profits are capitalized into stock prices, the change in value upon a settlement announcement can be used to estimate the new profit flows. We assembled a list of 64 settlements announced during 2014-2023. Although the announcements did not describe explicit forms of reverse payment, 16 announcements described terms that may transfer value to the generic firms. We classified these settlemen! ts as having an indication of reverse payment. Consistent with prior research, settlement announcements with no indication of reverse payment had no significant effect on the stock prices of brand firms implying that they tended to meet traders’ expectations. Stock prices increased by approximately 3.5%, on average, after settlements with indication of reverse payment, implying they increased brand profits by delaying generic entry. We estimate that these increases correspond to a total increase in purchaser spending of 3.0 billion per year. Because our sample is not a full census of settlements, the industry-wide increase in spending may be closer to $7 billion per year.
11. The Economics of Net Zero Banking
Adair Morse and Parinitha R. Sastry #33148
Banks have voluntarily committed to align their lending portfolios with a net zero path toward a decarbonized economy. In this review, we explore the economic channels for why portfolio decarbonization might be consistent with lender profit maximization. We frame the question by positing that net zero lending may create differential value through the channels of risk and returns, where return topics span profit margins and lending book growth arguments. We then use the lens of the frame to survey the literature and speak to gaps in research knowledge. We uncover multiple roles for risk arguments influencing decarbonization. Moreover, decarbonization and green investment are tied to enhanced profitability through bank lending growth. Yet, the literature has many dots yet to connect. We suggest that future work may draw further connections between the literature in climate finance and the broader literature in banking, to enhance our understanding of the role that banks will p! lay in the net zero transition.
12. Adverse Selection and (un)Natural Monopoly in Insurance Markets
Edward Kong, Timothy Layton, and Mark Shepard #33187
Adverse selection is a classic market failure known to limit or “unravel”' trade in high-quality insurance and many other economic settings. While the standard theory emphasizes quality distortions, we argue that selection has another big-picture implication: it unravels competition among differentiated firms, leading to fewer surviving competitors—and in the extreme, what we call “un-natural” monopoly. Adverse selection pushes firms toward aggressive price cutting to attract price-sensitive, low-risk consumers. This creates a wedge between average and marginal costs that (like fixed costs in standard models) limits how may firms can profitably survive. We demonstrate this insight in a simple model of insurer entry and price competition, estimated using administrative data from Massachusetts' health insurance exchange. We find a large “selection wedge” of 20-30% of average costs, which (without corrective policies) unravels the market to monopoly. Our analysis! suggests a surprising policy implication: interventions that limit price-cutting can improve welfare by supporting more entry, and ultimately lower prices.
13. Liquidity Traps: A Unified Theory of the Great Depression and Great Recession
Gauti B. Eggertsson and Sergey K. Egiev #33195
This paper presents a unified framework to explain three major economic downturns: the U.S. Great Depression, the U.S. Great Recession, and Japan’s Long Recession. Temporary economic disruptions, such as banking crises and excessive debt accumulation, can drive natural interest rates into negative territory in the short term. At the same time, structural factors, including demographic decline and rising inequality, can depress natural interest rates over short and long horizons. A negative natural interest rate and the zero lower bound (ZLB) are necessary conditions for a liquidity trap. Credible monetary policy can counteract the adverse effects of short-run liquidity traps. Diminished monetary policy credibility or persistent negative natural rates may necessitate fiscal interventions. The framework sheds light on the macroeconomic challenges of low-interest-rate environments and underscores the central importance of \textit{policy regimes}. We close by reflecting on the! great macroeconomic question of our time: Will short-term interest rates collapse back to zero once the inflation surge of the 2020s moves to the back mirror and the political landscape in the US has dramatically changed?
14. Overcoming Racial Gaps in School Preferences: The Effect of Peer Diversity on School Choice
Clemence M. Idoux and Viola Corradini #33179
Differences in school choice by race contribute to school segregation and unequal access to effective schools. Conditional on test score and district of residence, Black and Hispanic families consistently choose schools with fewer white and Asian students, lower average achievement, and lower value-added. This paper combines unique survey data and administrative data from New York City to identify the determinants of racial disparities in school choice and shows that attending a more diverse middle school can mitigate racial choice gaps. Instrumental variable estimates show that middle school students exposed to more diverse peers apply to and enroll in high schools that are also more diverse. These effects particularly benefit Black and Hispanic students who, as a result, enroll in higher value-added high schools. A post-application survey of guardians of high school applicants suggests that most cross-race differences in choice stem from information gaps and homophily in p! references for school demographics. The survey results also reveal that exposure to diverse middle school peers reduces racial differences in choices by addressing these underlying determinants: it increases preferences for peer diversity and broadens the range of known school options.
