Manage Research Papers

Kirill Pogorelskiy & Matthew Shum

More voters than ever get political news from their friends on social media platforms. Is this bad for democracy? Using context-neutral laboratory experiments, we find that biased (mis)information shared on social networks affects the quality of collective decisions relatively more than does segregation by political preferences on social media. Two features of subject behavior underlie this finding: 1) they share news signals selectively, revealing signals favorable to their candidates more often than unfavorable signals; 2) they naıvely take signals at face value and account for neither the selection in the shared signals nor the differential informativeness of news signals across different sources.

Arun Advani, William Elming and Jonathan Shaw

Understanding causes of and solutions to non-compliance is important for a tax authority. In this paper we study how and why audits affect reported tax in the years after audit – the dynamic effect – for individual income taxpayers. We exploit data from a random audit program covering more than 53,000 income tax self assessment returns in the UK, combined with data on the population of tax filers between 1999 and 2012. We first document that there is substantial non-compliance in this population. One in three filers underreports the tax owed. Third party information on an income source does not predict whether a taxpayer is non-compliant on that income source, though it does predict the extent of underreporting. Using the random nature of the audits, we provide evidence of dynamic effects. Audits raise reported tax liabilities for at least five years after audit, implying an additional yield 1.5 times the direct revenue raised from the audit. The magnitude of the impact falls over time, and this decline is faster for less autocorrelated income sources. Taking an event study approach, we further show that the change in reporting behaviour comes only from those found to have made errors in their tax report. Finally, using an extension of the Allingham-Sandmo (1972) model, we show that these results are best explained by audits providing the tax authority with information, which then constrains taxpayers’ ability to misreport.

David S. Jacks and Dennis Novy

What precisely were the causes and consequences of the trade wars in the 1930s? Were there perhaps deeper forces at work in reorienting global trade prior to the outbreak of World War II? And what lessons may this particular historical episode provide for the present day? To answer these questions, we distinguish between long-run secular trends in the period from 1920 to 1939 related to the formation of trade blocs (in particular, the British Commonwealth) and short-run disruptions associated with the trade wars of the 1930s (in particular, large and widespread declines in bilateral trade, the narrowing of trade imbalances, and sharp drops in average traded distances). We argue that the trade wars mainly served to intensify pre-existing efforts towards the formation of trade blocs which dated from at least 1920. More speculatively, we argue that the trade wars of the present day may serve a similar purpose as those in the 1930s, that is, the intensification of China- and US-centric trade blocs.

Michael Waterson and Jian Xie

We investigate the London bus market, a large market with regular procurement of bus services, for possible collusion using a wide variety of techniques, making use of the data at our disposal. There is little evidence of collusion in bidding for contracts apparent from our data, despite some features of the market that might lead to collusive behaviour.

Michael Ellington, Chris Martin & Bingsong Wang

This paper puts search frictions models under novel empirical scrutiny and tests their ability to match empirical observations. To capture changing dynamics we fit an extended Bayesian time-varying parameter VAR to US labour market data from 1962–2016. We find strong evidence against key predictions of the search frictions model, namely a large surge in vacancy creation in response to productivity shocks and a negative relationship between the volatilities of unemployment and wages. Our results question the amplification mechanism embedded in search frictions models and cast doubt on wage rigidity as a source of unemployment volatility.

Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, Clement Imbert, Johannes Spinnewijn, Teodora Tsankova & Maarten Luts

We study the impact of deterrence, tax morale, and simplifying information on tax compliance. We ran five experiments spanning the tax process which varied the communication of the tax administration with all income taxpayers in Belgium. A consistent picture emerges across experiments: (i) simplifying communication increases compliance, (ii) deterrence messages have an additional positive effect, (iii) invoking tax morale is not effective. Even tax morale messages that improve knowledge and appreciation of public services do not raise compliance. In fact, heterogeneity analysis with causal forests shows that tax morale treatments backfire for most taxpayers. In contrast, simplification has large positive effects on compliance, which diminish over time due to follow-up enforcement. A discontinuity in enforcement intensity, combined with the experimental variation, allows us to compare simplification with standard enforcement measures. Simplification is far more cost-effective, allowing for substantial savings on enforcement costs, and also improves compliance in the next tax cycle.

Sascha O. Becker, Ana Fernandes and Doris Weichselbaumer

Due to conventional gender norms, women are more likely to be in charge of childcare than men. From an employer’s perspective, in their fertile age they are also at “risk” of pregnancy. Both factors potentially affect hiring practices of firms. We conduct a largescale correspondence test in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, sending out approx. 9,000 job applications, varying job candidate’s personal characteristics such as marital status and age of children. We find evidence that, for part-time jobs, married women with older kids, who likely finished their childbearing cycle and have more projectable childcare chores than women with very young kids, are at a significant advantage vis-àvis other groups of women. At the same time, married, but childless applicants, who have a higher likelihood to become pregnant, are at a disadvantage compared to single, but childless applicants to part-time jobs. Such effects are not present for full-time jobs, presumably, because by applying to these in contrast to part-time jobs, women signal that they have arranged for external childcare.

Arun Advani, Toru Kitagawa and Tymon Słoczyński

We consider two recent suggestions for how to perform an empirically motivated Monte Carlo study to help select a treatment effect estimator under unconfoundedness. We show theoretically that neither is likely to be informative except under restrictive conditions that are unlikely to be satisfied in many contexts. To test empirical relevance, we also apply the approaches to a real-world setting where estimator performance is known. Both approaches are worse than random at selecting estimators which minimise absolute bias. They are better when selecting estimators that minimise mean squared error. However, using a simple bootstrap is at least as good and often better. For now researchers would be best advised to use a range of estimators and compare estimates for robustness.

Neha Bose and Daniel Sgroi

Small talk is a ubiquitous feature of social interaction but almost by definition seems to have little strategic importance and has hardly been studied within the social sciences. In a laboratory setting with 338 subjects, we show that short seemingly unimportant communication between players who know nothing about the games that are to follow (and so cannot engage in cheap talk) nevertheless has a dramatic and important effect. Through small talk players were able to better predict the personalities of their partners (especially their level of extraverion) building a sensible “theory of mind” which in turn boosted their payoffs in subsequent public goods and level-k reasoning games. Important psychological factors such as perceived similarity and self-projection also proved important. Additional insight is provided by text analysis on the language used during communication which indicates how theory of mind can be developed through trivial and seemingly irrelevant small talk.

Philippe Mongin, GREGHEC, Paris

Following an initiative of Social Choice and Welfare, this is the result of an interview conducted by email exchange during the period from July 2017 to February 2018, with minor adjustments later in 2018. Apart from some personal history, topics discussed include: (i) social choice, especially with interpersonal comparisons of utility; (ii) utilitarianism, including Harsanyi’s contributions; (iii) consequentialism in decision theory and in ethics; (iv) the independence axiom for decisions under risk; (v) welfare economics under uncertainty; (vi) incentive compatibility and strategy-proof mechanisms, especially in large economies; (vii) Pareto gains from trade, and from migration; (viii) cost–benefit analysis and welfare measurement; (ix) the possible future of normative economics.

Bishnupriya Gupta, Dilip Mookherjee, Kaivan Munshi, & Mario Sanclemente

We argue that community networks played an important role in the emergence of Indian entrepreneurship in the early stages of the cotton textile and jute textile industries in the late 19th and early 20th century respectively, overcoming the lack of market institutions and government support. From business registers, we construct a yearly panel dataset of entrepreneurs in these two industries. We find no evidence that entry is affected by prior trading experience or price shocks in the corresponding upstream sector. Firm directors exhibited a high degree of clustering of entrepreneurs by community. The dynamics of entry is consistent with a model of network-based dynamics.

Elisabetta Iossa, Patrick Rey & Michael Waterson

The paper studies competition for the market in a setting where incumbents (and, to a lesser extent, neighbouring incumbents) benefit from a cost advantage. The paper first compares the outcome of staggered and synchronous tenders, before drawing the implications for market design. We find that the timing of tenders should depend on the likelihood of monopolization. When monopolization is expected, synchronous tendering is preferable, as it strengthens the pressure that entrants exercise on the monopolist. When instead other firms remain active, staggered tendering is preferable, as it maximizes the competitive pressure that comes from the other firms

Monica Giulietti, Jesus Otero, & Michael Waterson

We assess the extent of inertia in grocery retail prices using data on prices and costs from a large supermarket chain in Colombia. Relative to previous work our analysis benefits from the daily frequency of the data and the availability of reliable replacement cost data. We uncover evidence supporting the existence of significant nominal rigidities in reference prices (three months) and even more so in reference costs (about five months). There is evidence that the price and cost rigidities differ depending on the type of product, being on average smaller in the case of perishable goods. Using an Error Correction Model framework, we examine the path of prices relative to costs, to determine the speed of adjustment of prices to shocks.

