The Latest NBER Working Papers(2024-12-16)
NBER最新工作论文
2024-12-16
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目录
1. Conflict in Dismissals
Pauline Carry and Benjamin Schoefer #33245
2. Conditions Under Which College Students Can be Responsive to Text-based Nudging
Lindsay C. Page, Katharine E. Meyer, Jeonghyun Lee, and Hunter Gehlbach #33257
3. When Democracy Refuses to Die: Evaluating a Training Program for New Politicians
Ernesto Dal Bó, Claudio Ferraz, Frederico Finan, and Pedro Pessoa #33251
4. Financial Inclusion Across the United States
Motohiro Yogo, Andrew Whitten, and Natalie Cox #33256
5. Toward an Understanding of the Political Economy of Using Field Experiments in Policymaking
Guglielmo Briscese and John A. List #33239
6. Efficient Imperfect Competition with an Application to International Trade
Guido Menzio #33253
7. The Long-run Effects of Transportation Productivity on the US Economy
A. Kerem Coşar, Sophie Osotimehin, and Latchezar Popov #33248
8. Suez
David S. Jacks, Christopher M. Meissner, and Nikolaus Wolf #33250
9. Unhooking the Past: Early-life Exposure to Hookworm Eradication and Later-life Longevity
Hamid Noghanibehambari and Jason Fletcher #33249
10. Beliefs of Others: an Experiment
Marina Agranov and Polina Detkova #33261
11. Granular Treasury Demand with Arbitrageurs
Kristy A.E. Jansen, Wenhao Li, and Lukas Schmid #33243
12. War Mobilization and Economic Development: World War II and Structural Transformation in India
Aneesha Parvathaneni and Dean Yang #33246
13. The Complementarity Between Cities and State Capacity
Edward L. Glaeser #33247
14. Beyond Bruen: Can Firearm Training Replace Local Discretion in Concealed Carry Permitting?
John J. Donohue, Matthew Benavides, Amy L. Zhang, and Alex Oktay #33240
16. The Effect of Medicaid on Crime: Evidence from the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment
Amy Finkelstein, Sarah Miller, and Katherine Baicker #33244
17. Cracks in the Glass Ceiling and Gender Equality: Do Exports Shatter the Glass Ceiling?
Bruno César Araújo, Lourenço S. Paz, and James E. West #33260
18. Rules vs. Discretion: Decoding FOMC Policy Deliberations
Michael D. Bordo, Klodiana Istrefi, and Humberto Martínez #33262
19. LASH risk and Interest Rates
Laura Alfaro, Saleem A. Bahaj, Robert Czech, Jonathon Hazell, and Ioana Neamtu #33241
20. Political Power and Market Power
Bo Cowgill, Andrea Prat, and Tommaso Valletti #33255
21. Financing, Ownership, and Performance: A Novel, Longitudinal Firm-Level Database
J. David Brown, Steven J. Davis, Lucia S. Foster, John C. Haltiwanger, and John Sabelhaus #33254
22. Federal Reserve Structure, Economic Ideas, and Banking Policy During the “Quiet Period” in Banking
Michael D. Bordo and Edward S. Prescott #33263
23. When Given Discretion Teachers Did Not Shirk: Evidence from Remedial Education in Secondary Schools
Sabrin A. Beg, Anne E. Fitzpatrick, Jason T. Kerwin, Adrienne Lucas, and Khandker Wahedur Rahman #33242
24. Sustainable Investing
Lubos Pastor, Robert F. Stambaugh, and Lucian A. Taylor #33252
摘要
1. Conflict in Dismissals
Pauline Carry and Benjamin Schoefer #33245
How do the employer and the worker interact during a dismissal? This paper tests whether they cooperate to minimize costs, or instead engage in conflict—i.e., deliberately amplify costs. We leverage a unique feature of the French labor market: an employer and a worker can jointly opt to replace a costly dismissal by a cheaper and more flexible “separation by mutual agreement” (SMA). Introduced in 2008, SMAs eliminate red tape costs, enable severance pay bargaining, and preclude litigation. However, we find that only 12% of dismissals are resolved through SMAs—far below the efficient level predicted by standard bargaining models. Surveying HR directors, we identify three drivers of conflict that hinder cost minimization: (i) hostility between the employer and the employee, (ii) employers using dismissals as a “discipline device” to maintain incentives, and (iii) asymmetric beliefs about subsequent labor court outcomes. Using counterfactual scenarios in the survey, we find that removing these three drivers of conflict would increase SMA adoption from 12% to 67% of dismissals. We confirm that less conflictual dismissals—due to either better employer-employee relationships or workers benefiting from early retirement—end more often as SMAs.
