American Economic Review 2023年第5期

American Economic Review 2023年第5期

Vol. 113 No. 4 May 2023

——更多动态，请持续关注gzh：理想主义的百年孤独

Nobel Lecture: Banking, Credit, and Economic Fluctuations

诺贝尔演讲:银行、信贷和经济波动

Ben S.Bernanke

Credit markets, including the market for bank loans, are characterized by imperfect and asymmetric information. These informational frictions can interact with other economic forces to produce periods of credit-market stress, in which intermediation is unusually costly and households and businesses have difficulty obtaining credit. A high level of credit-market stress, as in a severe financial crisis, may in turn produce a deep and prolonged recession. I present evidence that financial distress and disrupted credit markets were important sources of the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Recession of 2007–2009. Changes in the state of credit markets also play a role in "garden-variety" business cycles and in the transmission of monetary policy to the economy.

信贷市场，包括银行贷款市场，具有信息不完全和不对称的特点。这些信息摩擦可能与其他经济力量相互作用，产生信贷市场压力期，在此期间，中介费用异常高昂，家庭和企业难以获得信贷。在严重的金融危机中，高水平的信贷市场压力可能反过来导致深度和长期的衰退。我提供的证据表明，金融困境和信贷市场混乱是上世纪30年代大萧条和2007-2009年大衰退的重要根源。信贷市场状况的变化也在“普通”商业周期和货币政策向经济的传导中发挥作用。

Information, Mobile Communication, and Referral Effects

信息、移动通信和推荐效应

Panle JiaBarwick, Yanyan Liu, Eleonora Patacchini and Qi Wu

This paper uses the universe of cellphone records from a Chinese telecommunication provider for a northern Chinese city to examine the role of information exchange in urban labor markets. We provide the first direct evidence of increased communication among referral pairs around job changes. Information provided by social contacts mitigates information asymmetry and improves labor market performance.

本文利用中国北方某城市电信运营商的手机记录来考察信息交换在城市劳动力市场中的作用。我们提供了第一个直接证据，证明转介对之间围绕工作变化的沟通有所增加。社会联系提供的信息减轻了信息不对称，提高了劳动力市场绩效。

The Costs of Job Displacement over the Business Cycle and Its Sources: Evidence from Germany

经济周期中工作流失的成本及其来源:来自德国的证据

Johannes F.Schmieder, Till von Wachter and Jörg Heining

We document the sources behind the costs of job loss over the business cycle using administrative data from Germany. Losses in annual earnings after displacement are large, persistent, and highly cyclical, nearly doubling in size during downturns. A large part of the long-term earnings losses and their cyclicality is driven by declines in wages. Key to these long-lasting wage declines and their cyclicality are changes in employer characteristics, as displaced workers switch to lower-paying firms. These losses increase with duration of nonemployment. Changes in characteristics of displaced workers or displacing firms, and other post-job loss career outcomes explain little of the cyclicality.

我们使用来自德国的行政数据记录了商业周期中失业成本背后的来源。流离失所后的年收入损失是巨大的、持续的、高度周期性的，在经济低迷时期几乎翻倍。长期收入损失及其周期性在很大程度上是由工资下降造成的。这些长期工资下降及其周期性的关键是雇主特征的变化，因为失业的工人转向工资较低的公司。这些损失随着失业时间的延长而增加。失业工人或被取代的公司的特征变化，以及其他失业后的职业结果，几乎不能解释这种周期性。

Law and Norms: Empirical Evidence

法律与规范:经验证据

TomLane, Daniele Nosenzo and Silvia Sonderegger

A large theoretical literature argues laws exert a causal effect on norms, but empirical evidence remains scant. Using a novel identification strategy, we provide a compelling empirical test of this proposition. We use incentivized vignette experiments to directly measure social norms relating to actions subject to legal thresholds. Our large-scale experiments (n = 7,000) run in the United Kingdom, United States, and China show that laws can causally influence social norms. Results are robust across different samples and methods of measuring norms, and are consistent with a model of social image concerns where individuals care about the inferences others make about their underlying prosociality.

大量的理论文献认为法律对规范产生因果关系，但经验证据仍然不足。使用一种新的识别策略，我们对这一命题提供了一个令人信服的实证检验。我们使用激励性小插图实验来直接测量与受法律阈值约束的行为相关的社会规范。我们在英国、美国和中国进行的大规模实验(n = 7000)表明，法律可以对社会规范产生因果影响。结果在不同的样本和测量规范方法中都是稳健的，并且与社会形象关注模型一致，即个人关心他人对其潜在亲社会性的推断。

Social Exclusion and Social Preferences: Evidence from Colombia's Leper Colony

社会排斥和社会偏好:来自哥伦比亚麻风病人聚居地的证据

DiegoRamos-Toro

This paper explores the intergenerational consequences of social exclusion on prosociality. A lab-in-the-field approach in the historical region of Colombia's leper colony reveals that descendants of socially excluded individuals are locally altruistic and extend such altruism to outsiders who have undergone similar circumstances. These individuals also display mistrust toward those who have, historically, been exclusionary—in this case, doctors. The content of historical narratives shared by ancestors who were excluded, which emphasize the endured mistreatment and doctors' historical misinformation, is one mechanism that partially explains the intergenerational patterns.

本文探讨了社会排斥对亲社会性的代际影响。在哥伦比亚麻风病人殖民地的历史地区进行的一项实地实验表明，被社会排斥的个体的后代在当地是利他的，并将这种利他主义扩展到经历过类似情况的外人。这些人也对那些在历史上被排斥的人表现出不信任——在这种情况下，是医生。被排除在外的祖先分享的历史叙述内容强调忍受虐待和医生的历史错误信息，这是部分解释代际模式的机制之一。

Smart Contracts and the Coase Conjecture

智能合约和科斯猜想

ThomasBrzustowski, Alkis Georgiadis-Harris and Balázs Szentes

This paper reconsiders the problem of a durable-good monopolist who cannot make intertemporal commitments. The buyer's valuation is binary and his private information. The seller has access to dynamic contracts and, in each period, decides whether to deploy the previous period's contract or to replace it with a new one. The main result of the paper is that the Coase conjecture fails: the monopolist's payoff is bounded away from the low valuation irrespective of the discount factor.

本文重新考虑了不能作出跨期承诺的持久利益垄断者的问题。买方的估价是二元的，而且是他的私人信息。卖方可以访问动态合同，并在每个时期决定是否部署前一时期的合同或用新合同替换它。这篇论文的主要结论是科斯猜想失败了:无论贴现因素如何，垄断者的收益都被限制在低估值之外。

The Cost of Information: The Case of Constant Marginal Costs

信息成本:边际成本不变的情况

LucianoPomatto, Philipp Strack and Omer Tamuz

We develop an axiomatic theory of information acquisition that captures the idea of constant marginal costs in information production: the cost of generating two independent signals is the sum of their costs, and generating a signal with probability half costs half its original cost. Together with Blackwell monotonicity and a continuity condition, these axioms determine the cost of a signal up to a vector of parameters. These parameters have a clear economic interpretation and determine the difficulty of distinguishing states.

我们发展了一个信息获取的公理理论，它抓住了信息生产中恒定边际成本的概念:产生两个独立信号的成本是它们成本的总和，而产生一个信号的概率是原始成本的一半。与布莱克威尔单调性和连续性条件一起，这些公理确定了信号到一个参数向量的代价。这些参数具有明确的经济解释，并决定了区分状态的难度。