For exiting products, statistical agencies often impute inflation from surviving products. This understates growth if creatively-destroyed products improve more than surviving ones. If so, then the market share of surviving products should systematically shrink. Using entering and exiting establishments to proxy for creative destruction, we estimate missing growth in US Census data on non farm businesses from 1983 to 2013. We find missing growth (i) equaled about one-half a percentage point per year; (ii) arose mostly from hotels and restaurants rather than manufacturing; and (iii) did not accelerate much after 2005, and therefore does not explain the sharp slowdown in growth since then.
What makes countries engage in reforms of mass education? Motivated by historical evidence on the relation between military threats and expansions of primary education, we assemble a panel dataset from the last 150 years in European countries and from the postwar period in a large set of countries. We uncover three stylized facts: (i) investments in education are associated with military threats, (ii) democratic institutions are negatively correlated with education investments, and (iii) education investments respond more strongly to military threats in democracies. These patterns continue to hold when we exploit rivalries in a country's neighborhood as an alternative source of variation. We develop a theoretical model that rationalizes the three empirical findings. The model has an additional prediction about investments in physical infrastructures, which finds support in the data.
Estimates of poverty in India are crucial inputs for the understanding of world poverty, yet there is much disagreement about the numbers and the legitimacy of methods used to derive them. In this paper, we propose and justify an alternative approach to identify the poor, which uses the proportion of income spent on food. Our estimates have weaker data requirements than official methods, and they compare favorably with several validation tests. Most notably, households around our state poverty lines obtain their calories from similar sources, whereas this is not true of official poverty lines. We also find that rates of self-reported hunger are higher in states that we classify as poor.
This paper develops a framework to study environmentalism as a cultural phenomenon, namely as reflecting a process of social identification with certain values. The model is used to explain how the shares of environmentalists and materialists in society can coevolve with taxes on emissions to protect society against damages caused by environmental degradation. These policies are determined by electoral competition. However, even though politicians internalize the welfare of those currently alive and pick utilitarian optimal policies, the dynamic equilibrium paths of policies and evolving values may not converge to the steady state with the highest level of long-run welfare.
The delivery of basic health products and services remains abysmal in many parts of the world where child mortality is high. This paper shows the results from a large-scale randomized evaluation of a novel approach to health care delivery In randomly selected villages, a sales agent was locally recruited and incentivized to conduct home visits, educate households on essential health behaviors, provide medical advice and referrals, and sell preventive and curative health products. Results after 3 years show substantial health impact: under 5-years child mortality was reduced by 27 percent at an estimated average cost of $68 per life-year saved.
We use 130 years of data on historical migrations to the U.S. to show a causal effect of the ancestry composition of U.S. counties on foreign direct investment (FDI) sent and received by local firms. To isolate the causal effect of ancestry on FDI, we build a simple reduced-form model of migrations: Migrations from a foreign country to a U.S. county at a given time depend on (1) a push factor, causing emigration from that foreign country to the entire U.S., and (2) a pull factor, causing immigration from all origins into that U.S. county. The interaction between time-series variation in origin-specific push factors and destination-specific pull factors generates quasi-random variation in the allocation of migrants across U.S. counties. We find that doubling the number of residents with ancestry from a given foreign country relative to the mean increases the probability that at least one local firm engages in FDI with that country by 4 percentage points. We present evidence that this effect is primarily driven by a reduction in information frictions, and not by better contract enforcement, taste similarities, or a convergence in factor endowments.
Agricultural productivity is particularly low in developing countries. Output-sharing rules that make farmers less-than-full residual claimants are seen as a potentially important driver of low agricultural productivity. We report results from a field experiment designed to estimate and understand the effects of sharecropping contracts on agricultural input choices, risk-taking, and output. The experiment induced variation in the terms of sharecropping contracts. After agreeing to pay 50% of their output to the landlord, tenants were randomized into three groups: (i) some kept 50% of their output; (ii) others kept 75%; (iii) others kept 50% of output and received a lump-sum payment at the end of their contract, either fixed or stochastic. We find that tenants with higher output shares used more inputs, cultivated riskier crops, and produced 60% more output relative to control. Income or risk exposure have at most a small effect on farm output; the increase in output should be interpreted as an incentive effect of the output-sharing rule. JEL Codes: O12, Q12, Q15.
We assess the power of forward guidance promises about future interest rates as a monetary tool in a liquidity trap using a quantitative incomplete-markets model. Our results suggest the effects of forward guidance are negligible. A commitment to keep future nominal interest rates low for a few quarters although macro indicators suggest otherwise has only trivial effects on current output and employment. We explain theoretically why in complete markets models forward guidance is powerful generating a forward guidance puzzle and why this puzzle disappears in our model. We also clarify theoretically ambiguous conclusions from previous research about the effectiveness of forward guidance in incomplete and complete markets models.
We study the presence of other‐regarding preferences in the workplace by exploiting a randomized experiment that changed the monitoring of workers’ health during sick leave. We show that workers’ response to an increase in co‐worker shirking, induced by the experiment, is much stronger than the response to a decrease in co‐worker shirking. The asymmetric spillover effects are consistent with evidence of fairness concerns documented in laboratory experiments. Moreover, we find that the spillover effect is driven by workers with highly flexible and autonomous jobs, suggesting that co‐worker monitoring may be at least as important as formal monitoring in alleviating shirking.
In this paper, I investigate the differences in public spending and extraction of political rents between single-party and coalition governments. Common pool theories predict that coalitions tend to spend more and extract more rents than single-party governments. Using data from Finnish municipalities for the years 1997-2012 and a regression discontinuity design approach tailored for proportional elections, I provide causal evidence consistent with the theoretical predictions.
We document that switching from laissez-faire production to public procurement in residential waste collection in Finland reduces the number of firms active in the local market, but induces a statistically significant and large decrease in unit prices on average. While public procurement, thus, seems to be desirable from the citizens' perspective, not all municipalities adopt public procurement. We provide descriptive evidence that municipal council composition is associated with the chosen regime. This suggests that local politics may be one obstacle for the efficient provision of local public goods.
Today, more than ever, 'Spaceship Earth' is an apt metaphor as we chart the boundaries for a safe planet(1). Social scientists both analyse why society courts disaster by approaching or even overstepping these boundaries and try to design suitable policies to avoid these perils. Because the threats of transgressing planetary boundaries are global, long-run, uncertain and interconnected, they must be analysed together to avoid conflicts and take advantage of synergies. To obtain policies that are effective at both international and local levels requires careful analysis of the underlying mechanisms across scientific disciplines and approaches, and must take politics into account. In this Perspective, we examine the complexities of designing policies that can keep Earth within the biophysical limits favourable to human life.
The number of articles being published open access has been increasing and some research funders are starting to mandate their researchers to publish solely in open access-only journals. Reasons to promote open access include that it might lower costs and increase the diffusion of knowledge. One unintended consequence of moving to a system in which all journals are APC-based open access might be that high-quality journals become more lenient and start accepting lower quality articles compared to what they would do under subscription-based access. Using a game-theoretical analysis I show that this is indeed the case as long as readers value research quality to some extent. Moreover, if in addition to open access authors are no longer evaluated based on metrics of the journals in which they publish then quality standards of journals will deteriorate further. Hence, journals will no longer be providing the service of selecting the highest quality articles to its readers. This might in fact lower the diffusion of knowledge, as readers will have to spend more time on judging the quality, being at odds with one of the main reasons for promoting open access.