2. Conditions Under Which College Students Can be Responsive to Text-based Nudging
Lindsay C. Page, Katharine E. Meyer, Jeonghyun Lee, and Hunter Gehlbach #33257
College success requires students to engage with their institution academically and administratively. Missteps with administrative processes can threaten student persistence and success. Through two experimental studies, one exploratory (N=13,657) and one pre-registered and confirmatory (N=11,561), we assessed the effectiveness of an artificially intelligent, text-based chatbot that proactively reached out to students to support navigation of administrative processes and use of campus resources. Across two-year and four-year college contexts, outreach was most effective when focused on discrete administrative processes–such as filing financial aid forms and managing registration holds–which were acute and time-sensitive and for which outreach could be targeted to those for whom it was relevant. We situate these experiments in the context of similar efforts targeting college students to formulate testable hypotheses about their effective use for promoting college success. Specifically, we hypothesize that proactive outreach will be most effective when: (1) framed as from a trusted source with whom students would expect to communicate; (2) targeted using data to ensure that communication is relevant to students’ personal circumstances; and (3) focused on well-defined, required, and often acute tasks.
3. When Democracy Refuses to Die: Evaluating a Training Program for New Politicians
Ernesto Dal Bó, Claudio Ferraz, Frederico Finan, and Pedro Pessoa #33251
We evaluate the effects of a program in Brazil that selects and trains new politicians, addressing three main challenges: selection bias from program screening, self-selection into candidacy, and the need to quantify the contributions of both selection and training in a holistic evaluation. Our findings show that the program raised political entry by doubling candidacy rates and increasing electoral success by 69%. However, much of the overall effect was driven by screening, which accounted for 30% of the increase in candidacy and 43% of the increase in election rates, while also making the candidate pool more diverse, competent, and committed to democratic values. Renewing the political class involves trade-offs, as some traits favored by the program did not align with voter preferences, and also reduced the descriptive representation of low-income individuals.
4. Financial Inclusion Across the United States
Motohiro Yogo, Andrew Whitten, and Natalie Cox #33256
We study retirement and bank account participation for the universe of U.S. households with a member aged 50 to 59 in the administrative tax data. ZCTA-level average income, income inequality, and racial composition predict retirement account participation for low-income households, conditional on household income and regional price parities. Income inequality also predicts bank account participation for low-income households. We estimate the causal effect of access to an employer retirement plan on participation. Recent policy proposals for universal access with automatic enrollment could increase participation by 19 percentage points in the lowest income quintile over ten years.
5. Toward an Understanding of the Political Economy of Using Field Experiments in Policymaking
Guglielmo Briscese and John A. List #33239
Field experiments provide the clearest window into the true impact of many policies, allowing us to understand what works, what does not, and why. Yet, their widespread use has not been accompanied by a deep understanding of the political economy of their adoption in policy circles. This study begins with a large-scale natural field experiment that demonstrates the ineffectiveness of a widely implemented intervention. We leverage this result to understand how policymakers and a representative sample of the U.S. population update their beliefs of not only the policy itself, but the use of science and the trust they have in government. Policymakers, initially overly optimistic about the program’s effectiveness, adjust their views based on evidence but show reduced demand for experimentation, suggesting experiment aversion when results defy expectations. Among the U.S. public, support for policy experiments is high and remains robust despite receiving disappointing results, though trust in the implementing institutions declines, particularly in terms of perceptions of competence and integrity. Providing additional information on the value of learning from unexpected findings partially mitigates this trust loss. These insights, from both the demand and supply side, reveal the complexities of managing policymakers’ expectations and underscore the potential returns to educating the public on the value of open-mindedness in policy experimentation.
