Knowledge that Transforms

This paper develops a model of job creation and job destruction in a growing economy with embodied technical progress, which I use to analyze the political support for employment protection laws such as the ones that are observed in most European countries. In voting in favor of employment protection, incumbent employees trade off lower living standards (because employment protection maintains workers in less productive activities) against longer job duration. The latter is valued because the employed have rents, achieving wages above their alternative value. The gains from, and consequently the political support for, employment protection are larger the lower the rate of creative destruction (i.e., the lower the growth rate) and the larger the employed’s bargaining power. Hence, employment protection is more likely to arise in economies with greater worker bargaining power. Also, workers in older vintages are more in favor of employment protection. Consequently, greater initial protection increases its own support by maintaining a larger fraction of the workforce in older vintages. Finally, if workers can invest ex ante in match‐specific human capital, multiple steady‐state political equilibria may arise, as the outcome of the mutual feedback between employee rents and employment protection.

The economic theory of federalism is largely built around the premise that more heterogeneous preferences result in more decentralized policy making. Despite its prominence and importance, this central tenet of economic federalism has never been empirically evaluated. This paper presents the first formal test of the link between preference heterogeneity and endogenous policy decentralization using as a case study liquor control in the United States over the period 1934–70. The results are reassuring: States with more heterogeneous preferences are more likely to decentralize liquor control and allow for local government decision making.

This paper studies mechanisms behind the rise of mass consumption societies. The development process depicted follows the Flying Geese pattern, in which a series of industries take off one after another. As productivity improves in these industries, each consumer good becomes affordable to an increasingly large number of households, which constantly expand the range of goods they consume. This in turn generates larger markets for consumer goods, which leads to further improvement in productivity. For such virtuous cycles of productivity gains and expanding markets to occur, income distribution should be neither too equal nor too unequal. With too much equality, the economy stagnates in a poverty trap. With too much inequality, the development stops prematurely.

In nonrenewable resource industries, the existence of a markup of price over marginal market cost may reflect the existence of an implicit user cost for the resource rather than market power. We show that valid estimates of market power can be obtained by the joint estimation of a restricted cost function and an inverse supply relation. Estimation of the model with data for the largest firm in the international nickel industry indicates that output price substantially exceeded marginal market cost, with most of the difference due to the exercise of market power rather than the user cost of the resource.

The value of statistical life (VSL) can be inferred through real‐world wage–fatality risk trade‐offs made across different occupations. This paper shows that the VSL based on the wage‐risk trade‐off tends to be biased upward if it does not account for the diversity of workers’ unobservable skill to cope privately with job risk. This upward bias arises because the highest required wage differential among the workers is divided by their average risk across the population.

This paper reexamines whether higher cigarette taxes will substantially reduce youth smoking. We study the impact of taxes during exactly the period in adolescence in which most smokers start their habits. We find weak or nonexistent tax effects in models of the onset of smoking between eighth and twelfth grades, models of the onset of heavy smoking between eighth and twelfth grades, and discrete‐time hazard models that include state fixed effects. We also provide a new perspective on the relationship between smoking and schooling: students who eventually drop out of school are already more likely to smoke in the eighth grade.

Reputational career concerns provide incentives for short-lived agents to work hard, but it is well known that these incentives disappear as an agent reaches retirement. This paper investigates the effects of a market for firm reputations on the life cycle incentives of firm owners to exert effort. A dynamic general equilibrium model with moral hazard and adverse selection generates two main results. First, incentives of young and old agents are quantitatively equal, implying that incentives are "ageless" with a market for reputations. Second, good reputations cannot act as effective sorting devices: in equilibrium, more able agents cannot outbid lesser ones in the market for good reputations. In addition, welfare analysis shows that social surplus can fall if clients observe trade in firm reputations.

State‐level consumption exhibits excess sensitivity to lagged income to the same extent as U.S. aggregate data, but state‐specific (idiosyncratic) consumption exhibits substantially less sensitivity to lagged state‐specific income—a result that also holds for Canadian provinces. We propose the following interpretation: borrowing and lending in response to changes in consumer demand are easier for individual U.S. states than for the United States as a whole, and therefore, the measured deviation from the benchmark permanent income hypothesis model is smaller. However, lagged state‐specific variables help predict state‐specific consumption, suggesting that the PIH model still requires qualification.

This study theoretically and empirically examines altruistic and joy-of-giving motivations underlying contributions to charitable activities. The theoretical analysis shows that in an economy with an infinitely large number of donors, impurely altruistic preferences lead to either asymptotically zero or complete crowd-out. The paper then establishes conditions on preferences that are sufficient to yield zero crowd-out in the limit. These conditions are fairly weak and quite plausible. An empirical representation of the model is estimated using a new 198692 panel of donations and government funding from the United States to 125 international relief and development organizations. Besides directly linking sources of public and private support, the econometric analysis controls for unobserved institution-specific factors, institution-specific changes in leadership, year-to-year changes in need, and expenditures by related organizations. The estimates show little evidence of crowd-out from either direct public or related private sources. Thus, at the margin, donations to these organizations appear to be motivated solely by joy-of-giving preferences. In addition to addressing the basic question of motives behind charitable giving, the results help explain the existing disparity between econometric and experimental crowd-out estimates.