The Latest NBER Working Papers(2024-12-09)
NBER最新工作论文
2024-12-09
注：如需中文翻译（锻炼一下，最好别用~），手机请点击微信右上角选取全文翻译；点击本文下方阅读原文，即可到达NBER官网；用电脑观看公众号内容效果更佳！
目录
1. A Market Interpretation of Treatment Effects
Robert Minton and Casey B. Mulligan #33228
2. How Curvy is the Phillips Curve?
Philip Bunn, Lena Anayi, Nicholas Bloom, Paul Mizen, Gregory Thwaites, and Ivan Yotzov #33234
3. Business Applications as a Leading Economic Indicator?
Jose Asturias, Emin Dinlersoz, John C. Haltiwanger, Rebecca J. Hutchinson, and Alyson Plumb #33224
4. Search Costs, Intermediation, and Trade: Experimental Evidence from Ugandan Agricultural Markets
Lauren F. Bergquist, Craig McIntosh, and Meredith Startz #33221
5. Halloween, ADHD, and Subjectivity in Medical Diagnosis
Christopher Worsham, Charles Bray, and Anupam Jena #33232
6. Minimum Viable Signal: Venture Funding, Social Movements, and Race
Matt Marx, Qian Wang, and Emmanuel Yimfor #33227
7. A Theory of How Workers Keep Up With Inflation
Hassan Afrouzi, Andrés Blanco, Andrés Drenik, and Erik Hurst #33233
8. The Effects of Gender Integration on Men: Evidence from the U.S. Military
Kyle Greenberg, Melanie Wasserman, and E. Anna Weber #33235
9. Tearing the Paper Ceiling: The Impact of State Commitments to Remove Degree Requirements on Public Awareness and Job Opportunities for STARs
Justin Heck, Blair Corcoran de Castillo, Peter Q. Blair, and Papia Debroy #33220
10. Household Responses to Guaranteed Income: Experimental Evidence from Compton, California
Sidhya Balakrishnan, Sewin Chan, Sara Constantino, Johannes Haushofer, and Jonathan Morduch #33209
11. Is Swedish Household Debt Too High? Solvency, Liquidity, and Debt-Financed Overconsumption
Lars E.O. Svensson #33222
12. You Can Take Them With You: Recruiting Coworkers to One's Own New Firm
Marc-Andreas Muendler, James E. Rauch, and Sergio Mikio Koyama #33230
13. Hustling From Home? Work From Home Flexibility and Entrepreneurial Entry
John M. Barrios, Yael Hochberg, and Hanyi (Livia) Yi #33237
14. Careers and Wages in Family Firms: Evidence from Matched Employer-Employee Data
Edoardo Di Porto, Marco Pagano, Vincenzo Pezone, Raffaele Saggio, and Fabiano Schivardi #33219
15. Assessing Assessors
Huaizhi Chen and Lauren Cohen #33238
16. Investor Memory and Biased Beliefs: Evidence from the Field
Zhengyang Jiang, Hongqi Liu, Cameron Peng, and Hongjun Yan #33226
17. Growth and Fluctuations: An Overview
Joseph E. Stiglitz #33218
18. Are Some Angels Better than Others?
Johan Karlsen, Katja Kisseleva, Aksel Mjøs, and David T. Robinson #33231
19. Valuing Policy Characteristics and New Products using a Simple Linear Program
H. Spencer Banzhaf #33225
20. Gender Composition and Group Behavior: Evidence from US City Councils
Emilia Brito Rebolledo, Jesse Bruhn, Thea How Choon, and E. Anna Weber #33223
21. A Practical Guide to Shift-Share Instruments
Kirill Borusyak, Peter Hull, and Xavier Jaravel #33236
22. Why Aren't There More Minority Entrepreneurs?
Victor M. Bennett and David T. Robinson #33229
摘要
1. A Market Interpretation of Treatment Effects
Robert Minton and Casey B. Mulligan #33228
Markets, likened to an invisible hand, often appear to contradict econometric assumptions that rule out spillovers of one person’s treatment on another’s outcomes. This paper provides a simple statistical framework highlighting that controls are indirectly affected by the treatment through the market. Further, the effect of the treatment on the treated reveals only part of the consequence for the treated of treating the entire market. When combined with economic theory, our framework leads to a new application of Marshall’s Laws of Derived Demand that relates econometric estimates of treatment effects in the marketplace to the substitution and scale effects of demand theory. We show how treatment-effect estimators can diverge – both in magnitude and direction – from the causal effects of treatment on the treated or counterfactual policies treating all market participants. The framework shows how the consequences of targeted treatments reveal the effects of marketwide treatments, and the role of market frictions in that inference. Examples from labor, public finance, economic geography, development, and the macro literature on the “missing intercept” are provided.
