The Economic Journal 2025年 1月刊 目录与摘要

刊发卷期：Volume 135, Issue 665

刊发时间：January 2025

期刊等级：ABS 4

出版厂商：Wiley-Blackwell

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目录

Articles

1.House Prices and Misallocation: The Impact of the Collateral Channel on Productivity

Sergi Basco, David Lopez-Rodriguez, Enrique Moral-Benito

2.Do Motivated Classmates Matter for Educational Success?

Jan Bietenbeck

3.FAQ: How do I estimate the output gap?

Fabio Canova

4.Healthcare Appointments as Commitment Devices

Laura Derksen, Jason T Kerwin, Natalia Ordaz Reynoso, Olivier Sterck

5.Is the output growth rate in NIPA a welfare measure?

Jorge Durán, Omar Licandro

6.Informal Incentives and Labour Markets

Matthias Fahn, Takeshi Murooka

7.Optimal Taxation of Capital Income with Heterogeneous Rates of Return

Aart Gerritsen, Bas Jacobs, Kevin Spiritus, Alexandra V Rusu

8.Network formation and efficiency in linear-quadratic games: An experimental study

Gergely Horváth

9.Trading Stocks Builds Financial Confidence and Compresses the Gender Gap

Saumitra Jha, Moses Shayo

10.Assessing Macroeconomic Tail Risk

Francesca Loria, Christian Matthes, Donghai Zhang

11.Agricultural Technological Change, Female Earnings and Fertility: Evidence from Brazil

Vivek S Moorthy

12.Preventing Child Maltreatment: Beneficial Side Effects of Public Childcare

Malte Sandner, Stephan L Thomsen, Libertad González

13.Commitment and the Dynamics of Household Labour Supply

Alexandros Theloudis, Jorge Velilla, Pierre-André Chiappori, José Ignacio Giménez-Nadal, José Alberto Molina

Short Paper

14.The Rise of Pass-Throughs: an Empirical Investigation

Sebastian Dyrda, Benjamin Pugsley

摘要

1.House Prices and Misallocation: The Impact of the Collateral Channel on Productivity

Sergi Basco, David Lopez-Rodriguez, Enrique Moral-Benito

This paper investigates the impact of local house price booms on capital misallocation within industries. Using the geographical variation provided by the Spanish housing boom (2003–7), we show that firms exposed to positive local house price shocks received more bank credit and their investment grew more when they had a higher proportion of real estate assets. This collateral channel results in an increasing dispersion of the capital-labour ratio within industries. A counterfactual calculation suggests that the capital misallocation generated by this channel can account for around 40% of the total factor productivity decline experienced by the Spanish economy during the housing boom.

2.Do Motivated Classmates Matter for Educational Success?

Jan Bietenbeck

I provide evidence of social spillovers of personality by showing that being in class with motivated peers affects educational success. I first document that academic motivation, a key aspect of personality in the context of education, predicts own achievement, classroom behaviour, the high school grade point average and college-test taking among elementary school students. Exploiting random assignment of students to classes, I then show that exposure to motivated classmates causally affects achievement, an effect that operates over and above spillovers of classmates’ past achievement and socio-demographic composition. However, peer motivation in elementary school does not affect own motivation and long-term educational success.

3.FAQ: How do I estimate the output gap?

Fabio Canova

I investigate the properties of output gaps in New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models and study the relationship between theory-based quantities and the estimates obtained with standard approaches. Theoretical gaps display low-frequency variations, have similar frequency domain representations as potentials and are generally correlated with them. Potentials have important business cycle variability. Existing statistical approaches fail to recognise these features and generate distorted estimates. Gaps are best estimated with a polynomial filter. Explanations for the outcomes are given. I propose a statistical procedure reducing estimation biases.

4.Healthcare Appointments as Commitment Devices

Laura Derksen, Jason T Kerwin, Natalia Ordaz Reynoso, Olivier Sterck

We show that ordinary appointments can act as effective substitutes for hard commitment devices and increase demand for a critical healthcare service, particularly among those with self-control problems. We show this using an experiment that randomly offered HIV testing appointments and hard commitment devices to high-risk men in Malawi. Appointments more than double testing rates, with effects concentrated among those who demand commitment. In contrast, most men who take up hard commitments lose their investments. Appointments overcome commitment problems without the potential drawback of commitment failure, and have the potential to increase demand for healthcare in the developing world.

5.Is the output growth rate in NIPA a welfare measure?

Jorge Durán, Omar Licandro

This paper shows that, in a dynamic general equilibrium framework, the rate of output growth as measured by national income and product accounts reflects changes in welfare in the precise sense of equivalent variation. The main argument is straightforward. In a two-sector dynamic general equilibrium model of heterogeneous households, recursive preferences and quasi-concave technology, the Bellman equation provides a representation of household preferences over current consumption and investment. When applied to this representation of preferences, a Fisher–Shell true quantity index turns out to be equal to the Divisia index, closely approximated by the Fisher ideal chain index used in national income and product accounts.

6.Informal Incentives and Labour Markets

Matthias Fahn, Takeshi Murooka

This paper investigates how labour-market tightness affects market outcomes if firms use informal, self-enforcing, agreements to motivate workers. We characterise profit-maximising equilibria and show that an increase in the supply of homogeneous workers can increase wages. Moreover, even though all workers are identical in terms of skills or productivity, profit-maximising discrimination equilibria exist. There, a group of majority workers is paid higher wages than a group of minority workers, who may even be completely excluded. Minimum wages can reduce such discrimination and increase employment. We discuss how these results relate to empirical evidence on downward wage rigidity, immigration, the gender pay gap and credentialism.