6. Efficient Imperfect Competition with an Application to International Trade
Guido Menzio #33253
I study the equilibrium and the welfare effects of international trade when product markets are imperfectly competitive due of search frictions—as in Burdett and Judd (1983)—rather than product differentiation—as in Dixit and Stiglitz (1977). Markups are positive, even though there are multiple firms producing identical goods. Markups depend negatively on the number of firms producing identical goods, which, in turn, determines the extent of competition in the market. Markups may be increasing, constant, decreasing or non-monotonic in firm's size, depending on the extent of competition and on the distribution of marginal costs. The entry of firms and the quantity of output produced by each firm are efficient, even though the market is imperfectly competitive. International trade increases the measure of firms in the market, intensifies competition, lowers markups, and unambiguously increases welfare. These "natural" effects of trade emerge generically in the Burdett-Judd model of imperfect competition. In the Dixit-Stiglitz model of imperfect competition, these effects are an artifact of particular specifications of preferences.
7. The Long-run Effects of Transportation Productivity on the US Economy
A. Kerem Coşar, Sophie Osotimehin, and Latchezar Popov #33248
We quantify the aggregate, regional and sectoral impacts of transportation productivity growth on the US economy over the period 1947-2017. Using a multi-region, multi-sector model that explicitly captures produced transportation services as a key input to interregional trade, we find that the calibrated change in transportation productivity had a sizable impact on aggregate welfare, magnified by a factor of 2.3 compared to its sectoral share in GDP. The amplification mechanism results from the complementarity between transport services and tradable goods, interacting with sectoral and spatial linkages. The geographical implications are highly uneven, with the West and Southwest benefiting the most from market access improvements while the Northeast experiences a decline. Sectoral impacts are largest in transportation-intensive activities like agriculture, mining and heavy manufacturing. Our results demonstrate the outsized and heterogeneous impact of the transportation sector in shaping US economic activity through specialization and spatial transformation.
8. Suez
David S. Jacks, Christopher M. Meissner, and Nikolaus Wolf #33250
For all its importance, there still is no comprehensive quantitative assessment of the Suez Canal’s opening in 1869. We find that it led to a 72% relative increase in bilateral exports for affected country pairs and a likely permanent increase in world trade. With respect to the composition of trade, Suez was associated with large changes in export shares but only for a handful of goods categories. With respect to mechanisms, the relative cost of using steamships on Suez-affected routes fell dramatically and immediately after 1869, suggesting a vital role for the canal in the global diffusion of steam technology.
9. Unhooking the Past: Early-life Exposure to Hookworm Eradication and Later-life Longevity
Hamid Noghanibehambari and Jason Fletcher #33249
This study examines the long-term effects of the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission’s (RSC) hookworm eradication campaign, initiated in the American South in the 1910s, on old-age longevity. Utilizing Social Security Administration death records linked to the 1940 full-count census, we employ a difference-in-differences approach to examine the effects of early-life exposure to the eradication campaign on later-life outcomes. We find that individuals exposed to the RSC campaign during in-utero and early-life experience an increase of 1.3 months in longevity. The effects are substantially larger among nonwhites, children of illiterate mothers, and those born in urban areas. Moreover, we provide evidence of dynamic complementarity in the effects of hookworm eradication on longevity, with larger effects observed in counties exposed to the Rosenwald school construction movement and in states with more stringent child labor laws. Using the 1940 census and World War II enlistment data, we provide suggestive evidence of improvements in educational attainment, income, and cognitive ability as possible pathways. Our findings contribute to the literature on the lasting effects of early-life public health interventions and underscore the importance of such programs in addressing present-day global health challenges.