15. Long-Run Effects of Food Assistance: Evidence from the Food Stamp Program and Administrative Data
Marianne Bitler and Theodore F. Figinski #33182
Previous work using mostly self-reports shows large, positive effects of early-life exposure to Food Stamps on self-sufficiency, health, and well-being-lasting well into adulthood. We combine this same adoption timing with administrative data on earnings, employment, and use of disability benefits. Women born in counties with Food Stamps available in early life had 3 percent higher earnings at age 32. Effects were larger in counties with another in-kind food program in place before Food Stamps. Food Stamps relied on the other program's preexisting administrative eligibility determination. Our results establish links between pre-existing administrative infrastructure and the later-life impacts of Food Stamps.
16. How Important Are Cultural Frictions for Internal Migration? Evidence from the Nineteenth Century United States
Taylor Jaworski, Erik O. Kimbrough, and Nicole Saito #33192
We propose a new measure of cultural distance based on differences in the composition of first names and church denominations between locations. We use a gravity equation to estimate the elasticity of migration flows with respect to the two components of cultural distance as well as a standard measure of travel costs via the transportation network in the United States between 1850 and 1870. Our findings indicate a modest role for cultural distance relative to travel costs in explaining migration flows. We construct migration costs that reflect the distinct contributions of cultural distance and travel costs, and use an economic geography model of migration to quantify their effects. Travel costs are substantially more important than cultural distance for aggregate welfare. Nevertheless, we provide evidence that the components of cultural distance play a role in shaping of how many people move and their final destinations.
17. Taxing the Wealth of the Poor: Evidence from the Danish Old-Age Support Asset Test
Niels Johannesen, Johan Sæverud, and Emmanuel Saez #33189
This paper provides evidence that asset testing of social transfers substantially depresses the liquid wealth of the poor. Our setting is Denmark where the low-income elderly receive an annual payment (around 3,000) if their end-of-year liquid wealth is below a threshold (around 15,000). Using administrative data on income and wealth for the full population, we document that the wealth density distribution of the low-income elderly exhibits large but diffuse excess mass below the wealth threshold: The fraction with wealth between 50% and 100% of the wealth threshold is twice as high as for ineligible control groups who are slightly younger or have slightly higher income. A reform analysis supports a causal interpretation: excess mass below the threshold emerges around the introduction of the program and shifts when the threshold is increased discretely. The excess mass remains when we rely solely on third-party reported data to measure liquid wealth and therefore does not ! reflect strategic misreporting by the recipients. Finally, analyzing bank customer data with monthly information about wealth, spending and cash withdrawals shows that the excess mass largely reflects permanently lower levels of liquid wealth rather than temporary responses around the end of the year.
18. Fintech, Visual Attention, and Financial Inclusion: A Field Experiment on Migrant Remittances
Eduardo Nakasone, Máximo Torero, and Angelino Viceisza #33183
Migrant remittances are significant but remain relatively costly to send. Policymakers have argued that fintech, specifically, comparison websites like kayak.com but for sending money, can boost financial inclusion and reduce remittance prices. Yet, little is known about how migrants with limited education and trust in digital methods interact with fintech. We conduct a field experiment on a comparison website and vary remittance-company attributes shown to migrants, specifically, the time for delivery and customer reviews. We use visual attention data to explore search. We find that (1) while 10-28 percent of migrants exhibit some type of remittance habit, more than half experiment with companies once provided with fintech information; (2) while migrant response to information is rational and search seems targeted, there is considerable heterogeneity—those with low prior awareness of comparison sites, financial literacy, or information-processing capability are less respo! nsive to fintech; and (3) when presented with fintech information, migrants are 44 percent more likely to behave counter to the preferences over attributes they exhibit outside of the study. As such, they pay 20-30 percent more despite typically shopping around for the cheapest company. The findings suggest a nuanced potential for fintech to improve financial inclusion and consumer welfare.
19. The Effects of Lump-Sum Food Benefits during the COVID-19 Pandemic on Spending, Hardship, and Health
Lauren L. Bauer, Krista J. Ruffini, and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach #33199
This paper examines how providing families with lump-sum in-kind assistance during the pandemic affected food hardship, economic well-being, and maternal health. We study the introduction of a new program, P-EBT, that provided grocery vouchers worth approximately 300 per student during spring and summer 2020. Using cross-state variation in program timing, we find that families spent 18-42 per student per week in the 6 weeks after benefit receipt. Household food insufficiency and children’s food insecurity among low-income families declined by 27-49% in the month following receipt, and maternal mental health improved by 0.9 standard deviation.
