Knowledge that Transforms

The study examines the historical origins of existing cross-cultural differences in beliefs and values regarding the appropriate role of women in society. We test the hypothesis that traditional agricultural practices influenced the historical gender division of labor and the evolution of gender norms. We find that, consistent with existing hypotheses, the descendants of societies that traditionally practiced plough agriculture today have less equal gender norms, measured using reported gender-role attitudes and female participation in the workplace, politics, and entrepreneurial activities. Our results hold looking across countries, across districts within countries, and across ethnicities within districts. To test for the importance of cultural persistence, we examine the children of immigrants living in Europe and the United States. We find that even among these individuals, all born and raised in the same country, those with a heritage of traditional plough use exhibit less equal beliefs about gender roles today.

This article evaluates the long-term effects of class size in primary school. We use rich data from Sweden and exploit variation in class size created by a maximum class size rule. Smaller classes in the last three years of primary school (age 10 to 13) are beneficial for cognitive and noncognitive ability at age 13, and improve achievement at age 16. Most important, we find that smaller classes have positive effects on completed education, wages, and earnings at age 27 to 42. The estimated wage effect is large enough to pass a cost-benefit test.

We formulate a test of the fungibility of money based on parallel shifts in the prices of different quality grades of a commodity. We embed the test in a discrete-choice model of product quality choice and estimate the model using panel microdata on gasoline purchases. We find that when gasoline prices rise consumers substitute to lower octane gasoline, to an extent that cannot be explained by income effects. Across a wide range of specifications, we consistently reject the null hypothesis that households treat "gas money" as fungible with other income. We compare the empirical fit of three psychological models of decision-making. A simple model of category budgeting fits the data well, with models of loss aversion and salience both capturing important features of the time series.

Recently, Gene Grossman and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg (GRH; “External Economies and International Trade: Redux,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 125 [2010], 829–858) proposed a novel way to think about the implications of international trade in the presence of national external economies at the industry level. Instead of perfect competition and two industries, GRH assume Bertrand competition and a continuum of industries. GRH conclude that the equilibrium is unique if transport costs are low, that there is no trade for high transport costs, and that there is no equilibrium in pure strategies when transport costs are intermediate. In this note we reexamine the equilibrium analysis under different transport costs for a single industry (partial equilibrium) version of GRH’s model. We confirm many of GRH’s results, but also find that there are circumstances under which there are multiple equilibria, including equilibria in which trade patterns run counter to “natural” comparative advantage, and also find that there is a profitable deviation to the mixed-strategy equilibrium postulated by GRH for intermediate trading costs. We propose an alternative set of strategies for this case and establish that they constitute an equilibrium.

Governments in weak states often face an armed opposition and have to decide whether to try to accommodate and contain that adversary or to try to consolidate power and monopolize violence by disarming it. When and why do governments choose to consolidate power and monopolize violence? How fast do they try to consolidate power? When does this lead to costly fighting rather than to efforts to eliminate the opposition by buying it off? We study an infinite-horizon model in which the government in each period decides how much to offer the opposition and the rate at which it tries to consolidate its power. The opposition can accept the offer and thereby acquiesce to the government’s efforts to consolidate, or it can fight in an attempt to disrupt those efforts. In equilibrium, the government always tries to monopolize violence when it has “coercive power” against the opposition where, roughly, coercive power is the ability to weaken the opposition by lowering its payoff to fighting. Whether the government consolidates peacefully or through costly fighting depends on the size of any “contingent spoils,” which are benefits that begin to accrue from an increase in economic activity resulting from the monopolization of violence and the higher level of security that comes with it. When contingent spoils are small, the government buys the opposition off and eliminates it as fast as is peacefully possible. When contingent spoils are large, the government tries to monopolize violence by defeating the opposition militarily.

We present a method of ranking U.S. undergraduate programs based on students’ revealed preferences. When a student chooses a college among those that have admitted him, that college “wins” his “tournament.” Our method efficiently integrates the information from thousands of such tournaments. We implement the method using data from a national sample of high-achieving students. We demonstrate that this ranking method has strong theoretical properties, eliminating incentives for colleges to adopt strategic, inefficient admissions policies to improve their rankings. We also show empirically that our ranking is (1) not vulnerable to strategic manipulation; (2) similar regardless of whether we control for variables, such as net cost, that vary among a college’s admits; (3) similar regardless of whether we account for students selecting where to apply, including Early Decision. We exemplify multiple rankings for different types of students who have preferences that vary systematically.

