The Latest NBER Working Papers(2025-01-06)
NBER最新工作论文
2025-01-06
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目录
1. Time Consistent Infrastructure Investments: Optimal Flood Protection Policies in Spatial Equilibrium
Amine Ouazad and Matthew E. Kahn #33333
2. Calling All Parents: Leveraging Behavioral Insights to Boost Early Childhood Outcomes in the Developing World
Juanita Bloomfield, Ana I. Balsa, Alejandro Cid, and Philip Oreopoulos #33338
3. Are Big Cities Important for Economic Growth?
Matthew Turner and David N. Weil #33334
4. E-Cigarette Taxation and Queer Youth
Anthony Chuo, Chad D. Cotti, Charles J. Courtemanche, Johanna Catherine Maclean, Erik T. Nesson, and Joseph J. Sabia #33326
5. The Comovement of Voter Preferences: Insights from U.S. Presidential Election Prediction Markets Beyond Polls
Mikhail Chernov, Vadim Elenev, and Dongho Song #33339
6. CEO-Firm Matches and Productivity in 42 Countries
Amanda Dahlstrand, Dávid László, Helena Schweiger, Oriana Bandiera, Andrea Prat, and Raffaella Sadun #33324
7. Technological Disruption in the Labor Market
David J. Deming, Christopher Ong, and Lawrence H. Summers #33323
8. Immigrant Age at Arrival and the Intergenerational Transmission of Ethnic Identification among Mexican Americans
Brian Duncan and Stephen J. Trejo #33329
9. The Impact of Counterfeit Victims in the Victim Marketplace
Mingyuan Ban, Yi Qian, Qiang Gong, and Karl Aquino #33327
10. Corporate Resiliency and the Choice Between Financial and Operational Hedging
Viral V. Acharya, Heitor Almeida, Yakov Amihud, and Ping Liu #33340
11. Are People Fleeing States with Abortion Bans?
Daniel L. Dench, Kelly Lifchez, Jason M. Lindo, and Jancy Ling Liu #33328
12. Community Targeting at Scale
Sudarno Sumarto, Elan Satriawan, Benjamin A. Olken, Abhijit Banerjee, Achmad Tohari, Vivi Alatas, and Rema Hanna #33322
13. New Keynesian Economics through the Extensive Margin
Saki Bigio and Akira Ishide #33332
14. Can Early Intervention Reduce Future Child Maltreatment?
Anna Aizer and Emilia Brito Rebolledo #33341
15. Distance to Degrees: How College Proximity Shapes Students’ Enrollment Choices and Attainment Across Race-Ethnicity and Socioeconomic Status
Riley K. Acton, Kalena Cortes, Lois Miller, and Camila Morales #33337
16. Fisher-Schultz Lecture: Linear Estimation of Structural and Causal Effects for Nonseparable Panel Data
Victor Chernozhukov, Ben Deaner, Ying Gao, Jerry A. Hausman, and Whitney Newey #33325
17. Limited Risk Transfer Between Investors: A New Benchmark for Macro-Finance Models
Xavier Gabaix, Ralph S. J. Koijen, Federico Mainardi, Sangmin Simon Oh, and Motohiro Yogo #33336
18. Strategic Commitments to Decarbonize: The Role of Large Firms, Common Ownership, and Governments
Viral V. Acharya, Robert F. Engle III, and Olivier Wang #33335
19. Intergenerational Mobility over Two Centuries
Ran Abramitzky, Leah Platt Boustan, and Tamar Matiashvili #33330
摘要
1. Time Consistent Infrastructure Investments: Optimal Flood Protection Policies in Spatial Equilibrium
Amine Ouazad and Matthew E. Kahn #33333
Place-based investments can have unintended general equilibrium effects and face challenges of time inconsistency. This paper simulates the granular impact of alternative spatial and temporal designs of such investments, using Quantitative Spatial Models where the strategy of the policymaker is endogenized, with time-consistent policy analysis or policies with commitment. It can apply to sunk, fixed costs investments in transportation infrastructure, levees, and other location-based investments. Applying this framework to the 1936 Flood Control Act, the largest investment in flood control infrastructure in US history protecting 5% of land, the study examines the general equilibrium effects of levee investments on housing prices, population density, and racial demographics over eight decades. Protected neighborhoods initially had lower property values, higher minority shares, and greater flood risk, but experienced sustained property appreciation and changes in population density. Structural analysis reveals that optimal levee designs prioritize high-density areas, reduce price capitalization, and minimize urban sprawl. Policymakers who cannot commit to long-term plans tend to overbuild and maintain larger systems compared to those with time-consistent strategies.