Thomas Hills, Eugenio Proto & Daniel Sgroi

In addition to improving quality of life, higher subjective wellbeing leads to fewer health problems, higher productivity, and better incomes. For these reasons subjective wellbeing has become a key focal issue among scientific researchers and governments. Yet no scientific investigator knows how happy humans were in previous centuries. Here we show that a new method based on quantitative analysis of digitized text from millions of books published over the past 200 years captures reliable trends in historical subjective wellbeing across four nations. This method uses psychological valence norms for thousands of words to compute the relative proportion of positive and negative language, indicating relative happiness during national and international wars, financial crises, and in comparison to historical trends in longevity and GDP. We validate our method using Eurobarometer survey data from the 1970s onwards and in comparison with economic, medical, and political events since 1820 and also use a set of words with stable historical meanings to support our findings. Finally we show that our results are robust to the use of diverse corpora (including text derived from newspapers) and different word norms.

Clement Imbert, Marlon Seror, Yifan Zhang, & Yanos Zylberberg

This paper estimates the causal effect of rural-urban migration on urban production in China. We use longitudinal data on manufacturing firms between 2001 and 2006 and exploit exogenous variation in rural-urban migration due to agricultural price shocks. Following a migrant inflow, labor costs decline and employment expands. Labor productivity decreases sharply and remains low in the medium run. A quantitative framework suggests that destinations become too labor-abundant and migration mostly benefits low productivity firms within locations. As migrants select into high-productivity destinations, migration however strongly contributes to the equalization of factor productivity across locations.

Marcus Miller

With his conception of successive ‘Ages of Capitalism’, Anatole Kaletsky provides a canvas broad enough to encompass the banking crisis of 2008 and much more. After briefly outlining the Four Ages he identifies, we focus on the period of the Great Moderation when Inflation Targeting seemed to have solved the problem macroeconomic management – until it ended in spectacular failure. The rapid growth of cross-border banking – with securitized assets funded by wholesale money – evidently posed threats to financial stability that had been ignored by a regime targeting consumer prices. We look at three: the pecuniary externalities exerted by asset price changes on investment banking; information failures leading to an exaggerated banking boom; and the risk of insolvency in the subsequent ‘bank run’. The financial system pre-crash was, it seems, flawed by two Fallacies of Composition: by regulation that reckoned making individual banks safe guaranteed systemic stability; and a business model that reckoned securitization ensured liquidity whenever necessary. Finally, we discuss how, in different countries, the law has variously been invoked to handle reckless banking.

Sascha O. Becker, Andreas Ferrara, Eric Melander & Luigi Pascali

We study the effect of warfare on the development of state capacity and representative institutions using novel data on cities and territories in the German lands between 1200 and 1750. More specifically, we show that cities with a higher conflict exposure establish more sophisticated tax systems, but also develop larger councils, councils that are more likely to be elected by citizens, and more likely to be independent of other local institutions. These results are consistent with the idea of a trade-off between more efficient taxation and power sharing proposed in earlier work. We make headway on establishing a causal role of wars by using changes to German nobles’ positions within the European nobility network to instrument for conflict.

Federica Liberini, Michela Redoano, Antonio Russo, Angel Cuevas and Ruben Cuevas

Social media enable politicians to personalize their campaigns and target voters who may be decisive for the outcome of elections. We assess the effects of such political “micro-targeting” by exploiting variation in daily advertising prices on Facebook, collected during the course of the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. We analyze the variation of prices across political ideologies and propose a measure for the intensity of online political campaigns. Combining this measure with information from the ANES electoral survey, we address two fundamental questions: (i) To what extent did political campaigns use social media to micro-target voters? (ii) How large was the effect, if any, on voters who were heavily exposed to campaigning on social media? We find that online political campaigns targeted on users’ gender, geographic location, and political ideology had a significant effect in persuading undecided voters to support Mr Trump, and in persuading Republican supporters to turn out on polling day. Moreover the effect of micro-targeting on Facebook was strongest among users without university or college-level education.

Dan Bernhardt, Peter Buisseret & Sinem Hidir

We study multi-district legislative elections between two office-seeking parties when the election pits a relatively strong party against a weaker party; when each party faces uncertainty about how voter preferences will evolve during the campaign; and, when each party cares not only about winning a majority, but also about its share of seats in the event that it holds majority or minority status. When the initial imbalance favoring one party is small, each party targets the median voter in the median district, in pursuit of a majority. When the imbalance is moderate, the advantaged party continues to hold the centre-ground, but the disadvantaged party retreats to target its core supporters; it does so to fortify its minority share of seats in the likely event that it fails to secure a majority. Finally, when the imbalance is large, the advantaged party advances toward its opponent, raiding its moderate supporters in pursuit of an outsized majority

Chris Martin & Bingsong Wang

Recent evidence that the opportunity cost of employment is pro cyclical implies that existing models based around search frictions in the labour market cannot match the large volatilities of unemployment and vacancies observed in the data. In this paper, we incorporate insights from behavioural economics into the search frictions framework. The resultant model can match observed volatilities even if the opportunity cost is strongly pro cyclical. The key mechanism in the model is that the pro-cyclicality of the opportunity cost has a limited impact on the reference wage of workers; this feeds through into a limited volatility of the wage and so to a large unemployment volatility

Gaetano Bloise, Herakles Polemarchakis & Yiannis Vailakis

Debt is sustainable at a competitive equilibrium due solely to the reputation of debtors for repayment; that is, even absent collateral or legal sanctions available to creditors. Under incomplete markets, when the rate of interest (net of growth) is recurrently negative, self-insurance is more costly than borrowing, and repayments on loans are enforced by the implicit threat of loss of risk-sharing advantages of debt contracts. Private debt credibly circulates as a form of inside money and, in general, is not valued as a speculative bubble; it is distinct from outside money. Competitive equilibria with self-enforcing debt exist under a suitable hypothesis of gains from trade.

Michael Waterson

There are continued complaints on matters of event ticketing, particularly in music, despite recent changes in legislation and in practice. This report, a development of ideas following from Waterson (2016), sets out a personal view on the market, focusing on the UK and in particular the music sector, as it now exists. In it, I ask and respond to a self-imposed question- what might an improved ticketing system set out to achieve? In my view, a desirable ticketing system would be one that puts consumers first, both in terms of ease, fairness and choice. Hence the title. Currently, many of the participants in the market do not have consumers foremost in mind, and the lesson from various other markets where technology has shown significant potential is that ultimately, a framework that provides what (most) consumers want wins out.

Prashant Bharadwaj, James Fenske, Rinchan Ali Mirza & Namrata Kala

We use a difference in differences approach to show that the adoption of High Yielding Varieties (HYV) reduced infant mortality in India. This holds even comparing children of the same mother. Children of mothers whose characteristics predict higher child mortality, rural children, boys, and low-caste children benefit more from HYV adoption. We find no obvious evidence that parental investments respond to HYV adoption. We find little evidence of selection into child bearing in response to HYV adoption.

Graciela Chichilnisky, Peter J. Hammond & Nicholas Stern

Ramsey famously pronounced that discounting “future enjoyments” would be ethically indefensible. Suppes enunciated an equity criterion implying that all individuals’ welfare should be treated equally. By contrast, Arrow (1999a, b) accepted, perhaps rather reluctantly, the logical force of Koopmans’ argument that no satisfactory preference ordering on a sufficiently unrestricted domain of infinite utility streams satisfies equal treatment. In this paper, we first derive an equitable utilitarian objective based on a version of the Vickrey–Harsanyi original position, extended to allow a variable and uncertain population with no finite bound. Following the work of Chichilnisky and others on sustainability, slightly weakening the conditions of Koopmans and co-authors allows intergenerational equity to be satisfied. In fact, assuming that the expected total number of individuals who ever live is finite, and that each individual’s utility is bounded both above and below, there is a coherent equitable objective based on expected total utility. Moreover, it implies the “extinction discounting rule” advocated by, inter alia, the Stern Review on climate change.