2. How Curvy is the Phillips Curve?
Philip Bunn, Lena Anayi, Nicholas Bloom, Paul Mizen, Gregory Thwaites, and Ivan Yotzov #33234
Macro data suggests a convex relationship between inflation and economic slack, but identifying causality is challenging. Using micro data from large panel surveys of UK and US firms we show that the response of prices to demand shocks is also convex at the firm level. We obtain similar results using three different empirical exercises examining: the impact of COVID demand shocks, the response to sales shocks, and hypothetical shocks from a survey question. This convexity is strongest in firms and industries with higher inflation, disappears in horizons beyond two years, and is also present in response to cost shocks. We rationalize these findings in a menu cost model with positive trend inflation and decreasing returns at the firm level, which replicates firm and aggregate Phillips curve convexity. The non-linearity emerges from trend inflation pushing firms closer to their price increase thresholds.
3. Business Applications as a Leading Economic Indicator?
Jose Asturias, Emin Dinlersoz, John C. Haltiwanger, Rebecca J. Hutchinson, and Alyson Plumb #33224
How are applications to start new businesses related to aggregate economic activity? This paper explores the properties of three monthly business application series from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Business Formation Statistics as economic indicators: all business applications, business applications that are relatively likely to turn into new employer businesses (“likely employers”), and the residual series -- business applications that have a relatively low rate of becoming employers (“likely non-employers”). Growth in applications for likely employers significantly leads total nonfarm employment growth and has a strong positive correlation with it. Furthermore, growth in applications for likely employers leads growth in most of the monthly Principal Federal Economic Indicators (PFEIs). Motivated by our findings, we estimate a dynamic factor model (DFM) to forecast nonfarm employment growth over a 12-month period using the PFEIs and the likely employers series. The latter improves the model’s forecast, especially in the years following the turning points of the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic. Overall, applications for likely employers are a strong leading indicator of monthly PFEIs and aggregate economic activity, whereas applications for likely non-employers provide early information about changes in increasingly prevalent self-employment activity in the U.S. economy.
4. Search Costs, Intermediation, and Trade: Experimental Evidence from Ugandan Agricultural Markets
Lauren F. Bergquist, Craig McIntosh, and Meredith Startz #33221
We study the large-scale experimental rollout of a platform that reduced search and matching frictions in Ugandan agricultural markets by connecting buyers and sellers. Market integration improved substantially: trade increased and price gaps fell. Interpreting the experiment through a trade model, we estimate treatment effects accounting for equilibrium changes that impact control markets. The intervention reduced fixed trade costs by 21% and increased trade flows between treated markets by 6% and across all markets by 1%. Scale economies shaped engagement: few farmers used the platform, but equilibrium price convergence from improved arbitrage by larger traders passed through to farm revenue.
5. Halloween, ADHD, and Subjectivity in Medical Diagnosis
Christopher Worsham, Charles Bray, and Anupam Jena #33232
The practice of medicine relies on accurate diagnosis. However, the diagnosis of many medical conditions involves assessments that invite varying degrees of subjectivity. External and arbitrary factors can influence physicians’ diagnostic assessments in conditions ranging from heart attacks to neurodevelopmental conditions like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Quantifying this subjectivity is challenging, however, particularly for neurodevelopmental and psychiatric conditions where subjective assessments of behavior are common and important. Halloween, a holiday characterized by excitement among children, could present a natural experiment to study subjectivity in diagnosis, if any ensuing behavioral changes influence diagnosis rates of ADHD. Using data on over 100 million physician office visits, we compared ADHD diagnosis rates, by day, among children seen by physicians in the 10 weekdays surrounding seven Halloween holidays. The rate of new ADHD diagnosis was 62.7 per 10,000 child-visits on Halloween, compared with 55.1 during surrounding weekdays, a 14% increase. There were no increases in diagnoses of several neuropsychiatric disorders with diagnostic criteria that are less focused on hyperactive behavior. Our findings highlight subjectivity in ADHD diagnosis and support the need to consider external factors that may influence diagnosis.
