Knowledge that Transforms

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.

There has been renewed interest in the possible use of employment programs for disadvantaged male youth as a policy to reduce drug crime, but little evidence exists on the youth employment/drug crime relationship and theory suggests that these programs may increase rather than decrease the amount of drug crime. In this paper, panel data at the neighborhood level are used to investigate the relationship between drug crime and young males' intraurban job accessibility. Results obtained from models that control for time and fixed effects, as well as other potential sources of bias, suggest that modest improvements in job access can substantially reduce the amount of drug crime within poor inner-city neighborhoods.

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.

This paper analyzes the extent of risk-sharing among stockholders and nonstockholders. To evaluate the empirical importance of market incompleteness, it is essential to determine whether idiosyncratic shocks are important for the wealthy who have access to better insurance opportunities, but also face different risks, than the average household. We study a model where each period households decide whether to participate in the stock market by paying a fixed cost. Due to this endogenous entry decision, the testable implications of perfect risk-sharing take the form of a sample selection model, which we estimate using a semiparametric GMM estimator proposed by Kyriazidou (2001). Using data from PSID, we strongly reject perfect risk-sharing among stockholders, but perhaps surprisingly, do not find evidence against it among nonstockholders. This result appears to be robust to several extensions. This finding suggests further focus on risk factors that primarily affect the wealthy, such as entrepreneurial income risk.

In this paper we estimate New Keynesian Phillips curves (NKPC) for U.S. manufacturing industries defined at the SIC two digit level over the period 1959 to 1996. This enables us to measure the extent of nominal inertia across industrial sectors. A key innovation in this research is the use of intermediate-goods costs rather than labor costs as a measure of marginal costs. Intermediate-goods costs are a more significant element of costs for the firms populating our sample and are not subject to the criticism that wage rates are nonallocative. We find that there is statistically significant variability in estimates of price stickiness, ranging from eight months to two years. We also find that estimates of backward-looking price-setting behavior vary, with some industries characterized by 81% of pricing decisions made in a purely forward-looking manner, while in others only 52% of pricing decisions are made that way. Market concentration (as captured by the Herfindahl-Hirschman index) appears to be associated with increased price stickiness, but reduced rule-of-thumb behavior, in setting prices. Finally, firms are also more likely to follow simple rules of thumb when output in their industry is more volatile.

Quarterly evidence on participation in IMF programs for the period 1974–2003 is examined using the techniques of hazard analysis and error-correction estimation. Three hypotheses are proposed and tested. An increase in cumulative prior participation in IMF programs is found to cause a reduction on average in the length of a new spell of participation. The length of time between participation spells is reduced significantly with an increase in prior participation in IMF programs. Reserve adequacy is shown to be significantly and positively affected by participation in IMF programs. The results support a “revolving door” explanation of participation in IMF programs.

Critics argue that electronic voting is vulnerable to fraud. We test whether voting technology affected electoral outcomes in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. We find a positive correlation between use of electronic voting and George Bush vote share. The effect could have been large enough to influence the final results in some swing states. While this pattern would appear to be consistent with allegations of voting irregularities, a closer examination suggests this interpretation is unlikely. We find no evidence that electronic voting had a larger effect in swing states, or in states with a Republican secretary of state. We also find that electronic voting has a negative effect on turnout rates of Hispanics (who tend to favor Democrats). Electronic voting was more likely to be used in counties with a higher fraction of Hispanics; especially in swing states.

Keller and Levinson (2002) utilize state-level panel data on inflows of foreign direct investment along with an innovative measure of relative pollution abatement costs to assess the impact of environmental stringency on capital flows. Using standard parametric panel data models, the authors find moderate evidence that capital flows are sensitive to abatement costs. Using recently developed nonparametric methods, we assess the robustness of this conclusion. The nonparametric approach reveals that (a) some of the parametric results are not robust, and (b) the impact of relative abatement costs is heterogeneous across states and generally of smaller magnitude than previously suggested.