Yannick Gabuthy and Abhinay Muthoo

This paper analyses arbitration as a surrogate for complete contracts. We embed this idea in a simple model of a long-term relationship between a firm and its workforce, in which they can make productive-enhancing, relationshipspecific investments, and then negotiate over the division of the resultant surplus. It is shown that the mere presence of the arbitrator (in the background of negotiations) may enhance investment incentives ex-ante by minimising each party’s ability to engage in hold-up behaviours ex-post. Furthermore, we highlight notably that the partners should optimally commit to call an arbitrator ensuring a compromise by awarding a reasonable share of the surplus to the worker. Indeed, this type of arbitrator would harmonise the parties’ bargaining powers and then weight their investment incentives optimally.

Eleonora Alabrese, Sascha O. Becker, Thiemo Fetzer and Dennis Novy

Previous analyses of the 2016 Brexit referendum used region-level data or small samples based on polling data. The former might be subject to ecological fallacy and the latter might suffer from small-sample bias. We use individual-level data on thousands of respondents in Understanding Society, the UK’s largest household survey, which includes the EU referendum question. We find that voting Leave is associated with older age, white ethnicity, low educational attainment, infrequent use of smartphones and the internet, receiving benefits, adverse health and low life satisfaction. These results coincide with corresponding patterns at the aggregate level of voting areas. We therefore do not find evidence of ecological fallacy. In addition, we show that prediction accuracy is geographically heterogeneous across UK regions, with strongly pro-Leave and strongly pro-Remain areas easier to predict. We also show that among individuals with similar socioeconomic characteristics, Labour supporters are more likely to support Remain while Conservative supporters are more likely to support Leave.

Thiemo Fetzer, Pedro CL Souza, Oliver Vanden Eynde & Austin L. Wright

How do foreign powers disengage from a conflict? We study the recent largescale security transition from international troops to local forces in the context of the ongoing civil conflict in Afghanistan. We construct a new dataset that combines information on this transition process with declassified conflict outcomes and previously unreleased quarterly survey data. Our empirical design leverages the staggered roll-out of the transition onset, together with a novel instrumental variables approach to estimate the impact of the two-phase security transition. We find that the initial security transfer to Afghan forces is marked by a significant, sharp and timely decline in insurgent violence. This effect reverses with the actual physical withdrawal of foreign troops. We argue that this pattern is consistent with a signaling model, in which the insurgents reduce violence strategically to facilitate the foreign military withdrawal. Our findings clarify the destabilizing consequences of withdrawal in one of the costliest conflicts in modern history and yield potentially actionable insights for designing future security transitions.

Thiemo Fetzer

This paper documents a significant association between the exposure of an individual or area to the UK government’s austerity-induced welfare reforms begun in 2010, and the following: the subsequent rise in support for the UK Independence Party, an important correlate of Leave support in the 2016 UK referendum on European Union membership; broader individual-level measures of political dissatisfaction; and direct measures of support for Leave. Leveraging data from all UK electoral contests since 2000, along with detailed, individual-level panel data, the findings suggest that the EU referendum could have resulted in a Remain victory had it not been for austerity.

Wiji Arulampalam & Andrea Papini

Analysis of the relationship between taxes and self-employment should account for the interplay between responses in self-employment and wage employment. To this end, we estimate a two-state multi-spell duration model which accounts for both observed and unobserved heterogeneity using a large longitudinal administrative dataset for Norway for 1993-2011. Our findings confirm theoretical predictions, and are robust to various changes to definitions and sample selections. A policy experiment simulating a flatter tax schedule in the year 2000, is found to encourage both entry into and exit from self-employment, with an increase of about 11.5 percent in net inflow into self-employment.

Wiji Arulampalam, Michael P. Devereux, Federica Liberini

We use firm-level data to investigate the impact of taxes on the international location of targets in M&A, allowing for heterogeneous responses by companies. The statutory tax rate in the target country is found to have a negative impact on the probability of an acquisition in that country. In addition, the estimated size of the effect is found to depend on whether (i) acquirer is a domestic or a multinational enterprise; (ii) the acquisition is domestic or cross-border; and (iii) the acquirer’s country has a worldwide or territorial tax system.

Alberto Caruso, Lucrezia Reichlin & Giovanni Ricco

This paper highlights the anomalous characteristics of the Euro Area `twin crises' by contrasting the aggregate macroeconomic dynamics in the period 2009-2013 with the business cycle fluctuations of the previous decades. We report three stylised facts. First, the contraction in output was marked by an anomalous downfall in investment, while consumption, savings and unemployment followed their historical relation with GDP. Second, households' and financial corporations' debts, and house prices deviated from their pre-crisis trends. Third, the jump in the public deficit GDP ratio in 2008-2009 was unprecedented and so was the fiscal consolidation that followed. Our analysis points to the financial nature of the crisis as a likely explanation for these facts. Importantly, the `anomaly' in public deficit is in large part explained by extraordinary measures in support of the financial sector, which show up in the stock-flow adjustments and reveal a key interaction between the fiscal and the financial sectors.

Thiemo Fetzer and Stephan Kyburz

Can institutionalized transfers of resource rents be a source of civil conflict? Are cohesive institutions better in managing distributive conflicts? We study these questions exploiting exogenous variation in revenue disbursements to local governments together with new data on local democratic institutions in Nigeria. We make three contributions. First, we document the existence of a strong link between rents and conflict far away from the location of the actual resource. Second, we show that distributive conflict is highly organized involving political militias and concentrated in the extent to which local governments are non-cohesive. Third, we show that democratic practice in form having elected local governments significantly weakens the causal link between rents and political violence. We document that elections (vis-a-vis appointments), by producing more cohesive institutions, vastly limit the extent to which distributional conflict between groups breaks out following shocks to the available rents. Throughout, we confirm these findings using individual level survey data.

Sascha O. Becker and Thiemo Fetzer

The 2004 accession of 8 Eastern European countries to the European Union (EU) was accompanied by fears of mass migration. The United Kingdom - unlike many other EU countries - did not opt for temporary restrictions on the EU’s free movement of labour. We document that following EU accession more than 1 million people (ca. 3% of the UK working age population) migrated from Eastern Europe to the UK. We show that they mostly settled in places that had limited prior exposure to immigration. We provide evidence that these areas subsequently saw smaller wage growth at the lower end of the wage distribution and increased pressure on the welfare state, housing and public services. Using novel geographically disaggregated data by country-of-origin, we measure the effects of Eastern European migration on these outcomes for the UK-born and different groups of immigrants. Our results are important in the context of the UK’s Brexit referendum and the ongoing EU withdrawal negotiations in which migration features as a key issue.

Sascha O. Becker, Irena Grosfeld, Pauline Grosjean, Nico Voigtländer and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya

We exploit a unique historical setting to study the long-run effects of forced migration on investment in education. After World War II, the Polish borders were redrawn, resulting in large-scale migration. Poles were forced to move from the Kresy territories in the East (taken over by the USSR) and were resettled mostly to the newly acquired Western Territories, from which Germans were expelled. We combine historical censuses with newly collected survey data to show that, while there were no pre-WWII differences in education, Poles with a family history of forced migration are significantly more educated today. Descendants of forced migrants have on average one extra year of schooling, driven by a higher propensity to finish secondary or higher education. This result holds when we restrict ancestral locations to a sub sample around the former Kresy border and include fixed effects for the destination of migrants. As Kresy migrants were of the same ethnicity and religion as other Poles, we bypass confounding factors of other cases of forced migration. We show that labor market competition with natives and selection of migrants are also unlikely to drive our results. Survey evidence suggests that forced migration led to a shift in preferences, away from material possessions and towards investment in a mobile asset – human capital. The effects persist over three generations.

