The Economic Journal 2023年 8月刊

The Economic Journal 2023年 8月刊    ——更多动态，请持续关注gzh：理想主义的百年孤独

  1.The Dark Side of Transparency: Mission Variety and Industry Equilibrium in Decentralised Public Good Provision 透明度的阴黑一面:在分散的公共利益中,任务多样性和行业平衡 Gani Aldashev ; Esteban Jaimovich; Thierry Verdier We study the implications of transparency policies on decentralised public good provision by the non-profit sector. We present a model where imperfect monitoring of the use of funds interacts with the competitive structure of the non-profit sector under alternative informational regimes. Increasing transparency regarding the use of funds may have ambiguous effects on total public good provision and on donors’ welfare. On the one hand, transparency encourages all non-profit firms to engage more actively in curbing fund diversion. On the other hand, it tilts the playing field against non-profits facing higher monitoring costs, pressing them to give up on their missions. This effect on the extensive margin implies that transparency policies lead to a reduction in the diversity of social missions addressed by the non-profit sector. We show that the negative impact of transparency on social mission variety and on donors’ welfare is highest for intermediate levels of asymmetry in monitoring costs.   2.Urban Sprawl and Social Capital: Evidence from Indonesian Cities 城市扩张与社会资本:来自印度尼西亚城市的证据 Andrea Civelli; Arya Gaduh ; Alexander D Rothenberg; Yao Wang We use detailed data from Indonesian cities to study how variation in density within urban areas affects social capital. For identification, we instrument density with soil characteristics, and control for community averages of observed characteristics. Under plausible assumptions, these controls address sorting on observables and unobservables. We find that lower density increases trust in neighbours and community participation. We also find that lower density is associated with reduced interethnic tolerance, but this relationship is explained by sorting. Heterogeneity analysis suggests that crime in dense areas undermines community trust and participation, intensifying the negative impact of density.   3.Police Response Time and Injury Outcomes 警察反应时间和伤害结果 Gregory DeAngelo; Marina Toger ; Sarit Weisburd The delayed response of law enforcement to calls for service has become a hot button issue when evaluating police department performance. While it is often assumed that faster response times could play an important role in quelling potentially violent incidents, there is no empirical evidence to support this claim. In this paper, we measure the effect of police response time on the likelihood that an incident will result in an injury. To overcome the endogeneity of more severe calls being assigned higher priority, which requires a faster response, we take several steps. First, we focus on the subset of calls for service categorised as ‘Major Disturbance—Violence’ that all receive the same priority level. Second, we instrument for police response time with the number of vehicles within a 2.5-mile radius of the incident at the time it is received by the call centre. When controlling for beat, month and time-of-day fixed effects, this instrumenting strategy allows us to take advantage of the geographical constraints faced by a dispatcher when assigning officers to an incident. In contrast to the ordinary least squares estimates, our two-stage least squares analysis establishes a strong causal relationship whereby increasing response time increases the likelihood that an incident results in an injury. The effect is concentrated among female victims, suggesting that faster response time could potentially play an important role in reducing injuries related to domestic violence.   4.Individual Consequences of Occupational Decline 职业衰退的个人后果 Per-Anders Edin; Tiernan Evans; Georg Graetz ; Sofia Hernnäs; Guy Michaels We assess the career earnings losses that individual Swedish workers suffered when their occupations’ employment declined. High-quality data allow us to overcome sorting into declining occupations on various attributes, including cognitive and non-cognitive skills. Our estimates show that occupational decline reduced mean cumulative earnings from 1986–2013 by no more than 2%–5%. This loss reflects a combination of reduced earnings conditional on employment, reduced years of employment and increased time spent in unemployment and retraining. While on average workers successfully mitigated their losses, those initially at the bottom of their occupations’ earnings distributions lost up to 8%–11%.   