2. Calling All Parents: Leveraging Behavioral Insights to Boost Early Childhood Outcomes in the Developing World
Juanita Bloomfield, Ana I. Balsa, Alejandro Cid, and Philip Oreopoulos #33338
Early childhood in developing countries faces a greater prevalence of risk factors and limited resources, underscoring the need for effective, scalable support models. We develop and experimentally evaluate a multi-component approach to enhance family well-being over-the-phone. The program combines scalable outreaches including calls by a teleoperator, messages, a chatbot, and an AI tool. Targeted at highly vulnerable families with children aged 0 to 3 in Uruguay, the intervention promotes positive parenting practices at home, fosters language development, and provides personalized assistance to help families access government benefits. The intervention was implemented with 1,360 families eligible for support from the government agency Uruguay Crece Contigo over an eight-month period. We find that the program increases weekly frequency of parental engagement in stimulating activities and reduces parental stress. Treated families gain enhanced access to social benefits, including cash transfers and employment support programs.
3. Are Big Cities Important for Economic Growth?
Matthew Turner and David N. Weil #33334
Cities are often described as engines of economic growth. We assess this statement quantitatively. We focus on two mechanisms: a static agglomeration effect that makes production in bigger cities more efficient, and a dynamic effect whereby urban scale impacts the productivity of invention, which in turn determines the speed of technological progress for the country as a whole. Using estimates of these effects from the literature and MSA-level patent and population data since 1900, we ask how much lower US output would be in 2010 if city size had been limited to one million or one hundred thousand starting in 1900. These effects are small. If city sizes had been limited to one million people since 1900, output in 2010 would have been only 8% lower than its observed value.
4. E-Cigarette Taxation and Queer Youth
Anthony Chuo, Chad D. Cotti, Charles J. Courtemanche, Johanna Catherine Maclean, Erik T. Nesson, and Joseph J. Sabia #33326
Electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS) use among lesbian, gay, bisexual, and questioning (LGBQ) teenagers is over 30 percent higher than among their heterosexual counterparts. Yet little is known about how recent efforts to curb nicotine vaping through ENDS taxes impact sexual minorities. This study explores this question using data from the 2015-2021 State Youth Behavior Surveys. We find that a one-dollar (in 2021$) per mL of e-liquid increase in ENDS taxes reduces the likelihood of any prior-month ENDS use among heterosexual teens by about four percentage points and the likelihood of habitual vaping (as measured by frequent and everyday use) by about two percentage points. In sharp contrast, we find no evidence that ENDS taxes reduce any of the vaping measures for queer youths. The coefficient estimates are consistently less strongly negative for LGBQ than heterosexual youths, and the differences in effects on frequent and everyday vaping are statistically significant. Therefore, taxes widen disparities in vaping between queer and straight teens. The estimated effect of ENDS taxes on LGBQ teens who do not report being depressed, suicidal, or bullied is similar to the effect among heterosexuals, suggesting that LGBQ youths’ tax insensitivity may be explained by their dependence on e-cigarettes to cope with unique stress-related psychological challenges.
5. The Comovement of Voter Preferences: Insights from U.S. Presidential Election Prediction Markets Beyond Polls
Mikhail Chernov, Vadim Elenev, and Dongho Song #33339
We propose a novel time-series econometric framework to forecast U.S. Presidential election outcomes in real time by combining polling data, economic fundamentals, and political prediction market prices. Our model estimates the joint dynamics of voter preferences across states. Applying our approach to the 2024 Presidential Election, we find a two-factor structure driving the vast majority of the variation in voter preferences. We identify electorally similar state clusters without relying on historical data or demographic models of voter behavior. Our simulations quantify the correlations between state-level election outcomes. Failing to take the correlations into account can bias the forecasted win probability for a given candidate by more than 10 percentage points. We find Pennsylvania to be the most pivotal state in the 2024 election. Our results provide insights for election observers, candidates, and traders.