Sharun W. Mukand and Dani Rodrik

We develop a conceptual framework to highlight the role of ideas as a catalyst for policy and institutional change. We make an explicit distinction between ideas and vested interests and show how they feed into each other. In doing so the paper integrates the Keynes-Hayek perspective on the importance of ideas with the currently more fashionable Stigler-Becker (interests only) approach to political economy. We distinguish between two kinds of ideational politics – the battle among different worldviews on the efficacy of policy (worldview politics) versus the politics of victimhood, pride and identity (identity politics). Political entrepreneurs discover identity and policy ‘memes’ (narratives, cues, framing) that shift beliefs about how the world works or a person’s belief of who he is (i.e. identity). Our framework identifies a complementarity between worldview politics and identity politics and illustrates how they may reinforce each other. In particular, an increase in identity polarization may be associated with a shift in views about how the world works. Furthermore, an increase in income inequality is likely to result in a greater incidence of ideational politics. Finally, we show how ideas may not just constrain, but also ‘bite’ the interests that helped propagate them in the first instance.

Peter J. Hammond

Whether an economic agent’s decision creates an externality often depends on the institutional context in which the decision was made. Indeed, in orthodox economics, a technological or exogenous externality occurs just in case one agent’s economic welfare or production possibilities are directly affected by the market decisions of other agents. A pecuniary externality occurs just in case one consumer’s economic welfare or producer’s profit is affected indirectly by price changes caused by changes in other agents’ decisions. Similarly, an institutional or endogenous externality may arise whenever allocations are determined by a mechanism that is not strategy proof for some agent. Then even a resource balance constraint creates an institutional externality except in special cases such as when no individual agent’s action can affect market clearing prices — i.e., there are no pecuniary externalities.

Clément Imbert and John Papp

This paper provides new evidence on rural-to-urban migration decisions in developing countries. Using original survey data from rural India, we show that employment provision on local public works significantly reduces seasonal migration. Workers who choose to participate in the program forgo much higher earnings outside of the village. Structural estimates imply that the utility cost of one day away may be as high as 60% of migration earnings. Up to half of this cost can be explained by higher living costs and income risk. The other half likely reflects high non-monetary costs from living and working in the city.

Sascha O. Becker & Thiemo Fetzer

The outcome of the UK’s Brexit Referendum has been blamed on political factors, such as concerns about sovereignty, and economic factors such as migration, and trade integration. Analyses of the cross-sectional referendum voting pattern cannot explain how anti-EU sentiment built up over time. Since UKIP votes in the 2014 EU Parliament elections are the single most important predictor of the Vote Leave share, understanding the rise of UKIP might help to explain the role of political and economic factors in the build-up of Brexit. This paper presents new stylized facts suggesting that UKIP votes in local, national and European elections picked up dramatically in areas with weak socio-economic fundamentals, but only after 2010, at the expense of the Conservatives, and partly also Labour. The timing suggests that the Government’s austerity measures might have been a crucial trigger that helped to convert economic grievances into UKIP votes, putting increasing pressure on the Conservatives to hold the EU Referendum.

Silvia Miranda-Agrippino & Giovanni Ricco

This article reviews Bayesian inference methods for Vector Autoregression models, commonly used priors for economic and financial variables, and applications to structural analysis and forecasting.

Juliana Salomao and Liliana Varela

This paper develops a heterogeneous firm-dynamics model with endogenous currency debt composition to jointly study financing and investment decisions in developing economies. In our model, firms’ foreign currency borrowing arises from a trade-off between exposure to currency risk and growth. We assess econometrically the pattern of foreign currency borrowing using firm-level census data on Hungary, calibrate the model and quantify its aggregate impact. Our counterfactual exercises show that foreign currency borrowing can lead to higher growth and that the efficiency of the banking sector to screen productive and capital-scarce firms is essential to reap up the benefits of this financing.

Juliana Salomao and Liliana Varela

This paper develops a heterogeneous firm-dynamics model with endogenous currency debt composition to jointly study financing and investment decisions in developing economies. In our model, firms’ foreign currency borrowing arises from a trade-off between exposure to currency risk and growth. We assess econometrically the pattern of foreign currency borrowing using firm-level census data on Hungary, calibrate the model and quantify its aggregate impact. Our counterfactual exercises show that foreign currency borrowing can lead to higher growth and that the efficiency of the banking sector to screen productive and capital-scarce firms is essential to reap up the benefits of this financing

Irfan Qureshi

Should a policy rule include money? Including money exerts policy inertia and increases inflation aversion. In a New-Keynesian model with trend inflation, these features guarantee price determinacy even when the Taylor principle is not satisfied. Novel Greenbook data confirm money aggregates as U.S. Federal Open Market Committee policy objectives, enabling monetary policy to insulate the U.S. economy from self-fulfilling fluctuations despite positive trend inflation. A high response to inflation and low trend inflation guarantees determinacy post-1982. Cross-country applications highlight the superiority of the rule with money. Raising the inflation target from 2 percent to 4 percent violates the Taylor principle; including money resolves this issue.

Francis Bloch, Bhaskar Dutta,and Mihai Manea

We analyze the formation of partnerships in social networks. Players need favors at random times and ask their neighbors in the network to form exclusive long-term partnerships that guarantee reciprocal favor exchange. Refusing to provide a favor results in the automatic removal of the underlying link. When favors are costly, players agree to provide the first favor in a partnership only if they otherwise face the risk of eventual solitude. In equilibrium, the players essential for realizing every maximum matching can avoid this risk and enjoy higher payoffs than inessential players. Although the search for partners is decentralized and reflects local incentives, the strength of essential players drives efficient partnership formation in every network. When favors are costless, players enter partnerships at any opportunity and every maximal matching can emerge in equilibrium. In this case, efficiency is limited to special linking patterns: complete and complete bipartite networks, locally balanced bipartite networks with positive surplus, and factor-critical networks.

Redzo Mujcic& Andrew J. Oswald

Nearly 100 years ago, the philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell warned of the social dangers of widespread envy. One view of modern society is that it is systematically developing a set of institutions -- such as social media and new forms of advertising -- that make people feel inadequate and envious of others. If so, how might that be influencing the psychological health of our citizens? This paper reports the first large-scale longitudinal research into envy and its possible repercussions. The paper studies 18,000 randomly selected individuals over the years 2005, 2009, and 2013. Using measures of SF-36 mental health and psychological well-being, four main conclusions emerge. First, the young are especially susceptible. Levels of envy fall as people grow older. This longitudinal finding is consistent with a cross-sectional pattern noted recently by Nicole E. Henniger and Christine R. Harris, and with the theory of socioemotional regulation suggested by scholars such as Laura L. Carstensen. Second, using fixed-effects equations and prospective analysis, the analysis reveals that envy today is a powerful predictor of worse SF-36 mental health and well-being in the future. A change from the lowest to the highest level of envy, for example, is associated with a worsening of SF-36 mental health by approximately half a standard deviation (p <0.001). Third, no evidence is found for the idea that envy acts as a useful motivator. Greater envy is associated with slower -- not higher -- growth of psychological well-being in the future. Nor is envy a predictor of later economic success. Fourth, the longitudinal decline of envy leaves unaltered a U-shaped age pattern of well-being from age 20 to age 70. These results are consistent with the idea that society should be concerned about institutions that stimulate large-scale envy.

David G. Blanchflower & Andrew J. Oswald

In Happiness for All?, Carol Graham raises disquieting ideas about today’s United States. The challenge she puts forward is an important one. Here we review the intellectual case and offer additional evidence. We conclude broadly on the author’s side. Strikingly, Americans appear to be in greater pain than citizens of other countries, and most subgroups of citizens have downwardly trended happiness levels. There is, however, one bright side to an otherwise dark story. The happiness of black Americans has risen strongly since the 1970s. It is now almost equal to that of white Americans

Pablo F. Beker & Conrado Cuevas

We study the value of public information in a stochastic exchange economy where agents trade assets to reallocate risk and mandatory (retirement) savings imposes a lower bound on the market value of some agents’ holdings of a financial asset. Since equilibrium prices depend on the agents’ beliefs about the states of nature, the arrival of information shifts the agents’ mandatory savings constraints. We show that the arrival of public information can generate an ex-ante Pareto improvement relative to an uninformative equilibrium even when ex-post improvements are not possible.

