Knowledge that Transforms

Is there any need to clean up a banking system by closing some banks and forcing others to sell assets if the risk of a crisis becomes high? Impaired banks that may be forced to sell illiquid assets in the future have private incentives to hold, rather than sell, those assets Anticipating a potential fire sale, liquid buyers expect high returns, reducing their incentive to lend. Privately optimal trading decisions therefore lead to a worse fire sale and a larger drop in lending than is necessary. We discuss alternative ways of cleaning up the system and the associated costs and benefits.

This article examines learning-by-doing that is specific not just to individual firms but to pairs of firms working together in a contracting relationship. Using data from the oil and gas industry, I find that the productivity of an oil production company and its drilling contractor increases with their joint experience. This learning is relationship-specific: drilling rigs cannot fully appropriate the productivity gains acquired through experience with one production company to their work for another.This result is robust to ex ante match specificities. Moreover, producers' and rigs'contracting behavior is consistent with maximization of relationship-specific learning's productivity benefits.

We propose a tractable variant of the open economy neoclassical growth model that emphasizes political economy and contracting frictions. The political economy frictions involve a preference for immediate spending, while the contracting friction is a lack of commitment regarding foreign debt and expropriation. We show that the political economy frictions slow an economy's convergence to the steady state due to the endogenous evolution of capital taxation. The model rationalizes why openness has different implications for growth depending on the political environment, why institutions such as the treatment of capital income evolve over time, why governments in countries that grow rapidly accumulate net foreign assets rather than liabilities, and why foreign aid may not affect growth.

This article assesses the role of conditionality in cash transfer programs using a unique experiment targeted at adolescent girls in Malawi. The program featured two distinct interventions: unconditional transfers (UCT arm) and transfers conditional on school attendance (CCT arm). Although there was a modest decline in the dropout rate in the UCT arm in comparison with the control group, it was only 43% as large as the impact in the CCT arm at the end of the 2-year program. The CCT arm also outperformed the UCT arm in tests of English reading comprehension. However, teenage pregnancy and marriage rates were substantially lower in the UCT than the CCT arm, entirely due to the impact of UCTs on these outcomes among girls who dropped out of school.

The printing press was the great innovation in early modern information technology, but economists have found no macroeconomic evidence of its impact. This article exploits city-level data. Between 1500 and 1600, European cities where printing presses were established in the 1400s grew 60% faster than otherwise similar cities. Cities that adopted printing in the 1400s had no prior advantage, and the association between adoption and subsequent growth was not due to printers choosing auspicious locations. These findings are supported by regressions that exploit distance from Mainz, Germany--the birthplace of printing--as an instrument for adoption.

This article attempts to document and account for the long-run evolution of inheritance. We find that in a country like France the annual flow of inheritance was about 20--25% of national income between 1820 and 1910, down to less than 5% in 1950, and back up to about 15% by 2010. A simple theoretical model of wealth accumulation, growth, and inheritance can fully account for the observed U-shaped pattern and levels. Using this model, we find that under plausible assumptions the annual bequest flow might reach about 20--25% of national income by 2050. This corresponds to a capitalized bequest share in total wealth accumulation well above 100%. Our findings illustrate the fact that when the growth rate g is small, and when the rate of return to private wealth r is permanently and substantially larger than the growth rate (say, r = 4--5% versus g = 1--2%), which was the case in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century and is likely to happen again in the twenty-first century, then past wealth and inheritance are bound to play a key role for aggregate wealth accumulation and the structure of lifetime inequality. Contrary to a widespread view, modern economic growth did not kill inheritance.

Using geographic differences in the availability of payday loans, I estimate the real effects of credit access among low-income households. Payday loans are small, high interest rate loans that constitute the marginal source of credit for many high risk borrowers. I find no evidence that payday loans alleviate economic hardship. To the contrary, loan access leads to increased difficulty paying mortgage, rent and utilities bills. The empirical design isolates variation in loan access that is uninfluenced by lenders' location decisions and state regulatory decisions, two factors that might otherwise correlate with economic hardship measures. Further analysis of differences in loan availability—over time and across income groups—rules out a number of alternative explanations for the estimated effects. Counter to the view that improving credit access facilitates important expenditures, the results suggest that for some low-income households the debt service burden imposed by borrowing inhibits their ability to pay important bills.

We develop a method for decomposing countries' observed export prices into quality versus quality-adjusted components using information contained in trade balances. Holding observed export prices constant, countries with trade surpluses are inferred to offer higher quality than countries running trade deficits. We account for variation in trade balances induced by horizontal and vertical differentiation, and we estimate the evolution of manufacturing quality for top exporters from 1989 to 2003. We find that observed unit value ratios can be a poor approximation for relative quality differences, countries' quality is converging more rapidly than their income, and countries appear to vary in terms of displaying “high-quality” versus “low-price” growth strategies.

Using a randomized evaluation in Kenya, we measure health impacts of spring protection, an investment that improves source water quality. We also estimate households' valuation of spring protection and simulate the welfare impacts of alternatives to the current system of common property rights in water, which limits incentives for private investment. Spring infrastructure investments reduce fecal contamination by 66%, but household water quality improves less, due to recontamination. Child diarrhea falls by one quarter. Travel-cost based revealed preference estimates of households' valuations are much smaller than both stated preference valuations and health planners' valuations, and are consistent with models in which the demand for health is highly income elastic. We estimate that private property norms would generate little additional investment while imposing large static costs due to above-marginal-cost pricing, private property would function better at higher income levels or under water scarcity, and alternative institutions could yield Pareto improvements.