Knowledge that Transforms

A change in the audition procedures of symphony orchestras—adoption of “blind” auditions with a “screen” to conceal the candidate's identity from the jury—provides a test for sex-biased hiring. Using data from actual auditions, in an individual fixed-effects framework, we find that the screen increases the probability a woman will be advanced and hired. Although some of our estimates have large standard errors and there is one persistent effect in the opposite direction, the weight of the evidence suggests that the blind audition procedure fostered impartiality in hiring and increased the proportion women in symphony orchestras. (JEL J7, J16)

We examine how owners of productive resources (e.g., public enterprises or financial capital) optimally allocate their resources among wealth-constrained operators of unknown ability. Optimal allocations exhibit: (1) shared enterprise profit—the resource owner always shares the operator's profit; (2) dispersed enterprise ownership—resources are widely distributed among operators of varying ability; (3) limited benefits of competition—the owner may not benefit from increased competition for the resource; and, sometimes, (4) diluted incentives for the most capable—more capable operators receive smaller shares of the returns they generate. Implications for privatizations and venture capital arrangements are explored. (JEL D82, D44, D20)

This paper uses general-equilibrium simulations to explore the role of residential mobility in shaping the impact of different private-school voucher policies. The simulations are derived from a three-district model of low-, middle-, and high-income school districts (calibrated to New York data) with housing stocks that vary within and across districts. In this model, it is demonstrated that school-district targeted vouchers are similar in their impact to nontargeted vouchers but vastly different from vouchers targeted to low-income households. Furthermore, strong migration effects are shown to significantly improve the likely equity consequences of voucher programs. (JEL I22, I28, H73)

Demand Reduction in Multiunit Auctions: Evidence from a Sportscard Field Experiment by John A. List and David Lucking-Reiley. Published in volume 90, issue 4, pages 961-972 of American Economic Review, September 2000

Our one-page reply to Whinston and Siegal's forthcoming AER article correcting and elaborating our 1991 AER article.

This paper outlines what inflation targeting involves for emerging market/transition countries and discusses the advantages and disadvantages of this monetary policy strategy. The discussion suggests that although inflation targeting is not a panacea and may not be appropriate for many emerging market countries, it can be a highly useful monetary policy strategy in a number of them.

For 20 years following 1949, average total fertility per woman in China hovered just above six children. The year 1970 marked the beginning of persistent fertility declines. By 1980, the rate had dropped to 2.75, and since 1992 it has remained under 2. While some of this transition can be accounted for by broad socioeconomic developments, the extent to which it is attributable to China's unique population policies remains controversial. This paper analyzes household data from the 1992 Household Economy and Fertility Survey (HEFS) to provide the first direct microeconomic empirical evidence on the efficacy of these policies.

Few would doubt the proposition that political institutions matter for economic development. Yet we lack robust generalizations and systematic evidence on how exactly they do so. In this short paper, I draw attention to a regularity in the cross-national data that has received little attention to date: participatory political regimes are associated with significantly lower levels of aggregate economic instability. After presenting some of the evidence in the next section, I speculate that the reason has to do with the propensity of democracy to moderate social conflict and induce compromise. I discuss three distinct arguments as to why this may be the case. I. Some evidence The relationship between democracy and economic growth has been studied extensively. The data tend to show that democracy has no systematic effect on long-run growth rates. The top panel of Figure 1 shows a typical result: the partial correlation between an index of democracy during the 1970s and subsequent economic growth is virtually zero. The relationship between democracy and volatility in economic performance, on the other hand, is negative, statistically significant, and quantitatively large. This is shown in the bottom panel of Figure 1:

From page 100 -- "A distinctive feature of the procedures recently adopted by inflation-targeting central banks is their forward-looking character. Forecasts of the economy’s future evolution conditional upon alternative policies play a central role in the banks’ deliberations, to an extent that the procedures adopted are sometimes characterized as “forecast targeting.” This emphasis upon the future consequences of policy is unsurprising in an approach that tries to maintain as transparent as possible a relation between the banks’ decisions and the ultimate goals of monetary policy; after all, current decisions can still affect the future, but not the past. Nonetheless, common descriptions of how inflation targeting is or should be practiced go too far, in proposing purely forward-looking procedures. I shall argue instead that an optimal framework for the conduct of monetary policy must generally be history-dependent in ways precluded by these simple proposals. This follows from a general feature of the optimal control of a forward-looking system, which is to say, one in which the private sector’s expectations about future policy are an important determinant of the effects of monetary policy."

This paper analyzes the effects of international openness on vertical integration. Vertical integration can confer a negative externality, by thinning the market for inputs and thus worsening opportunism problems; this induces strategic complementarity and multiple equilibria in the integration decision, thus providing a theory of different “industrial systems” or “industrial cultures” in ex ante identical countries. International openness thickens the market, facilitating leaner, less integrated firms, thus providing gains from international openness quite different from those that are familiar from trade theory. This may be taken as one theory of “outsourcing,” “downsizing,” and “Japanization” as consequences of “globalization.” (JEL D23, F15, L22)