10. Beliefs of Others: an Experiment
Marina Agranov and Polina Detkova #33261
We study how people think others update their beliefs upon encountering new evidence. We find that when two individuals share the same prior, one believes that new evidence cannot systematically shift the other’s beliefs in either direction (Martingale property). When the two have different priors, people think that any information brings others’ expected posteriors closer to their own prior, but this adjustment is less responsive to information quality than theory predicts. We identify the primary cause of this insensitivity and discuss the implications of our findings for strategic games with asymmetric information, information design, and, more broadly, for understanding societal polarization.
11. Granular Treasury Demand with Arbitrageurs
Kristy A.E. Jansen, Wenhao Li, and Lukas Schmid #33243
We construct a novel dataset of sector-level U.S. Treasury holdings, covering the majority of the market. Using this dataset, we estimate maturity-specific demand functions and elasticities of different investors and the Fed, and integrate them into a dynamic equilibrium model of the Treasury market with risk-averse arbitrageurs. Quantifying the model reveals that (1) strong arbitrage leads to an elastic Treasury market and a steeply downward-sloping term structure of market elasticity; (2) monetary tightening raises term premia due to arbitrageurs interacting with investors exhibiting high cross-elasticities; (3) QE has limited impact unless the Fed credibly commits to sustained balance sheet expansion.
12. War Mobilization and Economic Development: World War II and Structural Transformation in India
Aneesha Parvathaneni and Dean Yang #33246
Can temporary wartime mobilization change the long-run development trajectory of an economy? We study how mobilization for World War II in colonial India influenced its subsequent development. From 1939 to 1945, the British colonial government purchased massive amounts of war materiel within India. We study long-run impacts on structural transformation—the transition of employment from agriculture to modern sectors (industry and services)—in Indian districts. Causal identification takes a shift-share approach, exploiting variation across industries in war-related government orders, and variation across districts in their pre-war industrial structure. We find that World War II economic mobilization had positive and significant impacts on long-run development. More than six decades later, districts with higher procurement of war materiel saw greater structural transformation from agriculture towards industry and services, and higher consumption levels, urbanization rates, and in-migration. We find substantial spillovers on services sectors not directly subject to procurement. The majority of structural transformation effects are driven by procurement of heavy industrial goods.
13. The Complementarity Between Cities and State Capacity
Edward L. Glaeser #33247
Public capacity complements urban density because externalities abound in cities and urban scale makes it possible to share infrastructure that needs to be managed. Yet, urban governments face limitations that are not experienced by private sector entities. A city cannot just stop policing if it decides it is bad at policing. Typically, public compensation and personnel policies are highly regulated either by law or by union contracts. City governments do, however, have one great advantage over private entities: a greater ability to learn from their peers. City governments do similar things throughout the world, while companies frequently specialize. Private companies have strong incentives to hide the trade secrets that make them more productive, cities do not. As individual cities do not have an incentive to make it easier for other governments to learn from them, multinational entities like the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank could enable that learning. Since climate-change-related crises are relatively rare events, city-to-city learning seems particularly important for adapting to climate change.
14. Beyond Bruen: Can Firearm Training Replace Local Discretion in Concealed Carry Permitting?
John J. Donohue, Matthew Benavides, Amy L. Zhang, and Alex Oktay #33240
The 2022 Supreme Court case NYSRPA v. Bruen struck down states’ discretion in issuing individuals firearm right-to-carry permits. As the country transitions towards more and more permissive concealed carry regulation, it has remained unclear how permitting processes and requirements affect personal and public safety. Leveraging a novel dataset of state laws spanning 2000- 2022, we find that more stringent concealed carry requirements, such as higher fees or more training hours, do not deter gun owners from obtaining carrying licenses, nor do they alter their behavior substantially enough to impact public safety outcomes including violent crimes, gun theft, or accidental shootings. As such, stricter training requirements are unable to counteract the effects of more permissive concealed carry issuance.