6. Minimum Viable Signal: Venture Funding, Social Movements, and Race
Matt Marx, Qian Wang, and Emmanuel Yimfor #33227
How do venture capital investors react to social movements, including those that relate to historical underrepresentation in funding? We use image and name algorithms combined with clerical review to classify race for 150,000 founders and 30,000 investors. These data allow us to assess the impact of George Floyd’s murder on VC funding of Black entrepreneurs and identify which VCs were most responsive. Although VCs responded swiftly, investment in Black-founded startups reverted to prior levels within two years. This temporary reaction was concentrated among those who had never previously invested in any Black entrepreneur. Moreover, the investors who responded were less likely to invest in more than one Black-founded startup and were less inclined to engage deeply by taking a board seat. Finally, it appears that the best Black entrepreneurs may have anticipated this “token” response, as they did not match with investors who had no experience funding Black startups.
7. A Theory of How Workers Keep Up With Inflation
Hassan Afrouzi, Andrés Blanco, Andrés Drenik, and Erik Hurst #33233
In this paper, we develop a model that combines elements of modern macro labor theories with nominal wage rigidities to study the consequences of unexpected inflation on the labor market. The slow and costly adjustment of real wages within a match after a burst of inflation incentivizes workers to engage in job-to-job transitions. Such dynamics after a surge in inflation lead to a rise in aggregate vacancies relative to unemployment, associating a seemingly tight labor market with lower average real wages. Calibrating with pre-2020 data, we show the model can simultaneously match the trends in worker flows and wage changes during the 2021-2024 period. Using historical data, we further show that prior periods of high inflation were also associated with an increase in vacancies and an upward shift in the Beveridge curve. Finally, we show that other “hot labor market” theories that can cause an increase in the aggregate vacancy-to-unemployment rate have implications that are inconsistent with the worker flows and wage dynamics observed during the recent inflationary period. Collectively, our calibrated model implies that the recent inflation in the United States, all else equal, reduced the welfare of workers through real wage declines and other costly actions, providing a model-driven reason why workers report they dislike inflation.
8. The Effects of Gender Integration on Men: Evidence from the U.S. Military
Kyle Greenberg, Melanie Wasserman, and E. Anna Weber #33235
Do men negatively respond when women first enter an occupation? We answer this question by studying the end of one of the final explicit occupational barriers to women in the U.S.: in 2016, the U.S. military opened all positions to women, including historically male-only combat occupations. We exploit the staggered integration of women into combat units to estimate the causal effects of the introduction of female colleagues on men’s job performance, behavior, and perceptions of workplace quality, using monthly administrative personnel records and rich survey responses. We find that integrating women into previously all-male units does not negatively affect men’s performance or behavioral outcomes, including retention, promotions, demotions, separations for misconduct, criminal charges, and medical conditions. Most of our results are precise enough to rule out small, detrimental effects. However, there is a wedge between men's perceptions and performance. The integration of women causes a negative shift in male soldiers' perceptions of workplace quality, with the effects driven by units integrated with a woman in a position of authority. We discuss how these findings shed light on the roots of occupational segregation by gender.
9. Tearing the Paper Ceiling: The Impact of State Commitments to Remove Degree Requirements on Public Awareness and Job Opportunities for STARs
Justin Heck, Blair Corcoran de Castillo, Peter Q. Blair, and Papia Debroy #33220
In the past two years, 25 states have enacted executive orders and legislation to reduce unnecessary degree requirements for public sector jobs, signaling a shift toward skill-based hiring. This paper examines the impact of these policy commitments on public perceptions, media coverage, and job posting practices in the time following their adoption. Our analysis reveals significant increases in public awareness of skill-based hiring concepts, such as the 'paper ceiling' (i.e., bachelor’s degree analog of the glass ceiling), and a notable decline in bachelor’s degree requirements in state government job postings. We estimate that degree requirements dropped by 2.5 percentage points for each additional year of policy exposure in states with commitments. These findings suggest that state policy commitments have expanded access to government jobs for workers skilled through alternative routes (STARs) other than the bachelor’s degree in keeping with the intended goals of the policies to broaden the talent pool for public sector hiring.