5.Labour Taxes, Market Size and Productivity Growth 劳动税、市场规模和生产率增长 Domenico Ferraro ; Soroush Ghazi; Pietro F Peretto How do changes in labour taxes affect innovation and aggregate productivity growth? To answer this question, we propose a quantitative, general equilibrium growth model featuring product and quality innovation with endogenous market structure, estimate its parameters and provide empirical validation for the propagation mechanism of labour tax changes. We find that a temporary cut in flat-rate labour taxes produces a growth acceleration in aggregate productivity, permanently increasing the path of real GDP per capita. Moreover, such permanent gains are sizeable even without long-run growth effects. 劳动税的变化如何影响创新和总生产率增长?为了回答这一问题，我们提出了一个具有内生市场结构的产品和质量创新的定量一般均衡增长模型，估计了其参数，并对劳动税变动的传播机制进行了实证验证。我们发现，暂时削减统一税率的劳动税会加速总生产率的增长，从而永久性地提高实际人均GDP的增长路径。此外，即使没有长期增长效应，这种永久性收益也是相当可观的。   6.Unraveling Firms: Demand, Productivity and Markups Heterogeneity 拆解企业:需求、生产率和加成率异质性 Emanuele Forlani; Ralf Martin; Giordano Mion; Mirabelle Muûls We develop a novel framework that simultaneously allows recovering heterogeneity in demand, quantity total factor productivity and markups across firms while leaving the correlation between the three dimensions unrestricted. We accomplish this by explicitly introducing demand heterogeneity and systematically exploiting assumptions used in previous productivity estimation approaches. In doing so, we provide an exact decomposition of revenue productivity in terms of the underlying heterogeneities, thus bridging the gap between quantity and revenue productivity estimations. We use Belgian firms’ production data to quantify total factor productivity, demand and markups, and show how they are correlated with each other across time and with measures obtained from other approaches. In doing so, we find quantity total factor productivity and demand to be strongly negatively correlated with each other, so suggesting a trade-off between the quality of a firm’s products and their production cost. We also show how our framework provides deeper and sharper insights on the response of firms to increasing import competition from China. In particular, we find that changes in revenue productivity materialise as the outcome of complex and sometimes offsetting changes in quantity total factor productivity, demand, markups and production scale. 我们开发了一个新的框架，同时允许恢复需求、数量、全要素生产率和企业间加价的异质性，同时使三个维度之间的相关性不受限制。我们通过明确地引入需求异质性和系统地利用在以前的生产力估计方法中使用的假设来实现这一点。在此过程中，我们根据潜在的异质性提供了收入生产率的精确分解，从而弥合了数量和收入生产率估计之间的差距。我们使用比利时公司的生产数据来量化全要素生产率、需求和加价，并显示它们如何随时间相互关联，并与从其他方法获得的措施相关联。在这样做的过程中，我们发现数量全要素生产率和需求之间存在强烈的负相关关系，因此表明企业产品质量与其生产成本之间存在权衡关系。我们还展示了我们的框架如何为企业应对来自中国的进口竞争提供更深入、更清晰的见解。特别是，我们发现收入生产率的变化是数量、全要素生产率、需求、加价和生产规模的复杂变化(有时是相互抵消的变化)的结果。   7.The Intergenerational Transmission of World War I on Female Labour 第一次世界大战对女性劳动的代际传递 Victor Gay Demographic shocks tied to World War I’s high death toll induced many women to enter the labour force in the immediate post-war period. I document a positive impact of these newly employed women on the labour force participation of subsequent generations of women until today. I also find that the war permanently altered attitudes toward the role of women in the labour force. I decompose this impact into three channels of intergenerational transmission: transmission from mothers to daughters, transmission from mothers-in-law to daughters-in-law via their sons and transmission through local social interactions.   8.Parental Responses to Information about School Quality: Evidence from Linked Survey and Administrative Data 家长对学校质量信息的反应：来自相关调查和行政数据的证据 Ellen Greaves ; Iftikhar Hussain; Birgitta Rabe; Imran Rasul We study the interaction between family and school inputs by identifying the causal impact of information about school quality on parental time investment into children. Inspection ratings provide news that shifts parental beliefs about school quality, and hence investment into children. We study this using household panel data from England, linked to administrative records on school inspection ratings. We find that parents receiving good news over school quality significantly decrease time investment into their children. We provide insights on the distributional and test score impacts of the nationwide inspections regime, through multiple margins of endogenous response of parents and children.   9.Culture and Gender Differences in Willingness to Compete 竞争意愿的文化和性别差异 Karen Evelyn Hauge; Andreas Kotsadam; Anine Riege We investigate how culture affects gender differences in willingness to compete in a large pre-registered experiment using an epidemiological approach. Our sample of 1,943 Norwegians with parents born in 59 different countries shows a smaller gender gap in willingness to compete among individuals of more gender-equal ancestries. The difference is driven by women with parents from more gender-equal countries wanting to compete more and men with the same ancestry wanting to compete less. The results are robust to controlling for a large set of factors at the individual, parental and ancestral country levels, indicating that gendered culture shapes competitive preferences.   