Knowledge that Transforms

We use a unique proprietary panel data set from a large hotel company to study how organizational form affects hotel pricing and performance. Aggregate data patterns suggest sizable performance differences between franchised and company-operated hotels. However, after controlling for other factors, we find that if significant at all, such differences are economically small. Moreover, once we endogenize the choice of organizational form, the differences become insignificant. We conclude that the company chooses which hotels to franchise and operate corporately such that, conditional on hotel and market characteristics, it obtains consistent outcomes across organizational forms.

We conduct an empirical study of the impact of consumer price search on the shifting of cigarette excise taxes to consumer prices. We use novel data on the prices that smokers report paying and document substantial price dispersion. We find that cigarette taxes are shifted at lower rates to carton buyers and, especially, smokers who buy cartons of cigarettes in a state other than their state of residence. We also find evidence that taxes are shifted at somewhat lower rates to the prices paid by heavier smokers and at somewhat higher rates to the prices paid by smokers of light cigarettes.

The migration of young Chinese scientists to undertake graduate studies in U.S. universities is arguably one of the most important recent episodes of skilled migration. Using a new data set covering around 16,000 Ph.D. graduates in 161 U.S. chemistry departments, we show that Chinese students have a scientific output during their thesis that is significantly higher than other students. In fact, conditional on acceptance into the same programs, Chinese students perform about as well as the awardees of the NSF doctoral fellowship program. These results shed new light on the benefits of student migration on scientific productivity of destination countries.

Using survey-based measures of future U.S. economic activity from the Livingston Survey and the Survey of Professional Forecasters, we study how changes in expectations and their interaction with monetary policy contribute to fluctuations in macroeconomic aggregates. We find that changes in expected future economic activity are a quantitatively important driver of economic fluctuations: a perception that good times are ahead typically leads to a significant rise in current measures of economic activity and inflation. We also find that the short-term interest rate rises in response to expectations of good times as monetary policy tightens.

This paper investigates the sensitivity of the intergenerational transmission of health to changes in the socioeconomic and public health environment into which children are born using individual survey data on 2.24 million children born to 600,000 mothers during the period 1970 to 2000 in 38 developing countries merged by country and cohort with macroeconomic data. We find that children are more likely to bear the penalty exerted by poor maternal health if they are conceived or born in adverse socioeconomic conditions. Equivalently, shocks to the child's birth environment are more damaging of children born to women with weaker health at birth.

In October 2003, the United States drastically reduced the number of H-1B visas available for foreign-born workers. Such restrictions could make U.S. colleges less attractive to foreign students considering an American education as a pathway to U.S. employment. Citizens from five countries are de facto exempt from the visa restrictions, however. Our difference-in-difference estimates show that restrictive immigration policy reduced SAT scores of international applicants by about 1.5% and decreased the number of SAT score reports sent by international students at the top quintile of the SAT score distribution. Restrictive immigration policy disproportionately discourages high-ability international students from pursuing education in the United States.

This paper applies semiparametric regression models using penalized splines to investigate the profile of well-being over the life span. Using data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) and the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), the analysis shows a common, and quite similar, age-specific pattern of life satisfaction for both Britain and Germany that can be characterized by three age stages. The evidence suggests that the U-shaped profile is a good approximation of decreasing and increasing well-being in the first and second stage. After people reached their late 60s, however, a decline in well-being is found in the third stage.

This paper uses multilevel factor models to characterize within- and between-block variations as well as idiosyncratic noise in large dynamic panels. Block-level shocks are distinguished from genuinely common shocks, and the estimated block-level factors are easy to interpret. The framework achieves dimension reduction and yet explicitly allows for heterogeneity between blocks. The model is estimated using an MCMC algorithm that takes into account the hierarchical structure of the factors. The importance of block-level variations is illustrated in a four-level model estimated on a panel of 445 series related to different categories of real activity in the United States.

Exploiting Australia's National Service lotteries of 1965 to 1972, I estimate the effect of army service on employment outcomes. Population data from military personnel records, tax returns, veterans' compensation records, and the Census facilitate a rich and precise analysis, identified by 53,000 complying conscripts. The estimated employment effect is −12 percentage points (95% CI: −13, −11) overall, −37 for those who served in Vietnam and 0 for those who served only in Australia. It emerged in the 1990s, mirrored by veterans' disability pension effects. These results contrast with those for the United States, possibly reflecting employment disincentives associated with Australia's veterans' compensation system.

Most of the economic analyses of the overseas Chinese network focus on trade and investment flows at the country level. In this paper, we analyze the effects of the ethnic Chinese network at the firm level. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, we find that ethnic Chinese FDI firms in China in fact underperform nonethnic Chinese FDI firms. We also find that the performance of ethnic Chinese firms deteriorates over time. We present evidence consistent with the hypothesis that ethnic Chinese firms underinvest in those firm attributes that may contribute to long-term performance, such as human capital and technology. Our findings raise both empirical and normative implications of ethnic ties.