Walter Bossert & Bhaskar Dutta

We propose and characterize a class of measures of welfare change that are based on the generalized Gini social welfare functions. In addition, we analyze these measures in the context of a second-order dominance property that is akin to generalized Lorenz dominance as introduced by Shorrocks (1983) and Kakwani (1984). Because we consider welfare differences rather than welfare levels, the requisite equivalence result involves linear welfare functions (that is, those associated with the generalized Ginis) only, as opposed to the entire class of strictly increasing and S-concave welfare indicators

David Ronayne and Daniel Sgroi

We ran an experiment where 1,503 subjects (advisees) completed tasks, and then had the choice to submit either their own score or the score of other subjects (advisers). The observed data are difficult to reconcile with rational behavior. First, good advice was ignored: about 25% of the time, advisees chose to submit their own score instead of the higher score of an adviser, reducing their payoff. Second, when the adviser was superior in skill, good advice was ignored more often. Third, when the adviser was relatively highly paid, subjects were less likely to make use of them. We offer an explanation of the data focused on two behavioral forces: envy and the sunk cost fallacy. The role of envy was complex: more envious advisees, as measured using a dispositional envy scale, opted to follow advisers more often in the skill-based task revealing a positive, motivational effect of envy. However, higher adviser remuneration reduced this effect, revealing a negative side of envy as a constraint on rational decision-making. Susceptibility to the sunk cost fallacy, measured using a novel scale we developed, had a negative impact on the uptake of good advice. This is consistent with the idea that subjects feel resistant to changing their answers when they put in effort to formulate them. We also present findings from a new survey of 3,096 UK voters who took part in the national referendum on EU membership, consistent with some of our experimental results.

Robin Naylor & Christian Soegaard

Firms which face the threat of import competition from foreign rivals are conventionally seen as favouring import protection. We show that this is not necessarily the case when domestic firms’ input prices are determined endogenously. In a framework where the input price is determined through bargaining with an (upstream) input supplier, the relationship between a domestic (downstream) firm’s profits and the number of foreign competitors depends on trade costs. If trade costs are sufficiently high, then an increase in the number of foreign entrants can raise the profits of a downstream firm in a home market characterised by Cournot competition. The intuition for this result is that increased product market competition through the entry of foreign firms is mirrored by profit-enhancing moderation of the bargained input price. We examine a number of tariff and non-tariff barriers to international trade and identify conditions under which import-competing firms will favour the removal of barriers to foreign competition

Robin Naylor & Christian Soegaard

Firms which face the threat of import competition from foreign rivals are conventionally seen as favouring import protection. We show that this is not necessarily the case when domestic firms' in-put prices are determined endogenously. In a framework where the input price is determined through
bargaining with an (upstream) input supplier, the relationship between a domestic (downstream) firm's profits and the number of foreign competitors depends on trade costs. If trade costs are sufficiently high, then an increase in the number of foreign entrants can raise the profits of a downstream firm in a home market characterised by Cournot competition. The intuition for this result is that increased product market competition through the entry of foreign firms is mirrored by profit-enhancing moderation of the bargained input price. We examine a number of tariff and non-tariff barriers to international trade and identify conditions under which import-competing firms will favour the removal of barriers to foreign
competition.

Bishnupriya Gupta

India fell behind during colonial rule. The absolute and relative decline of Indian GDP per capita with respect to Britain began before colonization and coincided with the rising textile trade with Europe in the 18th century. The decline of traditional industries was not the main driver Indian decline and stagnation. Inadequate investment in agriculture and consequent decline in yield per acre stalled economic growth. Modern industries emerged and grew relatively fast. The falling behind was reversed after independence. Policies of industrialization and a green revolution in agriculture increased productivity growth in agriculture and industry, but Indian growth has been led by services. A strong focus on higher education under colonial policy had created an advantage for the service sector, which today has a high concentration of human capital. However, the slow expansion in primary education was a disadvantage in comparison with the high growth East Asian economies

Sascha O. Becker, Stephan Heblich and Daniel M. Sturm

This paper evaluates the impact of public employment on private sector activity using the relocation of the German federal government from Berlin to Bonn in the wake of the Second World War as a source of exogenous variation. To guide our empirical analysis, we develop a simple economic geography model in which public sector employment in a city can crowd out private employment through higher wages and house prices, but also generates potential productivity and amenity spillovers. We nd that relative to a control group of cities, Bonn experiences a substantial increase in public employment. However, this results in only modest increases in private sector employment with each additional public sector job destroying around 0.2 jobs in industries and creating just over one additional job in other parts of the private sector. We show how this finding can be explained by our model and provide several pieces of evidence for the mechanisms emphasised by the model.

Thomas Hasenzagl, Filippo Pellegrino, Lucrezia Reichlin and Giovanni Ricco

A view often expressed by the Fed is that three components matter in inflation dynamics: a trend anchored by long run inflation expectations; a cycle connecting nominal and real variables; and oil prices. This paper proposes an econometric structural model of inflation formalising this view. Our findings point to a stable expectational trend, a sizeable and well identified Phillips curve and an oil cycle which, contrary to the standard rational expectation model, affects inflation via expectations without being reflected in the output gap. The latter often overpowers the Phillips curve. In fact, the joint dynamics of the Phillips curve cycle and the oil cycles explain the inflation puzzles of the last ten years.

Fernanda Brollo, Pedro Forquesato & Juan Carlos Gozzi

We analyze how political discretion affects the selection of government workers, using individual-level data on political party membership and matched employer-employee data on the universe of formal workers in Brazil. Exploiting close mayoral races, we find that winning an election leads to an increase of over 40% in the number of members of the winning party working in the municipal bureaucracy. Employment of members of the ruling party increases relatively more in senior positions, but also expands in lower-ranked jobs, suggesting that discretionary appointments are used both to influence policymaking and to reward supporters. We find that party members hired after their party is elected tend be of similar or even higher quality than members of the runner-up party, contrary to common perceptions that political appointees are less qualified. Moreover, the increased public employment of members of the ruling party is long-lasting, extending beyond the end of the mayoral term.

Aditi Dimri and François Maniquet

We study absolute income poverty measurement when agents differ in preferences and face different prices. The difficulty arising from price heterogeneity is typically solved using equivalent income, but the choice of the reference price vector remains arbitrary. We provide a way to solve this arbitrariness problem by making the poverty measure consistent with preferences: an agent qualifies as poor if and only if she prefers the poverty line bundle to her current consumption bundle. We then prove that defining group/region specific poverty lines is another way of recovering consistency with preferences, provided one uses the headcount ratio. Comparing the resulting three approaches using Indian data, we find that the different approaches leads to different poverty conclusions. We show that not taking preferences into account leads to severely underestimating urban poverty

Nicholas Crafts

British productivity growth disappointed during the early postwar period. This reflected inadequate investment in equipment and skills but also entailed inefficient use of inputs. Weak management, dysfunctional industrial relations, and badly-designed economic policy were all implicated. The policy framework was partly the result of seeking low unemployment through wage restraint by appeasement of organized labour. A key aspect was weak competition. This exacerbated corporate governance and industrial-relations problems in the British ‘variety of capitalism’ which sustained low effort bargains and managerial incompetence. Other varieties of capitalism were better placed to achieve fast growth but were infeasible for Britain given its history.

Eugenio Proto, Daniel Sgroi and Mahnaz Nazneen

According to existing research across several disciplines (management, psychology, economics and neuroscience), positive mood can have positive effects, engendering more altruistic, open and helpful behaviour, but can also work though a more negative channel by inducing inward-orientation, assertiveness, and reduced use of information. This leaves the impact on cooperation in interactive and strategic situations unclear. We find evidence from 490 participants in a laboratory experiment suggesting that participants in an induced positive mood cooperate less in a repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma than participants in a neutral setting. This is robust to the number of repetitions or the inclusion of pre-play communication. In order to understand why positive mood might damage the propensity to cooperate, we conduct a language analysis of the pre-play communication between players. This analysis indicates that subjects in a more positive mood use more inward-oriented and more negative language which supports the negative channel.

Gregory S. Crawford, Lachlan Deer, Jeremy Smith & Paul Sturgeon

Increased competition for viewers’ time is threatening the viability of publicservice broadcasters (PSBs) around the world. Changing regulations regarding advertising minutes might increase revenues, but little is known about the structure of advertising demand. To address this problem, we collect a unique dataset on monthly impacts (quantities) and prices of UK television channels between 2002 and 2009 to estimate the (inverse) demand for advertising on both public and commercial broadcasters. We find that increasing PSB advertising minutes to the level permitted for non-PSBs would increase PSB and industry revenue by 10.5% and 6.7%.