6. CEO-Firm Matches and Productivity in 42 Countries
Amanda Dahlstrand, Dávid László, Helena Schweiger, Oriana Bandiera, Andrea Prat, and Raffaella Sadun #33324
Firms are key to economic development, and CEOs are key to firm productivity. Are firms in countries at varying stages of development led by the right CEOs, and if not, why? We develop a parsimonious measure of CEO time use that allows us to differentiate CEOs into “leaders” and “managers” in a survey of 4,800 manufacturing firms across 42 countries, with income per capita ranging from USD 4,000 to 45,000. We find that poorer countries have fewer leaders and relate this to training opportunities. Even when suitable leaders are available, they often do not lead the firms that would benefit the most, resulting in mismatches that can cause up to a 20% loss in productivity for the mismatched firms. The findings imply that policies that address the causes of mismatch could significantly enhance growth without additional resources.
7. Technological Disruption in the Labor Market
David J. Deming, Christopher Ong, and Lawrence H. Summers #33323
This paper explores past episodes of technological disruption in the US labor market, with the goal of learning lessons about the likely future impact of artificial intelligence (AI). We measure changes in the structure of the US labor market going back over a century. We find, perhaps surprisingly, that the pace of change has slowed over time. The years spanning 1990 to 2017 were less disruptive than any prior period we measure, going back to 1880. This comparative decline is not because the job market is stable today but rather because past changes were so profound. General-purpose technologies (GPTs) like steam power and electricity dramatically disrupted the twentieth-century labor market, but the changes took place over decades. We argue that AI could be a GPT on the scale of prior disruptive innovations, which means it is likely too early to assess its full impacts. Nonetheless, we present four indications that the pace of labor market change has accelerated recently, possibly due to technological change. First, the labor market is no longer polarizing— employment in low- and middle-paid occupations has declined, while highly paid employment has grown. Second, employment growth has stalled in low-paid service jobs. Third, the share of employment in STEM jobs has increased by more than 50 percent since 2010, fueled by growth in software and computer-related occupations. Fourth, retail sales employment has declined by 25 percent in the last decade, likely because of technological improvements in online retail. The post-pandemic labor market is changing very rapidly, and a key question is whether this faster pace of change will persist into the future.
8. Immigrant Age at Arrival and the Intergenerational Transmission of Ethnic Identification among Mexican Americans
Brian Duncan and Stephen J. Trejo #33329
Many U.S.-born descendants of Mexican immigrants do not identify as Mexican or Hispanic in response to the Hispanic origin question asked in the Census and other government surveys. Analyzing microdata from the 2000 U.S. Census and the 2001-2019 American Community Surveys, we show that the age at arrival of Mexican immigrants exerts an important influence on ethnic identification not only for these immigrants but also for their U.S.-born children. Among Mexican immigrants who arrived as children, the rate of “ethnic attrition”—i.e., not self-identifying as Mexican or Hispanic—is higher for those who migrated at a younger age. Moreover, the children of these immigrants exhibit a similar pattern: greater ethnic attrition among children whose parents moved to the United States at a younger age. We unpack the relative importance of several key mechanisms—parental English proficiency, parental education, family structure, intermarriage, and geographic location—through which the age at arrival of immigrant parents influences the ethnic identification of their children. Intermarriage turns out to be the primary mechanism: Mexican immigrants who arrived at a very young age are more likely to marry non-Hispanics, and the rate of ethnic attrition is dramatically higher among children with mixed ethnic backgrounds.
9. The Impact of Counterfeit Victims in the Victim Marketplace
Mingyuan Ban, Yi Qian, Qiang Gong, and Karl Aquino #33327
Just and efficient allocations of charity have attracted much academic and media attention. The sources of inefficiency and unjust are important to understand yet understudied. Our study aims to fill this void by directly modelling the victims’ market in a collective reputation framework. By analyzing three types of individuals who signal their victim status with different personalities and incentives, we derive the honest, dishonest and unfunded equilibria as well as the mixed equilibrium where both types of these equilibria could coexist. Our analyses of the social welfare under each equilibrium shed light on key parameters that could potentially serve as policy instruments for improving social welfare. We also reveal that the mechanisms analogous to bank run and lemons market could take place in the victims’ market as much as in other markets. In particular, when charity resources are scarce, more strategic signallers could rush to emit false victim signals and drive the market to the dishonest equilibrium with lower social welfare. The need for screening signallers could drive up the psychological costs of authentic victims to the extent that they voluntarily drop out of the market and suffer alone, resulting in misplaced charity funds and severe deadweight losses. When there is psychological utility associated with cheating for the hedonic signallers, the social welfare is even worse off.