10. Household Responses to Guaranteed Income: Experimental Evidence from Compton, California
Sidhya Balakrishnan, Sewin Chan, Sara Constantino, Johannes Haushofer, and Jonathan Morduch #33209
We study the effects of a two-year unconditional cash transfer program for lowincome households in Compton, California between 2021 and 2023. 695 households were randomly assigned to receive transfers averaging about $500 per month over a two year period, with 1,402 households randomly assigned to a control group. To measure the impact of transfer frequency, half of the recipients were paid twice per month and the other half received quarterly transfers. We surveyed 1,074 respondents 18 months after the beginning of transfers. Receiving guaranteed income had no impact on the labor supply of full-time workers, but part-time workers (at baseline) had lower labor market participation by 13 percentage points. Income (excluding the transfer) was reduced by 333 per month on average relative to control households, and expenditures were reduced by 302 per month. At the same time, average non-housing debt balances declined by 2,190 over 18 months relative to the control group, although the drop is not statistically significant. We find a significant improvement in housing security, but no overall effects on indices of psychological and financial well-being. The recipients of twice-monthly transfers were more likely to own a car, had lower credit card debt and greater food security than recipients of quarterly transfers, but otherwise transfer frequency had little impact. Compared to male recipients, female recipients reported a greater increase in financial security, and a smaller reduction in earned income and expenditures.
11. Is Swedish Household Debt Too High? Solvency, Liquidity, and Debt-Financed Overconsumption
Lars E.O. Svensson #33222
Swedish authorities and international organizations that comment on Swedish economic policy have argued that household debt is too high and a threat to financial and macroeconomic stability (FMS). But household debt may become a threat to FMS under essentially three conditions: (1) Household debt becomes too high relative to household assets. (2) Households’ debt service becomes too high relative to incomes and payment capacity. (3) Households use home-equity withdrawals—made possible by rising house prices—to finance an unsustainable overconsumption of macroeconomic significance. Two Swedish structural features mitigate the risks. First, mortgages are a safe cash cow for banks and contribute to financial stability. Second, the mortgage rates are not exogenous but indirectly controlled by the Riksbank, and it sets the policy rate to maintain FMS. Regarding condition (1), aggregate household assets are much larger and have grown much faster than debt. Net wealth was twice the debt in 1985, five times in 2024. 78% of borrowers have home equity exceeding 30%, more than any housing price fall during the last 50 years. Regarding condition (2), debt service of borrowers is not high relative to incomes, because modest LTV ratios mean that required amortization rates are modest. Regarding condition (3), there is no indication of any debt-financed overconsumption (undersaving) of macroeconomic significance. HEW is not unusually high, the saving rate is at a historical high, and the share of durable consumption in total consumption expenditures is normal. Thus, none of the three conditions is present. Swedish household debt is neither too high nor a threat to financial or macroeconomic stability.
12. You Can Take Them With You: Recruiting Coworkers to One's Own New Firm
Marc-Andreas Muendler, James E. Rauch, and Sergio Mikio Koyama #33230
New firms do not yet have employees who can aid recruiting by referrals, but entrepreneurs can recruit workers they know to their startups—in effect making their own referrals. We consider new firms in Brazil’s formal sector founded between 2002 and 2014, for which at least one founding owner can be traced to previous formal employment. We find that 35.1 percent of new firms with at least five employees hire one or more coworkers from a founding owner’s last employer in their first year of operation, and that 9.2 percent of first-year hires at new firms were coworkers at a founding owner’s last employer. The former coworkers most likely to join a founding owner’s new firm are those who, at their last employer, worked in the same plant as a founding owner, had long overlap with a founding owner, were classified in the same industry or occupation as a founding owner, and were hired at roughly the same time as a founding owner. Controlling for observable human capital and new firm fixed effects, former coworkers earn eight percent higher initial wages at new firms and are six percentage points less likely to separate before a new firm’s second year of operation. We find that the coworker wage premium diminishes with tenure by 0.5 percentage points per year and the coworker separation premium diminishes with tenure by 2.0 percentage points per year.