16. The Effect of Medicaid on Crime: Evidence from the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment
Amy Finkelstein, Sarah Miller, and Katherine Baicker #33244
Abstract:
Those involved with the criminal justice system have disproportionately high rates of mental illness and substance use disorders, prompting speculation that health insurance, by improving treatment of these conditions, could reduce crime. Using the 2008 Oregon Health Insurance Experiment, which randomly made some low-income adults eligible to apply for Medicaid, we find no statistically significant impact of Medicaid coverage on criminal charges or convictions. These null effects persist for high-risk subgroups, such as those with prior criminal cases and convictions or mental health conditions. In the full sample, our confidence intervals can rule out most quasi-experimental estimates of Medicaid's crime-reducing impact.
17. Cracks in the Glass Ceiling and Gender Equality: Do Exports Shatter the Glass Ceiling?
Bruno César Araújo, Lourenço S. Paz, and James E. West #33260
We use Brazilian administrative employer-employee matched data of worker demographics, industry of affiliation, occupation, and wages to examine whether females in managerial and executive positions (cracks in the glass ceiling) lead to more gender-equal workplace outcomes. In response to the large and unanticipated 1999 Brazilian Real exchange rate devaluation, the gender wage gap widened across all firms. The contrast between female and male-led firms was large and highly significant regarding managerial and supervisory employees. Both the gender wage gap and the proportion of female employees grew more in female-led firms than in male-led firms, consistent with the predictions of our monopsony model of firm behavior. We conclude that exports further crack the glass ceiling but do not necessarily improve the gender wage gap.
18. Rules vs. Discretion: Decoding FOMC Policy Deliberations
Michael D. Bordo, Klodiana Istrefi, and Humberto Martínez #33262
This study provides evidence on the usage and preferences of Federal Reserve’s Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) regarding the balance between rules and discretion in policy decisions. Analyzing FOMC transcripts over 40 years, we find that while Discretion has been a consistent feature in the language of the FOMC, the use of the language of Rules surged notably in the mid-1990s, aligning with theoretical advancements in monetary policy. We identify that a rise in Discretion terminology occurs during economic downturns and periods of heightened uncertainty. In contrast, a rise in the language of Rules is supported by higher references to terms such as “credibility” and “commitment,” and is more prevalent among hawkish FOMC members. Our findings link the increased use of the language of Rules (Discretion) language to tighter (easier) monetary policy, revealing a significant role of this debate in shaping policy outcomes, in particular periods.
19. LASH risk and Interest Rates
Laura Alfaro, Saleem A. Bahaj, Robert Czech, Jonathon Hazell, and Ioana Neamtu #33241
This paper studies a form of liquidity risk that we call ‘Liquidity After Solvency Hedging’ or “LASH” risk. Financial institutions take LASH risk when they hedge against solvency risk, using strategies that require liquidity when the solvency of the institution improves. We focus on LASH risk relating to interest rate movements. Our framework implies that institutions with longer-duration liabilities than assets—e.g. pension funds and insurers—take more LASH risk as interest rates fall. Using UK regulatory data from 2019-22 on the universe of sterling repo and swap transactions, we measure, in real time and at the institution level, LASH risk for the non-bank sector. We find that at the peak level of LASH risk, a 100bps increase in interest rates would have led to liquidity needs close to the cash holdings of the pension fund and insurance sector. Using a cross-sectional identification strategy, we find that low interest rates caused increases in LASH risk. We then find that the pre-crisis LASH risk of non-banks predicts their bond sales during the 2022 UK bond market crisis, contributing to the yield spike in the market.
20. Political Power and Market Power
Bo Cowgill, Andrea Prat, and Tommaso Valletti #33255
Brandeis (1914) hypothesized that firms with market power will also attempt to gain political power. To explore this hypothesis empirically, we combine data on mergers with data on lobbying expenditures and campaign contributions in the US from 1999 to 2017. We pursue two distinct empirical approaches: a panel event study and a differential exposure design. Both approaches indicate that mergers are followed by large and persistent increases in lobbying activity, both by individual firms and by industry trade associations. There is also weaker evidence for an association of mergers with campaign contributions (PACs). We also find that mergers impact the extensive margin of political activity, for example, by impacting companies’ choice to establish their first in-house lobbying teams and/or first corporate PAC. We interpret these results within an oligopoly model augmented with endogenous regulation and lobbying.
