Knowledge that Transforms

We investigate the role that nonportfolio fund differentiation and information/search frictions play in creating two salient features of the mutual fund industry: the large number of funds and the sizable dispersion in fund fees. In a case study, we find that despite the financial homogeneity of S&P 500 index funds, this sector exhibits the fund proliferation and fee dispersion observed in the broader industry. We show how extra-portfolio mechanisms explain these features. These mechanisms also suggest an explanation for the puzzling late-1990s shift in sector assets to more expensive (and often newly entered) funds: an influx of high-information-cost novice investors.

We investigate how contractual incompleteness affects asset ownership in trucking by examining cross-sectional patterns in truck ownership and how truck ownership has changed with the diffusion of on-board computers (OBCs). We find that driver ownership of trucks is greater for long than short hauls, and when hauls require equipment for which demands are unidirectional rather than bidirectional. We then find that driver ownership decreases with OBC adoption, particularly for longer hauls. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that truck ownership reflects trade-offs between driving incentives and bargaining costs, and indicate that improvements in the contracting environment have led to less independent contracting and larger firms.

We investigate how integration of bank ownership across states has affected economic volatihty within states. In theory, bank integration could cause higher or lower volatility, depending on whether credit supply or credit demand shocks predominate. In fact, year-to-year fluctuations in a state's economic growth fall as its banks become more integrated (via holding companies) with banks in other states. As the bank linkages between any pair of states increase, fluctuations in those two states tend to converge. We conclude that interstate banking has made state business cycles smaller, but more alike.

Economic impacts of unionization on employers are difficult to estimate in the absence of large, representative data on establishments with union status information. Estimates are also confounded by selection bias, because unions could organize at highly profitable enterprises that are more likely to grow and pay higher wages. Using multiple establishment-level data sets that represent establishments that faced organizing drives in the United States during 1984–1999, this paper uses a regression discontinuity design to estimate the impact of unionization on business survival, employment, output, productivity, and wages. Essentially, outcomes for employers where unions barely won the election (e.g., by one vote) are compared with those where the unions barely lost. The analysis finds small impacts on all outcomes that we examine; estimates for wages are close to zero. The evidence suggests that—at least in recent decades—the legal mandate that requires the employer to bargain with a certified union has had little economic impact on employers, because unions have been somewhat unsuccessful at securing significant wage gains.

We investigate the regulation of labor markets through employment, collective relations, and social security laws in 85 countries. We find that the political power of the left is associated with more stringent labor regulations and more generous social security systems, and that socialist, French, and Scandinavian legal origin countries have sharply higher levels of labor regulation than do common law countries. However, the effects of legal origins are larger, and explain more of the variation in regulations, than those of politics. Heavier regulation of labor is associated with lower labor force participation and higher unemployment, especially of the young. These results are most naturally consistent with legal theories, according to which countries have pervasive regulatory styles inherited from the transplantation of legal systems.

As a remedy for the notorious deficiency of pre-Civil War U. S. macroeconomic data, this study introduces an annual index of American industrial production consistently defined from 1790 until World War I. The index incorporates 43 quantity-based annual series (most entirely new) in the manufacturing and mining industries in a manner similar to the Federal Reserve Board's monthly industrial production index. The index changes our view of the growth and volatility of the U. S. economy before World War I. A direct implication of the index is that antebellum-postbellum differences in industrial volatility are statistically indistinguishable. The index also demonstrates that the pernicious deflationary depressions that purportedly followed the financial panics in 1837 and 1873 were actually rather mild recessions when expressed in real output.

I analyze a sequential bargaining model in which players are optimistic about their bargaining power (measured as the probability of making offers), but learn as they play the game. I show that there exists a uniquely predetermined settlement date, such that in equilibrium the players always reach an agreement at that date, but never reach one before it. Given any discount rate, if the learning is sufficiently slow, the players agree immediately. I show that, for any speed of learning, the agreement is delayed arbitrarily long, provided that the players are sufficiently patient. Therefore, although excessive optimism alone cannot cause delay, it can cause long delays if the players are expected to learn.

In the 1960s Blacks and Whites chose relatively similar first names for their children. Over a short period of time in the early 1970s, that pattern changed dramatically with most Blacks (particularly those living in racially isolated neighborhoods) adopting increasingly distinctive names, but a subset of Blacks actually moving toward more assimilating names. The patterns in the data appear most consistent with a model in which the rise of the Black Power movement influenced how Blacks perceived their identities. Among Blacks born in the last two decades, names provide a strong signal of socioeconomic status, which was not previously the case. We find, however, no negative relationship between having a distinctively Black name and later life outcomes after controlling for a child's circumstances at birth.

According to official statistics, 20 percent of Uganda's total public expenditure was spent on education in the mid-1990s, most of it on primary education. One of the large public programs was a capitation grant to cover schools' nonwage expenditures. Using panel data from a unique survey of primary schools, we assess the extent to which the grant actually reached the intended end-user (schools). The survey data reveal that during 1991–1995, the schools, on average, received only 13 percent of the grants. Most schools received nothing. The bulk of the school grant was captured by local officials (and politicians). The data also reveal considerable variation in grants received across schools, suggesting that rather than being passive recipients of flows from the government, schools use their bargaining power to secure greater shares of funding. We find that schools in better-off communities managed to claim a higher share of their entitlements. As a result, actual education spending, in contrast to budget allocations, is regressive. Similar surveys in other African countries confirm that Uganda is not a special case.

This paper exploits product-level U. S. import data to test trade theory. Although the United States increasingly sources the same products from both high- and low-wage countries, unit values within products vary systematically with exporter relative factor endowments and exporter production techniques. These facts reject factor-proportions specialization across products but are consistent with such specialization within products. The data are inconsistent with new trade theory models predicting an inverse relationship between price and producer productivity. The existence of within-product specialization is an important consideration for understanding the impact of globalization on firms and workers, the evolution of total factor productivity, and the likelihood of long-run income convergence.