Knowledge that Transforms

There is a widespread belief that changes in expectations may be an important independent driver of economic fluctuations. The news view of business cycles offers a formalization of this perspective. In this paper we discuss mechanisms by which changes in agents' information, due to the arrival of news, can cause business cycle fluctuations driven by expectational change, and we review the empirical evidence aimed at evaluating their relevance. In particular, we highlight how the literature on news and business cycles offers a coherent way of thinking about aggregate fluctuations, while at the same time we emphasize the many challenges that must be addressed before a proper assessment of the role of news in business cycles can be established. (JEL D83, D84, E13, E32, O33)

This review provides a critical survey of psychology-and-economics (“behavioral-economics”) research in contract theory. First, I introduce the theories of individual decision making most frequently used in behavioral contract theory, and formally illustrate some of their implications in contracting settings. Second, I provide a more comprehensive (but informal) survey of the psychology-and-economics work on classical contract-theoretic topics: moral hazard, screening, mechanism design, and incomplete contracts. I also summarize research on a new topic spawned by psychology and economics, exploitative contracting, that studies contracts designed primarily to take advantage of agent mistakes. (JEL A12, D03, D82, D86)

We review the main identification strategies and empirical evidence on the role of expectations in the New Keynesian Phillips curve, paying particular attention to the issue of weak identification. Our goal is to provide a clear understanding of the role of expectations that integrates across the different papers and specifications in the literature. We discuss the properties of the various limited-information econometric methods used in the literature and provide explanations of why they produce conflicting results. Using a common dataset and a flexible empirical approach, we find that researchers are faced with substantial specification uncertainty, as different combinations of various a priori reasonable specification choices give rise to a vast set of point estimates. Moreover, given a specification, estimation is subject to considerable sampling uncertainty due to weak identification. We highlight the assumptions that seem to matter most for identification and the configuration of point estimates. We conclude that the literature has reached a limit on how much can be learned about the New Keynesian Phillips curve from aggregate macroeconomic time series. New identification approaches and new datasets are needed to reach an empirical consensus. (JEL C51, D84, E12, E24, E31)

We survey the economic literature, both theoretical and empirical, on the choice of intellectual property protection by firms. Our focus is on the trade-offs between using patents and disclosing versus the use of secrecy, although we also look briefly at the use of other means of formal intellectual property protection. (JEL D82, K11, O31, O34)

A rapidly growing body of research applies panel methods to examine how temperature, precipitation, and windstorms influence economic outcomes. These studies focus on changes in weather realizations over time within a given spatial area and demonstrate impacts on agricultural output, industrial output, labor productivity, energy demand, health, conflict, and economic growth, among other outcomes. By harnessing exogenous variation over time within a given spatial unit, these studies help credibly identify (i) the breadth of channels linking weather and the economy, (ii) heterogeneous treatment effects across different types of locations, and (iii) nonlinear effects of weather variables. This paper reviews the new literature with two purposes. First, we summarize recent work, providing a guide to its methodologies, datasets, and findings. Second, we consider applications of the new literature, including insights for the “damage function” within models that seek to assess the potential economic effects of future climate change. (JEL C51, D72, O13, Q51, Q54)

This paper undertakes an assessment of a rapidly growing body of economic research on financial literacy. We start with an overview of theoretical research which casts financial knowledge as a form of investment in human capital. Endogenizing financial knowledge has important implications for welfare as well as policies intended to enhance levels of financial knowledge in the larger population. Next, we draw on recent surveys to establish how much (or how little) people know and identify the least financially savvy population subgroups. This is followed by an examination of the impact of financial literacy on economic decision-making in the United States and elsewhere. While the literature is still young, conclusions may be drawn about the effects and consequences of financial illiteracy and what works to remedy these gaps. A final section offers thoughts on what remains to be learned if researchers are to better inform theoretical and empirical models as well as public policy.

This paper uses firm-level survey data matched with official tax records to estimate the unobserved true sales of formal firms in Mongolia. Taking into account firm-level incentives to comply with taxes and a production function technology linking unobserved true sales with observable firm-level production characteristics, we derive a multiple-indicators, multiple-causes model predicting true sales. We find that firms underreport sales to the tax office by 38.6%, but firm-level survey data also suffer from significant underreporting. Finally, we compare our approach with two alternative approaches of measuring underreporting and discuss the practical implications of the findings for firm-level analyses of underreporting.

Physician-induced demand, whereby physicians alter patient treatment for personal gain, lies at the heart of concerns about publicly provided health care. However, little is known about how payment systems affect the ultimate outcome of patient health. Exploiting a unique policy induced variation in Denmark, I investigate the impact of physician payment contracts on infant health. In a difference-in-differences framework, I find that firstborn infants exposed in the womb to the care of general practitioners with capitation contracts have poorer infant health outcomes than infants exposed to fee-for-service contracts. The firstborn children of younger women primarily drive the effects.

In this paper, I construct product-level U.S.-manufacturing-imports data for new products. I show that consistent with product cycles, the North's new-products exports to the United States, relative to its old-products exports, grow faster than the South's for over a decade; then the South catches up with the North, and this pattern is reversed. This finding holds up in parametric, nonparametric, and semiparametric estimations, and only when new products are properly identified and old products within the same industries are used as controls. There is also evidence that product cycles become shorter over time and they are technology related.

We model technological progress as an external effect of organizational design, focusing on how factories, based on labor division, could spawn the Industrial Revolution. Dividing labor, as Adam Smith argued, facilitates invention by observers of production processes. However, entrepreneurs cannot internalize this benefit and choose labor division to facilitate monitoring. Equilibrium with few entrepreneurs features low wage shares, and high specialization, but a limited market for innovations. Conversely, with many entrepreneurs, there is a large market for innovation but little specialization because of high wage shares. Technological progress therefore occurs with a moderate scarcity of entrepreneurs. Institutional improvements affect growth ambiguously.