10. Corporate Resiliency and the Choice Between Financial and Operational Hedging
Viral V. Acharya, Heitor Almeida, Yakov Amihud, and Ping Liu #33340
We investigate how firms manage financial default risk (on debt) and operational default risk (on delivery obligations). Financially constrained firms reduce operational hedging through inventory and supply chain in favor of cash holdings. Our model predicts that firms’ markup increases with financial default risk as they cut operational hedging costs. Empirical analysis confirms this prediction and shows that the markup-credit risk relationship strengthens during adverse aggregate shocks, particularly for firms exposed to lending disruptions. Market power alone cannot explain this relationship, which reflects firms’ strategic adjustments in operational hedging practices.
11. Are People Fleeing States with Abortion Bans?
Daniel L. Dench, Kelly Lifchez, Jason M. Lindo, and Jancy Ling Liu #33328
In this study, we investigate whether reproductive rights affect migration. We do so using a synthetic difference-in-differences design that leverages variation from the 2022 Dobbs decision, which allowed states to ban abortion, and population flows based on change-of-address data from the United States Postal Service. The results indicate that abortion bans cause significant increases in net migration outflows, with effect sizes growing throughout the year after the decision. The most recent data point indicates that total abortion bans come at the cost of more than 36,000 residents per quarter. The effects are more prominent for single-person households than for family households, which may reflect larger effects on younger adults. We also find suggestive evidence of impacts for states that were hostile towards abortion in ways other than having total bans.
12. Community Targeting at Scale
Sudarno Sumarto, Elan Satriawan, Benjamin A. Olken, Abhijit Banerjee, Achmad Tohari, Vivi Alatas, and Rema Hanna #33322
Community-based targeting, in which communities allocate social assistance using local information about who is poor, in experimental settings leads to nuanced allocations that reflect local concepts of poverty. What happens when it is scaled up, by either by making the stakes high, or by replicating the process nationwide? We study this by examining community targeting in both a high-stakes experiment, in which villages determined who would receive the Indonesian conditional cash transfer program – worth almost USD 1,000 over 6 years – and in a nationwide scaleup, whereby Indonesia used community-based meetings to allocate COVID-transfers to over 8 million households. We find that both the experimental scale-up and the massive national scale-up had broadly similar performance to the original experimental study. We find strongly progressive targeting as measured by baseline household consumption, though – as in the pilot – not quite as strong as if they had used a fully up-to-date proxy means test. In both scale-ups, we also find that the villages gave additional weight to locally-valued characteristics beyond pure consumption, such as widowhood, recent illness, and food expenditure shares, again echoing the findings from pilots. The results suggest that community targeting can perform well at scale, as predicted by the experimental study.
13. New Keynesian Economics through the Extensive Margin
Saki Bigio and Akira Ishide #33332
This paper reformulates the New Keynesian model to incorporate output adjustments through the extensive margin. Shifting from adjustments through the intensive to the extensive employment margin, the model introduces predetermined output, altering key properties of the New Keynesian framework. First, the Taylor principle is inverted: stability is achieved when nominal rates respond less than one-for-one with inflation. Second, the model significantly alters the output responses to changes in monetary policy. We argue that this represents a challenge and an opportunity for the literature. Sticky information allows the model to correct the sign of impulse responses.
14. Can Early Intervention Reduce Future Child Maltreatment?
Anna Aizer and Emilia Brito Rebolledo #33341
Children with a disability are 3.5 times more likely to be maltreated. Federal Early Intervention (EI) serves 426,000 children 0-3 with a disability, 3.7% of the entire population under three. EI’s objective is to support families in caring for their children’s special needs. Compared to children evaluated but ineligible for EI, children receiving EI in the first year of life are 3.3 percentage points less likely to be maltreated later in life, a decline of 45%, with smaller effects for those receiving services later. Targeting at-risk children, intervening early, and engaging with families in a cooperative manner effectively reduces future maltreatment.