13. Hustling From Home? Work From Home Flexibility and Entrepreneurial Entry
John M. Barrios, Yael Hochberg, and Hanyi (Livia) Yi #33237
We investigate the influence of the growing trend of work-from-home (WFH) on new business formation, with a particular focus on the period surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. At baseline, local new business entry is positively associated with the proportion of occupations amenable to telework in the region. Utilizing the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic and the implementation of stay-at-home mandates as an exogenous shock, we examine the effects of realized flexibility for WFH on entrepreneurial entry. While overall new business registrations increased following pandemic stay-at-home mandates, areas with an occupational mix that has higher potential for telework demonstrate less pronounced growth in new business formation, particularly in regions with lower economic demand factors. Survey evidence highlights how flexibility provided by traditional employment reduces entrepreneurial intent, especially for workers seeking non-pecuniary benefits such as autonomy or flexibility. Consistent with this substitution effect, we observe significant gender disparities, with a notable decline in women-led startups in areas with greater telework potential. Our results suggest a nuanced tension between the attractiveness of flexibility in traditional employment and the autonomy provided by entrepreneurial entry.
14. Careers and Wages in Family Firms: Evidence from Matched Employer-Employee Data
Edoardo Di Porto, Marco Pagano, Vincenzo Pezone, Raffaele Saggio, and Fabiano Schivardi #33219
We investigate compensation policies in family and non-family firms using a novel employer-employee matched dataset comprising nearly the universe of Italian incorporated firms and ownership information. Family firms pay significantly lower wages and offer slower and less rewarding careers. Differences in worker sorting account for half of the wage gap while productivity differences and compensating differentials explain little of the residual gap. The wage distribution in family firms is more compressed, with infrequent promotions. We rationalize this evidence with a model where family owners seek to maintain control, creating a “glass ceiling” that limits their employees’ career progression.
15. Assessing Assessors
Huaizhi Chen and Lauren Cohen #33238
Property tax revenues – the largest discretionary source of revenue for local governments - adjust at a pace that is inconsistent with property values in the US. We show that this form of revenue smoothing may be rooted in the political economy of municipalities. Measures of local budget stressors are positively related to upward assessments of a property’s value. Moreover, municipalities are significantly more likely to reassess in up markets as opposed to down – consistent with maximizing tax base and revenue collected. Using micro-level evidence from just-passing school referenda in Illinois, these shocks to municipal liabilities lead to significant increases in property assessments without any associated increases in market values or transactions. Passing a referendum over the prior 3 years increases the probability that a house is reassessed upward by 23%. This flexible form of revenue smoothing creates avenues for personal rent extraction. We find that local tax assessors: 1) have tax assessments on their own properties significantly lower than neighboring properties; and 2) these tax assessments grow significantly slower than neighbors – lowering their tax bills. We further document a significant connection between the underassessment of tax assessors’ own properties and the tax-maximizing assessment gaps documented in the districts they operate.
16. Investor Memory and Biased Beliefs: Evidence from the Field
Zhengyang Jiang, Hongqi Liu, Cameron Peng, and Hongjun Yan #33226
We survey a large, representative sample of retail investors in China to elicit their memories of stock market investments and their return expectations. We merge this survey data with administrative transaction data to test a model in which investors selectively recall past experiences to form their beliefs. Our analysis uncovers new facts about investor memory and highlights similarity-based recall as a novel mechanism of belief formation in financial markets. A rising market prompts investors to recall their past experiences more positively, leading to more optimistic forecasts of future returns. Recalled experiences explain a sizable fraction of cross-investor variation in return expectations and dominate actual experiences in their explanatory power. In the transaction data, we confirm that recalled experiences affect investors' trading decisions through a belief channel.
17. Growth and Fluctuations: An Overview
Joseph E. Stiglitz #33218
Capitalism since its inception has been marked by large fluctuations. The resulting episodic unemployment has been very costly. This paper provides an overview of alternative theories. Standard models (such as DSGE) have not provided insights into the causes of the fluctuations and the shocks buffeting the economy, which contrary to what they assume, are largely endogenous; they have not provided an understanding of how and why the economy amplifies shocks and makes their effects at times so persistent or how and why there may be oscillatory behavior, rather than a smooth convergence back to some (temporary) equilibrium. Accordingly, they do not give guidance on how to make deep downturns—those that really matter—less frequent, shallower, and less costly. By contrast, there are alternative, new models, often building on older Keynesian foundations, with heterogenous capital goods and heterogeneous agents, interacting with each other in imperfect markets and fragile networks, with endogenous innovation in an ever-evolving economy, with deep uncertainty. These theories, with endogenously driven fluctuations, provide greater insights in the causes and nature of fluctuations, and better policy guidance.