21. Financing, Ownership, and Performance: A Novel, Longitudinal Firm-Level Database
J. David Brown, Steven J. Davis, Lucia S. Foster, John C. Haltiwanger, and John Sabelhaus #33254
The Census Bureau’s Longitudinal Business Database (LBD) underpins many studies of firm-level behavior. It tracks longitudinally all employers in the nonfarm private sector but lacks information about business financing and owner characteristics. We address this shortcoming by linking LBD observations to firm-level data drawn from several large Census Bureau surveys. The resulting Longitudinal Employer, Owner, and Financing (LEOF) database contains more than 3 million observations at the firm-year level with information about start-up financing, current financing, owner demographics, ownership structure, profitability, and owner aspirations – all linked to annual firm-level employment data since the firm hired its first employee. Using the LEOF database, we document trends in owner demographics and financing patterns and investigate how these business characteristics relate to firm-level employment outcomes.
22. Federal Reserve Structure, Economic Ideas, and Banking Policy During the “Quiet Period” in Banking
Michael D. Bordo and Edward S. Prescott #33263
We evaluate the decentralized structure of the Federal Reserve System as a mechanism for generating and processing new ideas on banking policy in the 1950s and 1960s. We document that demand for research and analysis was driven by banking industry developments and legal changes that required the Federal Reserve and other banking regulatory agencies to develop guidelines for bank mergers. In response to these developments, the Board and the Reserve Banks hired industrial organization economists and young economists out of graduate school who brought in the leading theory of industrial organization at the time, which was the structure, conduct, and performance (SCP) paradigm. This flow of ideas into the Federal Reserve from academia paralleled the flow that was going on in monetary policy and macroeconomics at the time and contributed to the increased professionalization of research at the Federal Reserve. We document how several Reserve Banks, particularly Boston and Chicago,innovated by creating dissertation support programs, collecting specialized data, and creating the Bank Structure Conference, which became the clearinghouse for academic work on bank structure and later for bank risk and financial stability. We interpret these examples as illustrating an advantage that a decentralized central bank has in the production of knowledge.
23. When Given Discretion Teachers Did Not Shirk: Evidence from Remedial Education in Secondary Schools
Sabrin A. Beg, Anne E. Fitzpatrick, Jason T. Kerwin, Adrienne Lucas, and Khandker Wahedur Rahman #33242
Public-sector organizations face a tradeoff: allowing workers discretion at the point of service to adapt to local needs, versus rigid harmonization to ensure uniform service delivery. We examine this tradeoff in the context of secondary schools in Odisha, India, where the centrally set curriculum is nearly 4 grades above the learning levels of the mean student. We conduct a randomized intervention that assigned schools to either a rigid or a flexible version of a remedial learning intervention that displaced the curriculum. We compare learning outcomes and teaching quality to the status quo. Both interventions increased learning by 0.11SD, about 60 percent of a year of learning, with gains throughout the learning distribution. We find no crowd-out of grade-level mastery, and no change in the likelihood of earning passing Board Marks one year later. Discretion did not lower the quality of implementation or induce shirking. Allowing teachers flexibility to adjust classroom content to student needs was beneficial and had limited downsides.
24. Sustainable Investing
Lubos Pastor, Robert F. Stambaugh, and Lucian A. Taylor #33252
We review the literature on sustainable investing, focusing on financial effects. First, we examine the effects of investor tastes on portfolio tilts and asset prices in a simple equilibrium setting. We establish novel connections, including a direct relation between the green portfolio tilt and the greenium. We also relate our framework to prior modeling of divestment. Finally, we review evidence related to the main concepts from our theoretical analysis, including the greenium, green tilts, climate risk, and investor tastes.