Irfan Qureshi

Why does low central bank independence generate high macroeconomic instability? A government may periodically appoint a subservient central bank chairman to exploit the inflation-output trade-off, which may generate instability. In a New Keynesian framework, time-varying monetary policy is connected with a “chairman effect.” To identify departures from full independence, I classify chairmen based on tenure (premature exits), and the type of successor (whether the replacement is a government ally). Bayesian estimation using cross-country data confirms the relationship between policy shifts and central bank independence, explaining approximately 25 (15) percent of inflation volatility in developing (advanced) economies. Theoretical analyses reveal a novel propagation mechanism of the policy shock.

Atif Ellahie & Giovanni Ricco

Using a large Bayesian VAR, we approximate the flow of information received by economic agents to investigate the effects of changes to government purchases. We document robust evidence that informational insufficiency in conventional models explains inconsistent results across samples and commonly employed identifications in recursive Structural VARs and Expectational VARs. Furthermore, we report heterogeneous effects of components of government purchases. While aggregate government purchases do not appear to produce strong stimulative effects with output multiplier around 0.7, government investment components have multipliers well above unity. State and local consumption, which captures investment in education and health, elicits a strong response.

Mark Harrison

In terms of economic development, Russia before and after the Soviet era was just an average economy. If the Soviet era is distinguished, it was not by economic growth or its contribution to human development, but by the use of the economy to build national power over many decades. In this respect, the Soviet economy was a success. It was also a tough and unequal environment in which to be born, live, and grow old. The Soviet focus on building national capabilities did improve opportunities for many citizens. Most important were the education of women and the increased survival of children. The Soviet economy was designed for the age of mass production and mass armies. That age has gone, but the idea of the Soviet economy lives on, fed by nostalgia and nationalism.

Silvia Miranda-Agrippino & Giovanni Ricco

Despite years of research, there is still uncertainty around the effects of monetary policy shocks. We reassess the empirical evidence by combining a new identification that accounts for informational rigidities, with a flexible econometric method robust to misspecifications that bridges between VARs and Local Projections. We show that most of the lack of robustness of the results in the extant literature is due to compounding unrealistic assumptions of full information with the use of severely misspecified models. Using our novel methodology, we find that a monetary tightening is unequivocally contractionary, with no evidence of either price or output puzzles.

Wiji Arulampalam, Michael P. Devereux & Federica Liberini

We use firm-level data to investigate the impact of taxes on the international location of targets in M&A allowing for heterogeneous responses by companies. The statutory tax rate in the target country is found to have a negative impact on the probability of an acquisition in that country. In addition, the estimated size of the effect is found to depend on whether (i) acquirer is a domestic or a multinational enterprise; (ii) the acquisition is domestic or cross-border; and (iii) the acquirer's country has a worldwide or territorial tax system.

Mark Harrison

This paper reviews two decades of research on the political economy of secrecy, based on the records of former Soviet state and party archives. Secrecy was an element of Soviet state capacity, particularly its capacity for decisiveness, free of the pressures and demands for accountability that might have arisen from a better informed citizenry. But secrecy was double-edged. Its uses also incurred substantial costs that weakened the capacity of the Soviet state to direct and decide. The paper details the costs of secrecy associated with “conspirative” government business processes, adverse selection of management personnel, everyday abuses of authority, and an uninformed leadership.

Irfan Qureshi

Is the classic Taylor rule misspecified? I show that the inability of the Taylor rule to explain the federal funds rate using real-time data stems from the omission of a money growth objective. I highlight the significant role played by money in the policy discourse during the Volcker-Greenspan era using new FOMC data, benchmarking a novel characterization of “good” policy. An application of this framework offers a unified policy-based explanation of the Great Moderation and Recession. Welfare analysis based on the New-Keynesian model endorses the rule with money. The evidence raises significant concerns about relying on the simple Taylor rule as a policy benchmark and suggests why money may serve as a useful indicator in guiding future monetary policy decisions.

Julia Cage and Lucie Gadenne

This paper documents the scal cost of trade liberalization: the extent to which countries are able to recover the trade tax revenues lost from liberalizing trade by increasing tax revenues from other sources. Using a novel dataset on government revenues over the period 1792-2006 we compare the fiscal impact of trade liberalization in developing countries and in today's rich countries at earlier stages of development. We find that trade liberalization episodes led to larger and longer-lived decreases in total tax revenues in developing countries since the 1970s than in rich countries in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Half the developing countries in our sample experience a fall in total tax revenues that lasts more than ten years after an episode. Results are similar when we consider government expenditures, suggesting decreases in trade tax revenues negatively affect governments' capacity to provide public services in many developing countries.

Lucie Gadenne

Existing evidence suggests that extra grant revenues lead to little improvements in public services in developing countries - but would governments spend tax revenues differently? This paper considers a program that invests in the tax capacity of Brazilian municipalities. Using variations in the timing of program uptake I find that it raises local tax revenues and that the increase in taxes is used to improve both the quantity and quality of municipal education infrastructure. In contrast increases in grants over which municipalities have the same discretion as over taxes have no impact on any measure of local public infrastructure. These results suggest that the way governments are financed matters: governments spend increases in tax revenues more towards expenditures that benefit citizens than increases in grant revenues.

Joram Mayshar, Omer Moav, Zvika Neemanx & Luigi Pascali

We propose that the development of social hierarchy following the Neolithic Revolution was due to the ability of the emergent elite to appropriate crops from farmers, rather than a result of increased productivity, as usually maintained. Since cereals are easier to appropriate than roots and tubers, we argue that regional variations in the suitability of land for the cultivation of these different crop types can account for differences in the formation of hierarchies and states. Our empirical investigation supports a causal effect of the cultivation of cereals on hierarchy, and the lack of a similar effect of land productivity.

Joram Mayshar, Omer Moav & Zvika Neeman

We propose a theory by which geographic attributes explain cross-regional institutional differences in: (1) the scale of the state, (2) the distribution of power within state hierarchy, and (3) property rights over land. The mechanism that underlies our theory concerns the state’s extractive capacity. In particular, we argue that the ability to appropriate revenue from the farming sector is affected by the transparency of farming which, in turn, is affected by geography and technology. We apply the theory to explain the di¤erences between the institutions of Ancient Egypt, Southern Mesopotamia and Northern Mesopotamia.

Redzo Mujcic and Andrew J. Oswald

Objectives: To explore whether improvements in psychological well-being occur after increases in fruit and vegetable consumption. Methods: Longitudinal food diaries were examined on 12,000 randomly samples Australian adults over 2007, 2009, and 2013. The study examined fixed-effects regression equations on individuals' happiness and life satisfaction. It adjusted for a large set of other influences, including people's changing incomes and personal circumstances. Prospective analysis, Granger-causality tests, and instrumental-variable estimation were also done. Results: Increases in fruit and vegetable intake were predictive of increases in happiness and life satisfaction. Well-being improvements were of up to 0.24 life-satisfaction points (for an increase of 8 portions a day), which is equal size to the psychological gain of moving from unemployment to employment. Improvements occurred within 24 months.Conclusions: People's motivation to eat healthy food is weakened by the fact that physical-health benefits accrue decades later. This study offers a new possibility. Public-health policy could emphasise immediate well-being improvement from healthy eating. Policy Implications: Citizens could be shown longitudinal evidence that 'happiness' gains from healthy eating can occur quickly and many years before enhances physical health.

Benjamin Artz, Amanda H.Goodall, and Andrew J. Oswald

Women typically earn less than men. The reasons are not fully understood. Previous studies argue that this may be because (i) women 'don't ask' and (ii) the reason they fail to ask is out of concern of the quality of their relationships at work. This account is difficult to assess with standard labor-economics data sets. Hence we examine direct survey evidence. Using matched employer-employee data from 2013-2014, the paper find that the women-don't-ask account is incorrect. Once an hours-of-work variable is included in 'asking' equations, hypotheses (i) and (ii) can be rejected. Women do ask. However, women do not get.