15. Distance to Degrees: How College Proximity Shapes Students’ Enrollment Choices and Attainment Across Race-Ethnicity and Socioeconomic Status
Riley K. Acton, Kalena Cortes, Lois Miller, and Camila Morales #33337
Leveraging rich data on the universe of Texas high school graduates, we estimate how the relationship between geographic access to public two- and four-year postsecondary institutions and postsecondary outcomes varies across race-ethnicity and socioeconomic status. We find that students are sensitive to the distance they must travel to access public colleges and universities, but there are heterogeneous effects across students – particularly with regard to distance to public two-year colleges (i.e., community colleges). White, Asian, and higher-income students who live in a community college desert (i.e., at least 30 minutes driving time from the nearest public two-year college) substitute towards four-year colleges and are more likely to complete bachelor’s degrees. Meanwhile, Black, Hispanic, and lower-income students respond to living in a community college desert by forgoing college enrollment altogether, reducing the likelihood that they earn associate’s and reducing the likelihood that they ultimately transfer to four-year colleges and earn bachelor’s degrees. These relationships persist up to eight years following high school graduation, resulting in substantial long-term gaps in overall degree attainment by race-ethnicity and income in areas with limited postsecondary access.
16. Fisher-Schultz Lecture: Linear Estimation of Structural and Causal Effects for Nonseparable Panel Data
Victor Chernozhukov, Ben Deaner, Ying Gao, Jerry A. Hausman, and Whitney Newey #33325
This paper develops linear estimators for structural and causal parameters in nonparametric,nonseparable models using panel data. These models incorporate unobserved, time-varying, individual heterogeneity, which may be correlated with the regressors. Estimation is based on an approximation of the nonseparable model by a linear sieve specification with individual specific parameters. Effects of interest are estimated by a bias corrected average of individual ridge regressions. We demonstrate how this approach can be applied to estimate causal effects, counterfactual consumer welfare, and averages of individual taxable income elasticities. We show that the proposed estimator has an empirical Bayes interpretation and possesses a number of other useful properties. We formulate Large-T asymptotics that can accommodate discrete regressors and which bypass partial identification in this case. We employ the methods to estimate average equivalent variation and deadweight loss for potential price increases using data on grocery purchases.
17. Limited Risk Transfer Between Investors: A New Benchmark for Macro-Finance Models
Xavier Gabaix, Ralph S. J. Koijen, Federico Mainardi, Sangmin Simon Oh, and Motohiro Yogo #33336
We define risk transfer as the percent change in the market risk exposure for a group of investors over a given period. We estimate risk transfer using novel data on U.S. investors' portfolio holdings, flows, and returns at the security level with comprehensive coverage across asset classes and broad coverage across the wealth distribution (including 400 billionaires). Our key finding is that risk transfer is small with a mean absolute value of 0.65% per quarter. Leading macro-finance models with heterogeneous investors predict risk transfer that exceeds our estimate by a factor greater than ten because investors react too much to the time-varying equity premium. Thus, the small risk transfer is a new moment to evaluate macro-finance models. We develop a model with inelastic demand, calibrated to the standard asset pricing moments on realized and expected stock returns, that explains the observed risk transfer. The model is adaptable to other macro-finance applications with heterogeneous households.
18. Strategic Commitments to Decarbonize: The Role of Large Firms, Common Ownership, and Governments
Viral V. Acharya, Robert F. Engle III, and Olivier Wang #33335
We study how government policies and corporate commitments to decarbonize interact under two externalities: environmental damages and green innovation spillovers. Unconstrained carbon taxes and innovation subsidies could achieve first-best outcomes, but when government policies face constraints, commitments by large firms and institutional investors can serve as profit-driven coordination devices that spur green innovation and technology adoption, and thereby reduce overall transition costs. Firm commitments also enhance government policy credibility by lowering the need for high future carbon taxes. Our empirical evidence confirms that firm size and green common ownership drive Net Zero commitments and decarbonization investments.
19. Intergenerational Mobility over Two Centuries
Ran Abramitzky, Leah Platt Boustan, and Tamar Matiashvili #33330
This paper provides an overview of recent empirical and methodological advances in the study of historical intergenerational mobility trends, with a focus on key measurement challenges. These advances are made possible by the recent digitization of historical censuses and new methods of historical record-linking, which have enabled researchers to create large historical samples of parent-child links. We identify three main findings. First, absolute mobility increased in the decades leading up to 1940 but has since declined, both in the US and other industrial countries. Second, recent studies on relative mobility question the classic narrative that the US has transitioned from a “land of opportunity” in the 19th century to a less mobile society today, suggesting that mobility was not as high in the past. However, estimates of relative mobility are sensitive to choices regarding sample selection and measurement. Third, we explore mechanisms underlying shifts in intergenerational mobility over time, including geographic mobility, wealth shocks, educational attainment, locational effects, and the transmission of parent-specific human capital. We conclude by suggesting avenues for future research.