18. Are Some Angels Better than Others?
Johan Karlsen, Katja Kisseleva, Aksel Mjøs, and David T. Robinson #33231
This paper uses Norwegian tax records to examine the performance of angel investors. While most angel investments perform poorly, mean returns are twice the invested capital, due largely to extreme skewness: around one-third of investments are a total loss, but the top one-percent return more than fifty times invested capital. Performance persistence among angels is largely attributable to unobserved investor characteristics. Professional networks are critical determinants of performance: top-performing angels tend to have broader business connections with startups and fellow investors, consistent with having access to superior deal flow.
19. Valuing Policy Characteristics and New Products using a Simple Linear Program
H. Spencer Banzhaf #33225
The Random Utility Model (RUM) is a workhorse model for valuing new products or changes in public goods. But RUMs have been faulted along two lines. First, for including idiosyncratic errors that imply unreasonably high values for new alternatives and unrealistic substitution patterns. Second, for involving strong restrictions on functional forms for utility. This paper shows how, instead, starting with a revealed preference framework, one can partially identify nonparametrically the answers to policy questions about discrete alternatives. When the Generalized Axiom of Revealed Preference (GARP) is satisfied, the approach weakly identifies a pure characteristics model. When GARP is violated, it recasts the RUM errors as departures from GARP (critical cost efficiency), to be minimized using a minimum-distance criterion. This perspective provides an alternative avenue for nonparametric identification of discrete choice models. The paper illustrates the approach by estimating bounds on the values of ecological improvements in the Southern Appalachian Mountains using survey data.
20. Gender Composition and Group Behavior: Evidence from US City Councils
Emilia Brito Rebolledo, Jesse Bruhn, Thea How Choon, and E. Anna Weber #33223
How does gender composition influence individual and group behavior? To study this question empirically, we assembled a new, national sample of United States city council elections and digitized information from the minutes of over 40,000 city-council meetings. We find that replacing a male councilor with a female councilor results in a 25p.p. increase in the share of motions proposed by women. This is despite causing only a 20p.p. increase in the council female share. The discrepancy is driven, in part, by behavioral changes similar to those documented in laboratory-based studies of gender composition. When a lone woman is joined by a female colleague, she participates more actively by proposing more motions. The apparent changes in behavior do not translate into clear differences in spending. The null finding on spending is not driven by strategic voting; however, preference alignment on local policy issues between men and women appears to play an important role. Taken together, our results both highlight the importance of nominal representation for cultivating substantive participation by women in high-stakes decision making bodies; and also provide evidence in support of the external validity of a large body of laboratory-based work on the consequences of group gender composition.
21. A Practical Guide to Shift-Share Instruments
Kirill Borusyak, Peter Hull, and Xavier Jaravel #33236
A recent econometric literature shows two distinct paths for identification with shift-share instruments, leveraging either many exogenous shifts or exogenous shares. We present the core logic of both paths and practical takeaways via simple checklists. A variety of empirical settings illustrate key points.
22. Why Aren't There More Minority Entrepreneurs?
Victor M. Bennett and David T. Robinson #33229
We study racial and gender disparities in entrepreneurial activity through the lens of a Roy model, focusing on the distinction between idea generation and execution. Using nationally representative sur-vey data, we find that Black and Hispanic individuals demonstrate higher entrepreneurial intentions than white respondents. They are much less likely, however, to launch ventures once ideas are conceived. A critical determinant of this gap is differential reliance on social networks, which shapes both the likelihood of launching a business as well as the reasons for stopping. Variation in the strength of local, own-group entrepreneurship reveals that stronger networks enhance the relationship between social engagement and business formation. Also, as predicted by the model, access to social networks also predicts seeking capital. The interconnections between socialization and searching for capital are important for understanding-policies aimed at boosting rates of entrepreneurship in underrepresented groups.