Giulia Lotti

How harshly should society punish young lawbreakers in order to prevent or reduce their criminal activity in the future? Through a fuzzy regression discontinuity design, we shed light on the question by exploiting two quasi-natural experiments stemming to compare outcomes from relatively harsh or rehabilitative criminal incarceration practises involving young offenders in the 1980's in England and Wales. According to our local linear regression estimates, young offenders exposed to the harsher youth facilities are 20.7 percent more likely to recidivate in the nine years subsequent to their custody, and they commit on average 2.84 offences more than offenders who experienced prison. Moreover, they are more likely to commit to violent offences, thefts, burglaries and robberies. On the contrary, offenders who were sent to the more rehabilitative youth facilities are less likely to reoffend in the future when compared from their older peers in prison, but only when they are held in institutions that are not solely focussed on punishment.

Alexandre Belloni, Mingli Chen & Victor Chernozhukov

We propose Quantile Graphical Models (QGMs) to characterize predictive and conditional independence relationships within a set of random variables of interest. This framework is intended to quantify the dependence in non-Gaussian settings which are ubiquitous in many econometric applications. We consider two distinct QGMs. First, Condition Independence QGMs characterize conditional independence at each quantile index revealing the distributional dependence structure. Second, Predictive QGMs characterize the best linear predictor under asymmetric loss functions. Under Gaussianity these notions essentially coincide but non-Gaussian settings lead us to different models as prediction and conditional independence are fundamentally different properties. Combined the models complement the methods based on normal and nonparanormal distributions that study mean predictability and use covariance and precision matrices for conditional independence. We also propose estimators for each QGMs. The estimators are based on high-dimension techniques including (a continuum of) ℓ1-penalized quantile regressions and low biased equations, which allows us to handle the potentially large number of variables. We build upon recent results to obtain valid choice of the penalty parameters and rates of convergence. These results are derived without any assumptions on the separation from zero and are uniformly valid across a wide-range of models. With the additional assumptions that the coefficients are well-separated from zero, we can consistently estimate the graph associated with the dependence structure by hard thresholding the proposed estimators. Further we show how QGM can be used to represent the tail interdependence of the variables which plays an important role in application concern with extreme events in opposition to average behaviour. We show that the associated tail risk network can be used for measuring systemic risk contributions. We also apply the framework to study financial contagion and the impact of downside movement in the market on the dependence structure of assets’ return. Finally, we illustrate the properties of the proposed framework through simulated examples.

David Ronayne and Gordon D. A. Brown

Consumers' choices are typically influenced by choice context in ways that standard models cannot explain. We provide a concise explanation of the attraction, compromise and similarity effects. Value is assumed to be determined by simple dominance relations between choice options and sampled comparators, and selection of comparators is assumed to be systematically influenced by the choice options. In one experiment, participants viewed differing selections of market options prior to choice. The classic context effects appeared and disappeared as predicted. In the second experiment, individuals' sampling distributions of market options were influenced by the choice set as predicted by the model.

Irfan Qureshi

I study whether money growth targeting leads to indeterminacy in the price level. I extend a conventional framework and show that the price level may be indeterminate if the central bank's response to money growth is weak even when the Taylor principle is satisfied. Based on this reasoning, policy coefficients estimated using novel FOMC meeting-level data propose a new channel of the policy mistakes that may have triggered indeterminacy during the Great Inflation. I show that 'passively' pursuing money growth objectives generates significantly larger welfare loss compared to alternative specifications of the monetary policy rule but 'active' money growth targeting drastically minimises welfare and loss. I confirm the relationship between money and growth objectives and macroeconomic volatility using cross-country evidence.

Juan Carlos Gozzi and Sergio Schmukl

Public credit guarantee schemes have gained popularity as a tool to try to increase access to credit for firms perceived to be financially constrained, typically small and medium-sized enterprises. This paper discusses the potential relevance of these schemes by providing a brief overview of their use around the world and reviewing some important design features. The paper also presents a brief conceptual discussion of the role of public credit guarantees in increasing access to credit and the rationale for government intervention. Public credit guarantee schemes can constitute useful mechanisms for increasing access to finance for certain groups of borrowers, but their success and financial sustainability hinge on proper design. Moreover, rigorous evidence on the impact of these schemes is still scarce. More in-depth evaluations that jointly take into account financial sustainability and (financial and economic) additionality are needed, as well as an assessment of credit guarantees against alternative policy instruments

Eugenio Proto and Andrew J. Oswald

This paper studies a famous unsolved puzzle in quantitative social science. Why do some nations report such high levels of mental well-being? Denmark, for instance, regularly tops the league table of rich countries’ happiness; Britain and the US enter further down; some nations do unexpectedly poorly. The explanation for the long observed ranking one that holds after adjustment for GDP and other socioeconomic variables is currently unknown. Using data on 131 countries, the paper cautiously explores a new approach. It documents three forms of evidence consistent with the hypothesis that some nations may have a genetic advantage in well-being.

Mingli Chen

I propose a fixed effects expectation-maximization (EM) estimator that can be applied to a class of nonlinear panel data models with unobserved heterogeneity, which is modelled as individual effects and/or time effects. Of particular interest is the case of interactive effects, i.e. when the unobserved heterogeneity is modelled as a factor analytical structure. The estimator is obtained through a computationally simple, iterative two-step procedure, where the two steps have closed form solutions. I show that estimator is consistent in large panels and derive the asymptotic distribution for the case of the probit with interactive effects. I develop analytical bias corrections to deal with the incidental parameter problem. Monte Carlo experiments demonstrate that the proposed estimator has good finite-sample properties

Jonathan de Quidty, Thiemo Fetzer and Maitreesh Ghatak

Numerous authors point to a decline in joint liability microcredit, and rise in individual liability lending. But empirical evidence is lacking, and there have been no rigorous analyses of possible causes. We first show using the well-known MIX Market dataset that there is evidence for a decline. Second, we show theoretically that commercialization–an increase in competition and a shift from non-profit to for-profit lending (both of which are present in the data)–drives lenders to reduce their use of joint liability loan contracts. Third, we test the model’s key predictions, and find support for them in the data.

Sascha O. Becker, Peter H. Egger and Maximilian von Ehrlich

We analyze EU Regional Policy during four programming periods: 1989-1993, 1994-1999, 2000-2006, 2007-2013. When looking at all periods, we focus on the growth, employment and investment effects of Objective 1 treatment status. For the two later periods, we additionally look at the effects of the volume of EU transfers, overall and in sub-categories, on various outcomes. We also analyze whether the concentration of payments across spending categories affects the effectiveness if EU transfers. Finally, we pay attention to the role of EU funding for UK regions given the current debate in the UK.

Wiji Arulampalam, Anjor Bhaskar and Nisha Srivastava

We examine the link between a mother’s autonomy - the freedom and ability to think, express, act and make decisions independently - and the nutritional status of her children. We design a novel statistical framework that accounts for cultural and traditional environment, to create a measure of maternal autonomy, a concept that has rarely been examined previously as a factor in children’s nutritional outcomes. Using data from the Third Round of the National Family Health Survey for India, supplemented with our qualitative survey, and accounting for “son preference” by limiting analysis to first-born children under 18 months of age, we document that maternal autonomy has a positive impact on the long-term nutritional status of rural children.

Clément Imbert and John Papp

This paper provides some of the first evidence that rural development policies can have fundamental effects on the reallocation of labor between rural and urban areas. It studies the spillover effects of the world's largest rural workfare program, India's rural employment guarantee. We find that the workfare program has substantial con¬sequences: it reduces short-term (or seasonal) migration to urban areas by 9% and increases wages for manual, short-term work in urban areas by 6%. The implied elas¬ticity of unskilled wages with respect to short-term migration is high (-0.7).

Herakles Polemarchakis

Eventual consensus is the only property of a rational dialog.

James P. Choy

I construct a model of religion as an institution that provides community enforcement of contracts within families. Family altruism implies that family members cannot commit to reporting broken contracts to the community, so the community must monitor contract performance as well as inflicting punishment. The community has less information than family members, and so community monitoring is inefficient. I provide evidence from a study of Amish institutions, including qualitative evidence from sociological accounts and quantitative evidence from a novel dataset covering nearly the entire Amish population of Holmes county, Ohio. I find that 1) Amish households are not unitary, 2) the Amish community helps to support families by inflicting punishments on wayward family members, 3) without the community Amish people have difficulty committing to punishing family members, and 4) Amish community membership strengthens family ties, while otherwise similar religious communities in which there is less need for exchange between family members have rules that weaken family ties. My model has implications for understanding selection into religious practice and the persistence of culture.