When and how do democratic institutions deliver accountable government? In addressing this broad question, we focus on the role played by political norms—specifically, the extent to which leaders abuse office for personal gain and the extent to which citizens punish such transgressions. We show how qualitatively distinct political norms can coexist because of a dynamic complementarity, in which citizens’ willingness to punish transgressions is raised when they expect such punishments to be used in the future. We seek to understand the emergence of accountability by analysing transitions between norms. To do so, we extend the analysis to include the possibility that, at certain times, a segment of voters are (behaviorally) intolerant of transgressions. Our mechanism highlights the role of leaders, offering an account of how their actions can instigate enduring change, within a fixed set of formal institutions, by disrupting prevailing political norms. We show how such changes do not depend on “sun spots” to trigger coordination, and are asymmetric in effect—a series of good leaders can (and eventually will) improve norms, whereas bad leaders cannot damage them.

Over the past 30 years, many states have abolished parole boards, which traditionally have had the discretion to release inmates before the expiration of their full sentence, in favor of fixed-sentence regimes in which the original sentence is binding. However, if prison time lowers recidivism risk and if parole boards can accurately estimate inmates’ recidivism risk, then relative to a fixed-sentence regime, parole can provide allocative-efficiency benefits (costly prison space is allocated to the highest-risk offenders) and incentive benefits (prisoners know they must reduce their recidivism risk to gain an early release, so invest in their own rehabilitation). Exploiting quasi-experiments from the state of Georgia, I show that prison time reduces recidivism risk and that parole boards set prison time in an allocatively efficient manner. Prisoners respond to these incentives; after a reform that eliminated parole for certain offenders, they accumulated a greater number of disciplinary infractions, completed fewer prison rehabilitative programs, and recidivated at higher rates than inmates unaffected by the reform. I estimate that eliminating parole for all prisoners would increase the prison population by 10% while also increasing the crime rate through deleterious effects on recidivism.

We investigate the consumption consequences of the 2006–9 housing collapse using the highly unequal geographic distribution of wealth losses across the United States. We estimate a large elasticity of consumption with respect to housing net worth of 0.6 to 0.8, which soundly rejects the hypothesis of full consumption risk-sharing. The average marginal propensity to consume (MPC) out of housing wealth is 5–7 cents with substantial heterogeneity across ZIP codes. ZIP codes with poorer and more levered households have a significantly higher MPC out of housing wealth. In line with the MPC result, ZIP codes experiencing larger wealth losses, particularly those with poorer and more levered households, experience a larger reduction in credit limits, refinancing likelihood, and credit scores. Our findings highlight the role of debt and the geographic distribution of wealth shocks in explaining the large and unequal decline in consumption from 2006 to 2009.

International trade agreements are an important element of the world economic system, but questions remain as to their purpose. The terms-of-trade hypothesis posits that countries use tariffs in part to improve their terms of trade and that trade agreements cause them to internalize the costs that such terms-of-trade shifts impose on other countries. This article investigates whether the most-favored-nation (MFN) tariffs set by World Trade Organization (WTO) members in the Uruguay Round are consistent with the terms-of-trade hypothesis. We present a model of multilateral trade negotiations featuring endogenous participation that leads the resulting tariff schedules to display terms-of-trade effects. Specifically, the model predicts that the level of the importer’s tariff resulting from negotiations should be negatively related to the product of two terms: exporter concentration, as measured by the Herfindahl-Hirschman index (sum of squared export shares), and the importer’s market power, as measured by the inverse elasticity of export supply, on a product-by-product basis. We test this hypothesis using data on tariffs, trade, and production across more than 30 WTO countries and find strong support. We estimate that the internalization of terms of trade effects through WTO negotiations has lowered the average tariff of these countries by 22% to 27% compared to its noncooperative level.