American Economic Review 2023年第6期

American Economic Review 2023年第6期

Vol. 113 No. 6 June 2023

 

 

——更多动态，请持续关注gzh：理想主义的百年孤独

 

 

 

Presidential Address: Does Monetary Policy Matter? The Narrative Approach after 35 Years

总统演讲:货币政策重要吗?35年后的叙事方法

Christina D. Romer and David H. Romer

The narrative approach to macroeconomic identification uses qualitative sources, such as newspapers or government records, to provide information that can help establish causal relationships. This paper discusses the requirements for rigorous narrative analysis using fresh research on the impact of monetary policy as the focal application. We read the historical Minutes and Transcripts of Federal Reserve policymaking meetings to identify significant contractionary and expansionary changes in monetary policy not taken in response to current or prospective developments in real activity for the period 1946 to 2016. We find that such monetary shocks have large and significant effects on unemployment, output, and inflation in the expected directions. Analysis of available policy records suggests that a contractionary monetary shock likely occurred in 2022. Based on the empirical estimates of the effect of previous shocks, one would expect substantial negative impacts on real GDP and inflation in 2023 and 2024.

宏观经济识别的叙述方法使用定性来源，如报纸或政府记录，来提供有助于建立因果关系的信息。本文以货币政策影响的新研究为重点，探讨了严谨叙事分析的要求。我们阅读了美联储政策制定会议的历史纪要和记录，以确定1946年至2016年期间货币政策的重大收缩和扩张变化，这些变化不是针对当前或未来实际活动的发展而采取的。我们发现，这种货币冲击在预期方向上对失业、产出和通胀产生了巨大而显著的影响。对现有政策记录的分析表明，2022年可能会发生一场紧缩性货币冲击。根据对以往冲击影响的实证估计，人们预计2023年和2024年实际GDP和通胀将受到重大负面影响。

 

 

The Birth of a Nation: Media and Racial Hate

一个国家的诞生:媒体与种族仇恨

Desmond Ang

This paper documents the impact of popular media on racial hate by examining the first American blockbuster: 1915's The Birth of a Nation, a fictional portrayal of the KKK's founding rife with racist stereotypes. Exploiting the film's five-year "road show," I find a sharp spike in lynchings and race riots coinciding with its arrival in a county. Instrumenting for road show destinations using the location of theaters prior to the movie's release, I show that the film significantly increased local Klan support in the 1920s. Road show counties continue to experience higher rates of hate crimes and hate groups a century later.

本文通过研究美国第一部大片——1915年的《一个国家的诞生》，记录了大众媒体对种族仇恨的影响，这部电影虚构地描绘了3k党的成立过程，充斥着种族主义的刻板印象。利用这部电影五年的“路演”，我发现私刑和种族骚乱在它到达一个县的时候急剧上升。我利用电影上映前的影院位置对路演目的地进行了测量，结果表明，这部电影在20世纪20年代显著增加了当地对三k党的支持。一个世纪后，路演县继续经历着更高的仇恨犯罪和仇恨团体率。

 

 

Reconciliation Narratives: The Birth of a Nation after the US Civil War         

和解叙事:美国内战后一个国家的诞生

Elena Esposito, Tiziano Rotesi, Alessandro Saia and Mathias Thoenig

We study how the spread of the Lost Cause narrative—a revisionist and racist retelling of the US Civil War—shifted opinions and behaviors toward national reunification and racial discrimination against African Americans. Looking at screenings of The Birth of a Nation, a blockbuster movie that greatly popularized the Lost Cause after 1915, we find that the film shifted the public discourse toward a more patriotic and less divisive language, increased military enlistment, and fostered cultural convergence between former enemies. We document how the racist content of the narrative connects to reconciliation through a "common-enemy" type of argument.

我们研究了“失败的原因”叙事(一种对美国内战的修正主义和种族主义重述)的传播如何改变了人们对国家统一和对非裔美国人的种族歧视的看法和行为。回顾《一个国家的诞生》(The Birth of a Nation)的放映，我们发现这部电影将公共话语转向了一种更爱国、更少分裂的语言，增加了军事征兵，并促进了昔日敌人之间的文化融合。《一个国家的诞生》是一部轰动一时的电影，在1915年之后极大地推广了失败的事业。我们记录了叙事中的种族主义内容是如何通过“共同敌人”类型的论点与和解联系在一起的。

 

 

Optimal Procurement with Quality Concerns

关注质量的最优采购

Giuseppe Lopomo, Nicola Persico and Alessandro T. Villa

Adverse selection in procurement arises when low-cost bidders are also low-quality suppliers. We propose a mechanism called LoLA (lowball lottery auction) which, under some conditions, maximizes any combination of buyer's and social surplus, subject to incentive compatibility, in the presence of adverse selection. The LoLA features a floor price, and a reserve price. The LoLA has a dominant strategy equilibrium that, under mild conditions, is unique. In a counterfactual analysis of Italian government auctions, we compute the gain that the government could have made, had it used the optimal procurement mechanism (a LoLA), relative to a first-price auction (the adopted format).