10.Formal Employment and Organised Crime: Regression Discontinuity Evidence from Colombia 正式就业和有组织犯罪:哥伦比亚回归不连续性证据 Gaurav Khanna; Carlos Medina; Anant Nyshadham; Jorge Tamayo; Nicolas Torres Safety net programs, common in settings with high informality like Latin America, often use a means test to establish eligibility. We ask: in settings in which organised crime provides lucrative opportunities in the informal market, will discouraging formal employment via benefits eligibility criteria increase criminal enterprise activity? We link administrative socioeconomic microdata with the universe of arrests in Medellín over a decade, and exploit exogenous variation in formal-sector employment around a socioeconomic-score cutoff, below which individuals receive generous benefits if not formally employed. Regression discontinuity estimates confirm this policy reduced formal-sector employment and generated a corresponding increase in arrests associated with organised crime. We do not find increases for crimes unlikely to be associated with organised entities, such as crimes of impulse or opportunity. Effects on arrests are strongest in neighbourhoods where organised crime is most prevalent.   11.Ride-Sharing and the Geography of Consumption Industries 拼车与消费行业地理 Jordan J Norris; Heyu Xiong Cities are centres of the consumption industries—establishments offering nightlife, food, recreation and retail. However, the city’s associated consumer value is inseparable from its geography because residents must travel to consume. By exploiting both the staggered entry across cities and the precise geographic boundary of Uber services for credible identification, we show that the introduction of ride-share technology into a city caused large and significant growth in the consumption industries. We provide evidence that the results are driven by an increase in consumer mobility, due to Uber causing a reduction in the economic cost of travel.   12.Optimal Contact Tracing and Social Distancing Policies to Suppress A New Infectious Disease 抑制新型传染病的最佳接触者追踪和社会距离政策 Stefan Pollinger This paper studies the suppression of an infectious disease in the canonical susceptible-infectious-recovered model. It derives three results. First, if technically feasible, the optimal response to a sufficiently small outbreak is halting transmissions instead of building up immunity through infections. Second, the crucial trade-off is not between health and economic costs, but between the intensity and duration of control measures. A simple formula of observables characterises the optimum. Third, the total cost depends critically on the efficiency of contact tracing, since it allows relaxing costly social distancing without increasing transmissions. A calibration to the COVID-19 pandemic illustrates the theoretical findings.   13.Rice Farming and the Origins of Cooperative Behaviour 水稻种植和合作行为的起源 Xiaoyu Zhou; Theodore Alysandratos; Michael Naef This paper provides novel evidence for links between historic farming practices and current norms of cooperative behaviour. We hypothesise that the cooperation required in wetland rice farming gives rise to strong cultural norms of cooperativeness. We compare participants from prefecture cities that predominately practice wetland rice cultivation to those from non-rice regions. A public goods game with and without punishment is the main measure for cooperative behaviour. Results indicate a strong and robust positive effect of wetland rice farming on cooperative behaviour and pro-social punishment. Complementary, consistent evidence from a natural field experiment and a survey further enriches our data.   SHORT PAPER 14.When Information Conflicts with Obligations: the Role of Motivated Cognition 当信息与义务冲突:动机认知的作用 Ao Wang; Shaoda Wang; Xiaoyang Ye We experimentally test how psychological motivations can impact the processing of purely objective information. We first document that, when the high-stakes College Entrance Exam is held in the month of Ramadan, Chinese Muslim students perform significantly worse. When asked about the impact of fasting, they severely underestimate the cost of taking the exam during Ramadan, even when presented with direct empirical evidence. In the experiment, we randomly offer students reading materials in which well-respected Muslim clerics explain that it is permissible to postpone the fast until after the exam. Consistent with an interpretation of motivated cognition, students who receive the material distort the statistics about the fasting cost significantly less and become more accepting of delaying the fast for the exam.