7.Optimal Taxation of Capital Income with Heterogeneous Rates of Return

Aart Gerritsen, Bas Jacobs, Kevin Spiritus, Alexandra V Rusu

We derive the Pareto-efficient mix of non-linear taxes on labour income and capital income if people differ in their rates of return on capital. We allow for two reasons why rates of return differ: because individuals with higher ability are better able to invest their capital or because wealthier individuals enjoy scale effects in wealth accumulation. In both cases, a strictly positive tax on capital income is part of any Pareto-efficient tax system. We derive a condition for the Pareto-efficient tax mix that relies solely on empirical sufficient statistics—not on social welfare weights—and find that Pareto-efficient taxes on capital income increase with the degree of return heterogeneity. Numerical simulations for empirically plausible return heterogeneity suggest that Pareto-efficient marginal tax rates on capital income are positive and substantial.

8.Network formation and efficiency in linear-quadratic games: An experimental study

Gergely Horváth

We experimentally study effort provision and network formation in the linear-quadratic game characterised by positive externality and complementarity of effort choices among network neighbours. We compare experimental outcomes to the equilibrium and efficient allocations and study the impact of group size and linking costs. We find that individuals overprovide effort relative to the equilibrium level on the network they form. However, their payoffs are lower than the equilibrium payoffs because they create fewer links than is optimal, which limits the beneficial spillover effects of effort provision. Reducing the linking costs does not significantly increase the connectedness of the network and the welfare loss is higher in larger groups. Individuals connect to the highest-effort providers in the group and ignore links to relative low-effort providers, even if those links would be beneficial to form. This effect explains the lack of links in the network.

9.Trading Stocks Builds Financial Confidence and Compresses the Gender Gap

Saumitra Jha, Moses Shayo

Many studies document low rates of financial literacy and suboptimal levels of participation in financial markets. These issues are particularly acute among women. Does this reflect a self-reinforcing trap? If so, can a nudge to participate in financial markets generate knowledge, confidence and further increase informed participation? We conduct a large field experiment that enables and incentivises working-age men and women—a challenging group to reach with standard financial training programs—to trade stocks for four to seven weeks. We provide no additional educational content. We find that trading significantly improves financial confidence, as reflected in stock market participation, objective and subjective measures of financial knowledge, and risk tolerance. These effects are especially strong among women. Participants also become more self-reliant and consult others less when making financial decisions.

10.Assessing Macroeconomic Tail Risk

Francesca Loria, Christian Matthes, Donghai Zhang

Real gross domestic product and industrial production in the United States display substantial asymmetry and tail risk. Is this asymmetry driven by a specific structural shock? Our empirical approach, based on quantile regressions and local projections, suggests otherwise. We find that the tenth percentile of predictive growth distributions responds between three and six times more than the median to monetary policy shocks, financial shocks, uncertainty shocks, and oil price shocks, indicating a common transmission mechanism. We present two data-generating processes that are capable of matching this finding: a threshold vector autoregression model and a non-linear equilibrium model.

11.Agricultural Technological Change, Female Earnings and Fertility: Evidence from Brazil

Vivek S Moorthy

I study how agricultural technological change affects labour market opportunities and fertility in a developing country context. Exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in the adoption of genetically engineered soy across municipalities in Brazil, I show that this labour-saving technology reduced female agricultural earnings and employment without inducing any female sectoral reallocation. Furthermore, this technology adoption increased fertility due to increases in overall household earnings and substitution effects driven by the reduction in female labour demand. These results suggest that technological progress in developing countries may not improve female economic opportunities or lower fertility unless substitution effects are negative and sufficiently large.

12.Preventing Child Maltreatment: Beneficial Side Effects of Public Childcare

Malte Sandner, Stephan L Thomsen, Libertad González

We investigate the impact of public childcare provision on the incidence of severe child maltreatment. For identification, we exploit a reform that expanded early childcare in Germany, generating large temporal and spatial variation in childcare coverage at the county level. Using high-quality administrative data covering all reported cases of child maltreatment in Germany by county and year, we find that an increase in childcare slots by one percentage point in a county reduced child maltreatment cases leading to out-of-home placement by about 1%. Our results suggest that the provision of universal public childcare may be more cost effective than previously thought.

13.Commitment and the Dynamics of Household Labour Supply

Alexandros Theloudis, Jorge Velilla, Pierre-André Chiappori, José Ignacio Giménez-Nadal, José Alberto Molina

The extent to which individuals commit to their partner for life has important implications. This paper develops a life-cycle collective model of the household, through which it characterises behaviour in three prominent alternative types of commitment: full, limited and no commitment. We propose a test that distinguishes between all three types based on how contemporaneous and historical news affect household behaviour. Our test permits heterogeneity in the degree of commitment across households. Using recent data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we reject full and no commitment, while we find strong evidence for limited commitment.

Short Paper

14.The Rise of Pass-Throughs: an Empirical Investigation

Sebastian Dyrda, Benjamin Pugsley

Almost half of all private employment in the United States is within businesses that do not pay corporate income tax. Instead, business income passes through to the owners’ individual income taxes. This pass-through share of employment has more than tripled since the early 1980s. Using comprehensive, confidential administrative data, this paper highlights five core findings underlying this growth: (1) the rise in pass-throughs is pervasive across industries and states; (2) the pass-through share converges unconditionally across both; (3) entrants’ organisational choices drive 60% of the rise; (4) shifts in firm and organisational dynamics following the 1986 Tax Reform Act show continued effects through the 2000s; (5) organisational forms exhibit high persistence with little life-cycle variation. Our study implies that tax or regulatory policy changes might take decades to manifest fully.