当低成本投标人同时也是低质量供应商时，采购中的逆向选择就出现了。我们提出了一种称为LoLA(低球彩票拍卖)的机制，在某些条件下，在存在逆向选择的情况下，受激励兼容性的约束，最大化买方和社会剩余的任何组合。LoLA的特点是底价和保留价。LoLA具有优势策略均衡，在温和条件下是唯一的。在对意大利政府拍卖的反事实分析中，我们计算了相对于首价拍卖(采用的形式)，如果政府使用最优采购机制(LoLA)，它可能获得的收益。

 

 

Optimal Contracting with Altruistic Agents: Medicare Payments for Dialysis Drugs

利他主体的最优契约:透析药物的医疗保险支付

Martin Gaynor, Nirav Mehta and Seth Richards-Shubik

We study health-care provider agency and optimal payments, considering an expensive medication for dialysis patients. Using Medicare claims data we estimate a structural model of treatment decisions, in which providers differ in their altruism and marginal costs, and this heterogeneity is unobservable to the government. In a novel application of nonlinear pricing methods, we empirically characterize the optimal contracts in this environment. The optimal contracts eliminate medically excessive dosages and reduce expenditures, resulting in approximately $300 million in annual gains from better contracting. This approach could be applied to a broad class of problems in healthcare payment policy.

我们研究医疗服务提供者代理和最优支付，考虑到昂贵的药物透析患者。利用医疗保险索赔数据，我们估计了治疗决策的结构模型，其中提供者在利他主义和边际成本方面存在差异，而这种异质性对政府来说是不可观察的。在非线性定价方法的新应用中，我们经验地描述了这种环境下的最优契约。最佳合同消除了医疗上的过量剂量并减少了支出，通过改进合同每年可获得约3亿美元的收益。这种方法可以应用于医疗保健支付政策中的广泛问题。

 

 

The Common-Probability Auction Puzzle

共概率拍卖谜题

M. Kathleen Ngangoué and Andrew Schotter

This paper presents a puzzle in the behavior of experimental subjects in what we call common-probability auctions. In common-value auctions, uncertainty is defined over values, while in common-probability auctions, uncertainty is defined over probabilities. We find that in contrast to the substantial overbidding found in common-value auctions, bidding in strategically equivalent common-probability auctions is consistent with Nash equilibrium. To explain our results, we run treatments to identify whether this difference stems from the way subjects estimate the good's value in a competitive environment rather than the way they bid conditional on these valuations. We conclude it is the former.

本文提出了在我们称之为共概率拍卖的实验对象的行为中的一个难题。在共同价值拍卖中，不确定性定义在价值之上，而在共同概率拍卖中，不确定性定义在概率之上。我们发现，与共同价值拍卖中存在的大量超额竞价不同，战略等价共同概率拍卖中的竞价符合纳什均衡。为了解释我们的结果，我们进行了处理，以确定这种差异是否源于受试者在竞争环境中估计商品价值的方式，而不是他们以这些估值为条件的出价方式。我们的结论是前者。

 

 

When Losses Turn into Loans: The Cost of Weak Banks

当亏损转化为贷款:弱势银行的成本

Laura Blattner, Luisa Farinha and Francisca Rebelo

We provide evidence that banks distort the composition of credit supply in order to comply with ratio-based capital requirements in times of economic distress. An unexpected intervention by the European Banking Authority provides a natural experiment to study how banks respond to falling below minimum required capital ratios during an economic downturn. We show that affected banks respond by cutting lending but also by reallocating credit to distressed firms with underreported loan losses. We develop a method to detect underreported losses using loan-level data. The credit reallocation leads to a reallocation of inputs across firms. We calculate that the resulting increase in input misallocation accounts for about 22 percent of the decline in productivity in Portugal in 2012.

我们提供的证据表明，在经济困难时期，银行扭曲了信贷供应的构成，以符合基于比率的资本要求。欧洲银行管理局(European Banking Authority)出人意料的干预，为研究银行在经济低迷时期资本金比率低于最低要求时的反应提供了一个自然的实验。我们表明，受影响的银行的反应是削减贷款，但也会将信贷重新分配给那些贷款损失被低估的陷入困境的公司。我们开发了一种方法来检测漏报的损失使用贷款水平的数据。信贷再分配导致了企业间投入的再分配。根据我们的计算，由此导致的投入错配的增加约占2012年葡萄牙生产力下降的22%。

 

 

Occupational Exposure to Capital-Embodied Technical Change

资本内含技术变革的职业暴露

Julieta Caunedo, David Jaume and Elisa Keller

We study differences in exposure to factor-biased technical change among occupations by providing the first measures of capital-embodied technical change (CETC) and of the elasticity of substitution between capital and labor at the occupational level. We document sizable occupational heterogeneity in both measures, but quantitatively, it is the heterogeneity in factor substitutability that fuels workers' exposure to CETC. In a general equilibrium model of worker sorting across occupations, CETC accounts for almost all of the observed labor reallocation in the US between 1984 and 2015. Absent occupational heterogeneity in factor substitutability, CETC accounts for only 17 percent of it.

我们通过提供资本体现的技术变革(CETC)和职业层面资本与劳动力之间替代弹性的第一个度量，研究了不同职业之间暴露于因素偏倚技术变革的差异。我们在两种测量方法中都记录了相当大的职业异质性，但在数量上，是因素可替代性的异质性促使工人暴露于CETC。在一个工人跨职业分类的一般均衡模型中，CETC几乎解释了1984年至2015年间美国观察到的所有劳动力再分配。在要素可替代性中不存在职业异质性，CETC仅占17%。