James P. Choy

Many societies are divided into multiple smaller groups. Certain kinds of interaction are more likely to take place within a group than across groups. I model a reputation effect that enforces these divisions. Agents who interact with members of different groups can support lower levels of cooperation with members of their own groups. A hierarchical relationship between groups appears endogenously in equilibrium. Group divisions appear without any external cause, and improvements in formal contracting institutions may cause group divisions to disappear. Qualitative evidence from the anthropological literature is consistent with several predictions of the model.

David McKenzie and Christopher Woodruff

Management has a large effect on the productivity of large firms. But does management matter in micro and small firms, where the majority of the labor force in developing countries works? We develop 26 questions that measure business practices in marketing, stock-keeping, recordkeeping, and financial planning. These questions have been administered in surveys in Bangladesh, Chile, Ghana, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria and Sri Lanka. We show that variation in business practices explains as much of the variation in outcomes – sales, profits and labor productivity and TFP – in microenterprises as in larger enterprises. Panel data from three countries indicate that better business practices predict higher survival rates and faster sales growth. The association of business practices with firm outcomes is robust to including numerous measures of the owner’s human capital. We find that owners with higher human capital, children of entrepreneurs, and firms with employees employ better business practices.

Giulio Trigilia

Firms seeking external financing jointly choose what securities to issue, and the extent of their disclosure commitments. The literature shows that enhanced disclosure reduces the cost of financing. This paper analyses how disclosure affects the optimal composition of financing means. It considers a market where firms compete for external financing under costly-state-verification, but, in contrast to the standard model: (i) the degree of asymmetric information between firms and outside investors is variable, and (ii) firms can affect it through a disclosure policy, modeled as a verifiable signal with a cost decreasing in its noise component. Two central predictions emerge

Mark Harrison

When we use Soviet documentation of political and secret police investigations to write history, to what extent are we vulnerable to the biases and inventions of the investigators? The problem is framed as one of principal and agent. It is argued that Soviet principals allowed their agents scope to manipulate facts and bias interpretations, not freely, but within strict limits that were laid down from above and varied from time to time. These limits were set by the leader’s “revolutionary insight,” the communist equivalent of what passes in more open societies today as “truthiness.” An understanding of the Soviet truthiness of the particular time is the best guide we have to interpreting the documentary records of that time. Evaluating them in this light, we see that Soviet historical documents are little different from the records of any other time and place.

Andreas Park and Daniel Sgroi

We analyze and confirm the existence and extent of rational informational herding and rational informational contrarianism in a financial market experiment, and compare and contrast these with equivalent irrational phenomena. In our study, subjects generally behave according to benchmark rationality. Traders who should herd or be contrarian in theory are the significant sources of both within the data. Correcting for subjects who can be identified as less rational increases our ability to predict herding or contrarian behavior considerably.

Peter Hammond

To prove their Walrasian equilibrium existence theorem, Arrow and Debreu (1954) devised an abstract economy that Shapley and Shubik (1977) cricitized as a market game because, especially with untrustworthy traders, it fails to determine a credible outcome away from equilibrium. All this earlier work also postulated a Walrasian auctioneer with complete information about traders' preferences and endowments. To ensure credible outcomes, even in disequilibrium, warehousing is introduced into a multi-stage market game. To achieve Walrasian outcomes in a large economy with incomplete information, even about traders' endowments, a strategy-proof demand revelation mechanism is considered, and then extended to include warehousing.

Gaetano Bloise, Herakles Polemarchakis and Yiannis Vailakis

Sovereign debt is not sustainable even in the presence of uninsurable risks; which extends the result of Bulow and Rogoff (1989). But the argument is not as general. Indeed, examples show that positive borrowing may be enforced even though the sovereign’s natural debt limits, corresponding to the most pessimistic evaluation of future endowment, are finite. Unsustainable sovereign debt in incomplete asset markets requires a strong version of high implied interest rates: the value of the most optimistic evaluation of future endowment is finite.

Rabah Arezki and Thiemo Fetzer

This paper provides the first empirical evidence of the newly found comparative advantage of the United States manufacturing sector following the so-called shale gas revolution. The revolution has led to (very) large and persistent differences in the price of natural gas between the United States and the rest of the world owing to the physics of natural gas. Results show that U.S. manufacturing exports have grown by about 6 percent on account of their energy intensity since the onset of the shale revolution. We also document that the U.S. shale revolution is operating both at the intensive and extensive margins.

Sascha O. Becker, Steven Pfaff and Jared Rubin

The Protestant Reformation is one of the defining events of the last millennium. Nearly 500 years after the Reformation, its causes and consequences have seen a renewed interest in the social sciences. Research in economics, sociology, and political science increasingly uses detailed individual-level, city-level, and regional-level data to identify drivers of the adoption of the Reformation, its diffusion pattern, and its socioeconomic consequences. This survey takes stock of the research so far, tries to point out what we know and what we do not know, and which are the most promising areas for future research.

Gaetano Bloise and Herakles Polemarchakis

In a dynamic economy, money provides liquidity as a medium of exchange. A central bank that sets the nominal rate of interest and distributes its profit to shareholders as dividends is traded in the asset market. A nominal rates of interest that tend to zero, but do not vanish, eliminate equilibrium allocations that do not converge to a Pareto optimal allocation.

Nikos Kokonas and Herakles Polemarchakis

In a stochastic economy of overlapping generations subject to uninsurable risks, competitive allocations need not be constrained optimal. This is the case even in the presence of long-lived assets and no short sales.

Nikos Kokonas and Herakles Polemarchakis

A reduction in the output of productive assets (trees) in some states of the world can expand the span of payo s of assets; and, improved risk sharing may compensate for the loss of output and support a Pareto superior allocation. Surprisingly, if short sales of assets are not allowed, improved risk sharing that results from the destruction of output does not su ce to induce a Pareto superior allocation.

Eugenio Proto, Aldo Rustichini and Andis Sofianos

Intelligence affects the social outcomes of groups. A systematic study of the link is provided in an experiment where two groups of subjects with different levels of intelligence, but otherwise similar, play a repeated prisoner's dilemma. Initial cooperation rates are similar, but increase in the groups with higher intelligence to reach almost full cooperation, while they decline in the groups with lower intelligence. Cooperation of higher intelligence subjects is payo sensitive and not automatic: in a treatment with lower continuation probability there is no difference between different intelligence groups.

Rocco Macchiavello, Andreas Menzel, Atonu Rabbani and Christopher Woodruff

Large private firms are still relatively rare in low-income countries, and we know little about how entry-level managers in these firms are selected. We examine a context in which nearly 80 percent of production line workers are female, but 95 percent of supervisors are male. We evaluate the effectiveness of female supervisors by implementing a training program for selected production line workers. Prior to the training, we find that workers at all level of the factory believe males are more effective supervisors than females. Careful skills diagnostics indicate that those perceptions do not always match reality. When the trainees are deployed in supervisory roles, production line workers initially judge females to be significantly less effective, and there is some evidence that the lines on which they work underperform. But after around four months of exposure, both perceptions and performance of female supervisors catch up to those of males. We document evidence that the exposure to female supervisors changes the expectations of male production workers with regard to promotion and expected tenure in the factory.

Gerben Bakker, Nicholas Crafts and Pieter Woltjer

We develop new aggregate and sectoral Total Factor Productivity (TFP) estimates for the United States between 1899 and 1941 through better coverage of sectors and better measured labor quality, and show TFP-growth was lower than previously thought, broadly based across sectors, strongly variant intertemporally, and consistent with many diverse sources of innovation. We then test and reject three prominent claims. First, the 1930s did not have the highest TFP-growth of the twentieth century. Second, TFP-growth was not predominantly caused by four leading sectors. Third, TFP-growth was not caused by a ‘yeast process’ originating in a dominant technology such as electricity.

Stephen Hansen and Michael McMahon

We explore how the multi-dimensional aspects of information released by the FOMC has effects on both market and real economic variables. Using tools from computational linguistics, we measure the information released by the FOMC on the state of economic conditions, as well as the guidance the FOMC provides about future monetary policy decisions. Employing these measures within a FAVAR framework, we find that shocks to forward guidance are more important than the FOMC communication of current economic conditions in terms of their effects on market and real variables. Nonetheless, neither communication has particularly strong effects on real economic variables.