20. Gender-Based Violence in Schools and Girls’ Education: Experimental Evidence from Mozambique
Sofia Amaral, Aixa Garcia-Ramos, Selim Gulesci, Alejandra Ramos, Sarita P. Ore-Quispe, and Maria Micaela Sviatschi #33203
Gender-based violence (GBV) at schools is a pervasive problem that affects millions of adolescent girls worldwide. In partnership with the Ministry of Education in Mozambique, we developed an intervention to increase the capacity of key school personnel to address GBV and to improve students’ awareness as well as proactive behaviors. To understand the role of GBV on girls’ education, we randomized not only exposure to the intervention but also whether the student component was targeted to girls only, boys only, or both. Our findings indicate a reduction in sexual violence by teachers and school staff against girls, regardless of the targeted gender group, providing evidence of the role of improving the capacity of key school personnel to deter perpetrators. Using administrative records, we also find that in schools where the intervention encouraged proactive behavior by girls, there was an increase in their school enrollment, largely due to an increased propensity for GB! V reporting by victims. Our findings suggest that effectively mitigating violence to improve girls’ schooling requires a dual approach: deterring potential perpetrators and fostering a proactive stance among victims, such as increased reporting.
21. Assortative Matching and Wages: The Role of Selection
Katarína Borovičková and Robert Shimer #33184
We develop a random search model with two-sided heterogeneity and match-specific productivity shocks to explain why high-productivity workers tend to work at high-productivity firms despite low-productivity workers gaining about as much from such matches. Our model has two key predictions: i) the average log wage that a worker receives is increasing in the worker's and employer's productivity, with low-productivity workers gaining proportionally more at high-productivity firms and ii) there is assortative matching between a worker's productivity and that of her employer. Selective job acceptance drives these patterns. All workers are equally likely to meet all firms, but workers have higher surplus from meeting firms of similar productivity. The high surplus meetings result in matches more frequently, generating assortative matching. Only the subset of meetings that result in matches are observed in administrative wage data, shaping wages. We show that our findings are quant! itatively consistent with recent empirical results. Moreover, we prove this selection is not detected using standard empirical approaches, highlighting the importance of theory-guided empirical work. Our results imply that encouraging high-wage firms to hire low-wage workers may be less effective at reducing wage inequality than wage patterns suggest.
22. The Color of Ideas: Racial Dynamics and Citations in Economics
Marlène Koffi, Roland Pongou, and Leonard Wantchekon #33150
This paper investigates the existence of racial disparities in the dissemination of ideas using the paper citation network in economics. Exploiting a comprehensive dataset of over 330,000 publications from 1950 to 2021, combined with manually collected data from the CVs of thousands of economists, we document that papers authored by non-White scholars (Black, Hispanic, or Asian) receive 5.1% to 9.6% fewer citations than those authored by White scholars. The citation gap remains or even amplifies with increasing author seniority and conventional quality indicators and is especially pronounced for Black authors. Moreover, papers authored by non-White scholars are less likely to serve as citation bridges and are less often cited by highly cited papers as measured by the centrality indexes, limiting both their direct and indirect influence. Our analysis indicates that this disparity is not attributable to differences in research quality, author ability, or visibility. Rather, it! is largely driven by homophily in citation patterns and racial clusters in networks, where scholars tend to cite authors from their racial group. These findings can be rationalized by a simple theoretical model where citation costs and peer-review preferences influence citation behavior. Then, we provide suggestive evidence that reducing information friction—thereby lowering the cost of citing—could reduce the racial citation gap by up to 50%. Finally, using natural language processing, we highlight the complementarity across racial groups in research and discuss potential losses from racial barriers to idea diffusion.
23. The Rise of E-Wallet Super-Apps and Buy-Now-Pay-Later
Wenlong Bian, Lin William Cong, and Yang Ji #33178
The rise of super-app digital wallets provides not only a conduit to banks but also internal payment options, including Buy-Now-Pay-Later (BNPL). We examine, for the first time, transactions matched with merchant and consumer information, from a leading e-wallet super-app, and complement the analyses with a randomized experiment. We document that BNPL serves as a dominant form of “digital cash” and expands payment and credit access to underserved consumers without increasing indebtedness or delinquencies despite their spending more. The findings crucially depend on the cross-sale capacity and inherent disciplinary incentives of super-app ecosystems. Our findings underscore the synergy between credit and payments and provide novel insights for economies transitioning to cashless via super-app-driven platforms, where FinTech credit sees the greatest potential.
