Knowledge that Transforms

There has been fierce debate over the imposition of stronger intellectual property rights laws for pharmaceutical products in developing countries. This paper uses data from the Indian pharmaceutical industry to develop a structural model of demand, supply and entry. The estimation yields demand and supply parameters that indicate significant heterogeneity among firms both within and across different therapeutic segments. The estimated parameters are used to simulate patent enforcement and price deregulation for 43 drugs, which predicts large losses for consumers and relatively small gains in profits for the global patent holders.

This study aims to empirically investigate the determinants of service industry productivity, such as economies of scale and economies of density. By using establishment-level data related to personal service industries in Japan, the study estimates the production functions for both value-added and physical output measures. In almost all the service industries examined, significant economies of scale and economies of density are observed, wherein productivity increases by 7% to 15% when the municipality population density doubles. These findings are confirmed by an estimation in which the measures of physical output are considered instead of value added.

Road safety policies often use incentive mechanisms based on traffic violations to promote safe driving—for example, fines, experience rating, and point-record driver's licenses. We analyze the effectiveness of these mechanisms in promoting safe driving. We derive their theoretical properties with respect to contract time and accumulated demerit points. These properties are tested empirically with data from the Quebec public insurance plan. We find evidence of moral hazard, which means that drivers who accumulate demerit points become more careful because they are at risk of losing their license. An insurance rating scheme introduced in 1992 reduced the frequency of traffic violations by 15%. We use this result to derive monetary equivalents for traffic violations and license suspensions.

U.S. credit unions serve 93 million members, hold 10% of U.S. savings deposits, and make 13.2% of all nonrevolving consumer loans. Since 1985, the share of U.S. depository institution assets held by credit unions has nearly doubled, and the average (inflation-adjusted) size of credit unions has increased over 600%. We use a local-linear estimator, dimesion-reduction techniques, and bootstrap methods to estimate and make inference about ray scale and expansion-path scale economies. We find substantial evidence of increasing returns to scale among credit unions of all sizes, suggesting that further consolidation and growth among credit unions are likely.

The interbank money market in the United States and Europe became turbulent during the financial crisis of 2007–2009, with the counterparty default risk premiums and liquidity premiums of short-term financing among major financial institutions rising sharply to unprecedented levels. Using various measures of macroeconomic and financial risks, I find that the surges in counterparty risk premiums were predominantly driven by heightened uncertainties about the macroeconomy and financial market, as well as underlying mortgage default risks. The new liquidity facility that the Federal Reserve established, the Term Auction Facility, significantly relieved the strains in the money market, primarily through lowering banks' liquidity concerns. Its effect on the counterparty risk premiums, however, has been quite limited.

This paper examines whether giving large cash transfers to financially distressed people causes them to avoid bankruptcy. A comparison of Florida Lottery winners who randomly received $50, 000 to $150, 000 to small winners indicates that such transfers only postpone bankruptcy rather than prevent it, a result inconsistent with the negative shock model of bankruptcy. Furthermore, the large winners who subsequently filed for bankruptcy had similar net assets and unsecured debt as small winners. Thus, our findings suggest that skepticism regarding the long-term impact of cash transfers may be warranted. © 2011 The President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

This paper shows that, consistent with a signaling-by-consuming model à la Veblen, income elasticities can be predicted from the visibility of consumer expenditures. We outline a stylized conspicuous consumption model where income elasticity is endogenously predicted to be higher if a good is visible and lower if it is not. We then develop a survey-based measure of expenditure visibility, ranking different expenditures by how noticeable they are to others. Finally, we show that our visibility measure predicts up to one-third of the observed variation in elasticities across consumption categories in U.S. data.

Previous empirical literature has found a sharp decline in consumption during the first years of retirement, implying that individuals do not save enough for their retirement. This phenomenon is called the retirement consumption puzzle. We find no evidence of the retirement consumption puzzle using panel data from 1980 to 2000. Consumption is defined as nondurable expenditure, a more comprehensive measure than only food used in many of the previous studies. We find that food expenditure declines at retirement, which is consistent with previous studies.

This paper investigates the sources of the substantial decrease in output growth volatility in the mid-1980s by identifying which of the structural parameters in a representative New Keynesian and structural VAR models changed. Overturning conventional wisdom, we show that the Great Moderation was due not only to changes in shock volatilities but also to changes in monetary policy parameters, as well as in the private sector's parameters. The Great Moderation was previously attributed to good luck because the alternative sources of instabilities appear to have offsetting effects on output volatility and therefore were impossible to detect using existing techniques.

We estimate the impact of market development and democratization on subjective political preferences. We rely on the specific situation of frontier zones and the considerable regional variations in culture and economic development in the countries of the former socialist bloc for identification. Using a survey conducted in 2006, we find a positive and significant effect of democracy on support for a market economy, but no effect of market liberalization on support for democracy. Hence, in contrast with the conventional wisdom concerning the sequencing of political and economic reforms, democratization may become a necessary condition to obtain public support for further economic liberalization.