Knowledge that Transforms

The last three decades have witnessed the rise of a pohtical gender gap in the United States wherein more women than men favor the Democratic party. We trace this development to the decline in marriage, which we posit has made men richer and women poorer. Data for the United States support this argument. First, there is a strong positive correlation between state divorce prevalence and the political gender gap—higher divorce prevalence reduces support for the Democrats among men but not women. Second, longitudinal data show that following marriage (divorce), women are less (more) likely to support the Democratic party.

Improvements in education and educational quality are widely acknowledged to be major contributors to black economic progress in the twentieth century. This paper investigates the sources of improvement in black education in the South in the first half of the century and demonstrates the important roles of social activism, especially NAACP litigation and private philanthropy, in improving the quality and availability of public schooling. Many scholars view education as a rival to social activism in explaining black economic progress, but such a view misses the important role of philanthropic and legal interventions in promoting education.

Many emerging market countries have suffered financial crises. One view blames soft pegs for these crises. Adherents of this view suggest that countries move to corner solutions—hard pegs or floating exchange rates. We analyze the behavior of exchange rates, reserves, and interest rates to assess whether there is evidence that country practice is moving toward corner solutions. We focus on whether countries that claim they are floating are indeed doing so. We find that countries that say they allow their exchange rate to float mostly do not—there seems to be an epidemic case of “fear of floating.”

This paper provides a quantitative theory for the recent rise in residual wage inequality consistent with the empirical observation that a sizable part of this increase has a transitory nature, a feature that eludes standard models based on ex ante heterogeneity in ability. An acceleration in the rate of quality improvement of equipment, like the one observed from the early 1970s, increases the productivity/quality differentials across machines (jobs). In a frictional labor market, this force translates into higher wage dispersion even among ex ante equal workers. With vintage-human capital, the acceleration reduces workers' capacity to transfer skills from old to new machines, generating a rise in the cross-sectional variance of skills, and therefore of wages. Through calibration, the paper shows that this mechanism can account for 30 percent of the surge in residual inequality in the U. S. economy (or for most of its transitory component). Two key implications of the theory—faster within-job wage growth and larger wage losses upon displacement—find empirical support in the data.

This research develops an evolutionary growth theory that captures the interplay between the evolution of mankind and economic growth since the emergence of the human species. This uni…ed theory encompasses the observed evolution of population, technology and income per capita in the long transition from an epoch of Malthusian stagnation to sustained economic growth. The theory suggests that prolonged economic stagnation prior to the transition to sustained growth stimulated natural selection that shaped the evolution of the human species, whereas the evolution of the human species was the origin of the take-o¤ from an epoch of stagnation to sustained growth. – Growth ; Technological Progress ; Fertility ; Human Capital ; Evolution ; Natural Selection ; Malthusian Stagnation

We develop an equilibrium model of industrial structure in which the organization of firms is endogenous. Differentiated consumer products can be produced either by vertically integrated firms or by pairs of specialized companies. Production of each variety of consumer good requires a specialized component. Vertically integrated firms can manufacture the components they need, but they face a relatively high cost of governance. Specialized firms can produce at lower cost, but search for partners is costly, and input suppliers face a potential holdup problem. We study the determinants of the equilibrium mode of organization when inputs are fully or partially specialized.

It is well-known that if international linkages are relatively small, the potential gains to international monetary policy coordination are typically quite limited. But when goods and financial markets are tightly linked, is it problematic if countries unilaterally design their monetary policy rules? Are the stabilization gains from having separate currencies largely squandered in the absence of effective international monetary coordination? We argue that under plausible assumptions the answer is no. Unless risk aversion is very high, lack of coordination in rule setting is a second-order problem compared with the overall gains from macroeconomic stabilization.

Sex ratios, i.e., relative numbers of men and women, can affect marriage prospects, labor force participation, and other social and economic variables. But the observed association between sex ratios and social and economic conditions may be confounded by omitted variables and reverse causality. This paper uses variation in immigrant flows as a natural experiment to study the effect of sex ratios on the children and grandchildren of immigrants. The flow of immigrants affected the second generation marriage market because second generation marriages were mostly endogamous, i.e., to members of the same ethnic group. The empirical results suggest that high sex ratios had a large positive effect on the likelihood of female marriage, and a large negative effect on female labor force participation. Perhaps surprisingly, the marriage rates of second generation men appear to be a slightly increasing function of immigrant sex ratios. Higher sex ratios also appear to have raised male earnings and the incomes of parents with young children. The empirical results are broadly consistent with theories where higher sex ratios increase female bargaining power in the marriage market.

Countries differ significantly in the way in which they regulate the entry of new businesses. To meet government requirements for starting to operate a business in Austria, an entrepreneur must complete 12 procedures taking at least 154 business days and pay US$11,612 in government fees. To do the same, an entrepreneur in Bolivia needs to follow 20 different procedures, pay US$2,696 in fees to the government and wait at least 82 business days to acquire the necessary permits. In contrast, an entrepreneur in Canada can finish the process in roughly 2 days by paying US$280 in government fees and completing only 2 procedures.

This paper utilizes a unique data set of credit card accounts to analyze how people respond to credit supply. Increases in credit limits generate an immediate and significant rise in debt, counter to the Permanent-Income Hypothesis. The “MPC out of liquidity” is largest for people starting near their limit, consistent with binding liquidity constraints. However, the MPC is significant even for people starting well below their limit, consistent with precautionary models. Nonetheless, there are other results that conventional models cannot easily explain, for example, why so many people are borrowing on their credit cards, and simultaneously holding low yielding assets. The long-run elasticity of debt to the interest rate is approximately -1.3, less than half of which represents balance-shifting across cards.