Knowledge that Transforms

In Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History, Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast probe the organizational foundations of development. Outlining the properties of the “natural” and “open entry” societies, they highlight as well the conditions under which societies can move from one to the other, thereby achieving political order and economic prosperity.

In this essay, I explain my reasons for the following policy recommendations: (1) The Fed should continue to manage monetary policy as it has in the past, should act as the nation's lender of last resort, should fully supervise the large bank holding companies and their subsidiary banks, and should be given resolution authority over the institutions that it supervises. (2) While a council of supervisors and regulators can play a useful role in dealing with macro prudential risks, it should not replace the central role of the Federal Reserve. (3) The virtually unlimited lending powers that the Fed has recently exercised in creating credit and helping individual institutions should be restricted in duration and subjected to formal Treasury approval backed by Congressional preauthorization of funds. (4) The Fed's capital rules for commercial banks need to be strengthened by replacing the existing risk-based capital approach with a broader definition of risk and the introduction of contingent capital. (5) Subjecting mortgage lending to a broader range of Federal Reserve regulations and allowing the Fed to deal with nonbank creators of mortgage products would be better than the creation of a new consumer financial protection organization.

A substantial body of research has taken shape on trade in services since the mid-1980s. Much of this is inspired by the WTO and regional trade agreements. However, an increasing number of papers focus on the impacts of unilateral services sector liberalization. The literature touches on important linkages between trade and FDI in services and the general pattern of productivity growth and economic development. This paper surveys the literature on services trade, focusing on contributions that investigate the determinants of international trade and investment in services, the potential gains from greater trade, and efforts to cooperate to achieve such liberalization through trade agreements. There is increasing evidence that services liberalization is a major potential source of gains in economic performance, including productivity in manufacturing and the coordination of activities both between and within firms. The performance of service sectors, and thus services policies, may also be an important determinant of trade volumes, the distributional effects of trade, and overall patterns of economic growth and development. At the same time, services trade is also a source of increasing political unease about the impacts of globalization on labor markets, linked to worries about offshoring and the potential pressure this places on wages in high income countries.

This paper provides an introduction and “user guide” to Regression Discontinuity (RD) designs for empirical researchers. It presents the basic theory behind the research design, details when RD is likely to be valid or invalid given economic incentives, explains why it is considered a “quasi-experimental” design, and summarizes different ways (with their advantages and disadvantages) of estimating RD designs and the limitations of interpreting these estimates. Concepts are discussed using examples drawn from the growing body of empirical research using RD.

This paper provides a critical survey of the large literature on the life cycle model of consumption, both from an empirical and a theoretical point of view. It discusses several approaches that have been taken in the literature to bring the model to the data, their empirical successes, and their failures. Finally, the paper reviews a number of changes to the standard life cycle model that could help solve the remaining empirical puzzles.

This paper compares the structural approach to economic policy analysis with the program evaluation approach. It offers a third way to do policy analysis that combines the best features of both approaches. We illustrate the value of this alternative approach by making the implicit economics of LATE explicit, thereby extending the interpretability and range of policy questions that LATE can answer.

The magnitude and the direction of net international capital flows do not fit neoclassical models. The fifty U.S. states comprise an integrated capital market with very low barriers to capital flows, which makes them an ideal testing ground for neoclassical models. We develop a simple frictionless open economy model with perfectly diversified ownership of capital and find that capital flows among the states are consistent with the model. Therefore, the small size and “wrong” direction of net international capital flows are likely due to frictions associated with national borders, not to inherent flaws in the neoclassical model.

This paper studies the persistence of innovation in Dutch manufacturing using an unbalanced panel of firm data from four waves of the Community Innovation Survey between 1994 and 2002. We estimate by maximum likelihood a dynamic type 2 tobit model accounting for individual effects and handling the initial conditions problem. We find true persistence in the probability of innovating in the high-tech category of industries and spurious persistence in the low-tech category. Furthermore, past innovation output intensity affects, albeit to a small extent, current innovation output intensity in the high-tech category, while no such evidence is found in the low-tech category.

What is the role of transport improvements in globalization? We argue that the nineteenth century is the ideal testing ground for this question: freight rates fell on average by 50% while global trade increased 400% from 1870 to 1913. We estimate the first indices of bilateral freight rates for the period and directly incorporate these into a standard gravity model. We also take the endogeneity of bilateral trade and freight rates seriously and propose an instrumental variables approach. The results are striking as we find no evidence that the maritime transport revolution was the primary driver of the late nineteenth century global trade boom. Rather, the most powerful forces driving the boom were those of income growth and convergence.

This paper analyzes a 1992 decrease in U.S. federal income tax withholding that shifted the timing of income tax payments while leaving ultimate tax burdens unchanged. Consequently income typically received as a lump-sum refund on filing a tax return was shifted into the previous year's monthly income. This paper considers the impact of the withholding change in the context of mental accounting and finds a decrease in the probability that households contributed to a tax-preferred retirement account. Additional robustness tests show that short-term saving did not simultaneously increase and that the main findings are not driven by liquidity constraints.