Knowledge that Transforms

This paper evaluates the effects of two subsidies targeted at schools with large proportions of disadvantaged pupils. The first scheme gives primary schools with at least 70% disadvantaged minority pupils extra funding for personnel. The second scheme gives primary schools with at least 70% pupils from any disadvantaged group extra funding for computers and software. The cutoffs provide a regression discontinuity design that we exploit in a local difference-in-differences framework. For both subsidies we find negative point estimates, which are for some outcomes significantly different from 0. Extra funding for computers and software seems especially detrimental for girls' achievement. The negative effects of extra funding for computers and software are consistent with results from other recent studies casting doubt on the efficacy of computers in schools.

Prior research has established that consumption falls significantly at retirement. What is not known is the extent to which this fall is anticipated during the working years. Using data from a new survey, we show that many working households do expect a considerable fall in consumption when they retire. In fact, those who are already retired report significantly smaller falls in consumption than are expected by those who are still working.

We show that firm size is increasing with the quality of the legal system in Mexico. A 1-standard-deviation improvement in the quality of the legal system is associated with a 0.15–0.30 standard deviation increase in firm size. We also show that the legal system affects firm size by reducing the idiosyncratic risk faced by firm owners. The legal system has a smaller impact on partnerships and corporations than on proprietorships, where risk is concentrated in a single owner. All of the findings are robust to instrumenting for legal quality using historical conditions. By focusing on firms in a single country, the data draw attention to the importance of informal institutions.

In this paper we present a simple, theory-based measure of the variations in aggregate economic efficiency associated with business fluctuations. We decompose this indicator, which we refer to as "the gap", into two constituent parts: a price markup and a wage markup, and show that the latter accounts for the bulk of the fluctuations in our gap measure. Finally, we derive a measure of the welfare costs of business cycles that is directly related to our gap variable, and which takes into account explicitly the existence of a varying aggregate inefficiency. When applied to postwar U.S. data, for plausible parametrizations, our measure suggests welfare losses of fluctuations that are of a higher order of magnitude than those derived by It also suggests that the major postwar recessions involved substantial efficiency costs.

We document that the fraction of entrepreneurs working in the region where they were born is significantly higher than the corresponding fraction for dependent workers. This is more pronounced in more developed regions and positively related to the degree of local financial development. Firms created by locals are bigger, operate with more capital-intensive technologies, and obtain greater financing per unit of capital invested, than firms created by nonlocals. This suggests that there are so many local entrepreneurs because locals can better exploit the financial opportunities available in the region where they were born. This helps to explain how local financial development causes persistent disparities in entrepreneurial activity, technology, and income.

Workers who lose their jobs can become reemployed either by being recalled to their previous employers or by finding new jobs. Workers' chances for recall should depress their job search intensity, so the rates of exit from unemployment by these two routes should be negatively related. We look for evidence in the PSID data by estimating a semiparametric competing risks model with explicitly related hazards. Our estimates reveal a statistically precise but small negative effect of recall probabilities on the rate of new job finding.

We develop a demand model for goods that are subject to habit formation. We show that consumption plans of forward-looking individuals depend on preferences, current period prices, and individual beliefs about the evolution of future prices. Moreover, an increase in price uncertainty reduces consumption along the optimal path. With smoking as our application, we test the predictions of our model using a unique data set of prices for cigarettes and the restricted-use version of the National Education Longitudinal Study. Our estimation results suggest that teenagers who live in metropolitan areas with a large amount of cigarette price volatility have, on average, significantly lower levels of cigarette consumption.

We investigate the role of permanent and transitory shocks for firms and aggregate dynamics. We find that permanent shocks to productivity and permanent shifts in the composition of output explain at least four-fifths of firms' dynamics. However, these permanent shocks are almost uncorrelated across firms and are therefore less relevant for aggregate dynamics. Transitory shocks, on the other hand, are not very important at the firm level, but they account for most of the volatility of aggregate hours and output, because they are significantly correlated across firms. Finally, we try to make some progress on the interpretation of the shocks.

Merger control authorities may approve a merger based on an “efficiency defense.” An important aspect in clearing mergers is that the efficiencies need to be merger-specific. Joint ventures, and in particular research joint ventures (RJVs), may achieve comparable efficiencies possibly without the anticompetitive (market power) effects of mergers. We empirically account for the endogenous formation of mergers and RJVs and provide evidence that at the semiconductor level, mergers and RJVs achieve dominant (net) efficiency effects. Our counterfactuals provide evidence that the efficiency gains caused by mergers would have been achieved by RJVs as well. Therefore, RJVs often represent viable alternatives to mergers from the consumer welfare point of view. At the more disaggregate level we find that the efficiency effects are larger in the microcomponents than in the memory market. This finding emphasizes the importance of market determinants (such as product differentiation and entry) having an impact on efficiency and market power effects.

We assess competition among retail depository institutions in 1,884 rural markets. We estimate an equilibrium market structure model that endogenizes the operating decisions of three types of depository institutions: multimarket banks, single-market banks, and thrift institutions. Observed market structures and a game-theoretic specification of entry behavior identify the parameters of an underlying profit function. We find strong evidence that product differentiation generates additional profits for retail depository institutions. These profits help to maintain smaller banks and thrifts, even as larger banks expand their operations. Consumers have more options, as more institutions can profitably operate as a result of product differentiation.