24. Flexible Pay and Labor Supply: Evidence from Uber’s Instant Pay
M. Keith Chen, Katherine Feinerman, and Kareem Haggag #33177
Modern tech platforms provide workers real-time control over when they work, and increasingly, flexible pay: the option to be paid immediately after work. We investigate the labor supply effects of pay flexibility and the implications of present-biased preferences among gig-economy workers. Using granular data from a nationwide randomized controlled trial at Uber, we estimate the effects of switching from a fixed weekly pay schedule to Instant Pay, a system that allows on-demand, within-day withdrawals. We find that flexible pay substantially increased drivers’ work time. Furthermore, consistent with present bias, the response is significantly higher when drivers are further away from the end of their counterfactual weekly pay cycle. We discuss welfare and broader implications in contexts in which workers have the ability to flexibly supply labor.
25. Household Saving in Japan: The Past, Present, and Future
Charles Yuji Horioka #33181
This paper explores the determinants of the level of, and trends over time in, Japan’s household saving rate, with emphasis on the impact of the age structure of the population, and makes projections about future trends therein. The paper finds that Japan’s household saving rate has not always been high either absolutely or relative to other countries and that it was only during the 1961-86 period that it exceeded 15%. Past and future trends in Japan’s household saving rate can largely be explained by changes in the age structure of her population, but declines in the saving rate of retired elderly households is a more important explanation for the recent decline in the household saving rate. However, it is likely that other factors such as the unavailability of consumer credit, the unavailability of social safety nets, high rates of economic (income) growth, tax breaks for saving, saving promotion policies, and high and rising land and housing prices are also partial ! explanations for why Japan’s household saving rate was so high during the 1961-86 period and why it declined so much subsequently. Finally, we project that Japan’s household saving rate will fall even further though not necessarily at a rapid rate.
26. Sticky Inflation: Monetary Policy when Debt Drags Inflation Expectations
Saki Bigio, Nicolas Caramp, and Dejanir Silva #33190
We append the expectation of a monetary-fiscal reform into a standard New Keynesian model. If a reform occurs, monetary policy will temporarily aid debt sustainability through a temporary burst in inflation. The anticipation of a possible reform links debt levels with inflation expectations. As a result, interest rates have two effects: they influence demand and affect expected inflation in opposite directions. The expectations effect is linked to the impact of interest rates on public debt. While lowering inflation in the short term is possible through demand control, inflation tends to rise again due to its impact on inflation expectations (sticky inflation). Optimal monetary policy may allow low real interest rates after fiscal shocks, temporarily breaking away from the Taylor principle. We assess whether the Federal Reserve's “staying behind the curve” was the right strategy during the recent post-pandemic inflation surge.
27. Private Equity for Pension Plans? Evaluating Private Equity Performance from an Investor's Perspective
Arthur Korteweg, Stavros Panageas, and Anand Systla #33194
We evaluate private equity (PE) performance using investor-specific stochastic discount factors, and examine whether investors could benefit from changing their allocation to PE. Plans invest in PE funds with higher average risk-adjusted performance. This is mainly due to access to successful PE managers, not superior selection skill. Decomposing returns into risk-compensation and "alpha", we find that some plans obtain higher PE returns by taking more risk without earning higher, and in some cases earning lower, risk-adjusted returns, broadly consistent with agency problems within plans.
28. r-g before and after the Great Wars 1507-2023
Kenneth S. Rogoff and Paul Schmelzing #33202
We present new long-run samples of r-g series over centuries for key economies in the international financial system. Across a wide variety of econometric approaches, and including duration-matched constructions, we demonstrate strong evidence of trend stationarity in these series. Although we confirm trend stationarity, we find robust evidence of a major structural break in the first third of the 20th century. A multi-century downward trend in r-g appears to have levelled off in the years around 1930, and since then r-g has shown high volatility coupled with clear upwards pressure: notably, though real interest rates may still appear favorably low, aggregate growth rates are drifting downwards in advanced economies since the interwar period, creating secular pressures on r-g and debt sustainability. Our results stand in contrast to much recent literature and suggest the need for much more caution in assuming benign trends in global public debt sustainability. At the same ti! me, when adding riskier elements of capital returns, the data lend support for structurally increasing "dynamic efficiency". We then associate the key 1930s inflection to the establishment and growth of welfare states in advanced economies, and the surge in non-defense, non-interest expenditures.
