Knowledge that Transforms

We estimate the factors determining specialization of crop choice at the level of individual fields, distinguishing between the role of natural advantage (soil characteristics) and economies of density (scale economies achieved when farmers plant neighboring fields with the same crop). Using rich geographic data from North Dakota, including new data on crop choice collected by satellite, we estimate the analog of a social interactions econometric model for the planting decisions on neighboring fields. We find that planting decisions on a field are heavily dependent on the soil characteristics of the neighboring fields. Through this relationship, we back out the structural parameters of economies of density. Setting an Ellison-Glaeser dartboard level of specialization as a benchmark, we find that of the actual level of specialization achieved beyond this benchmark, approximately two-thirds can be attributed to natural advantage and one-third to density economies.

Economic development implies that the efficiency of firms in developing countries starts approaching that of firms from advanced economies. Various development policies have been pursued to achieve this convergence. We test for this convergence in two economies that represent alternative models of implementing market-oriented development policies: the Czech Republic and Russia. Using 1992–2000 panel data on virtually all medium and large industrial firms in each country and accounting for endogeneity of ownership, we find that foreign ownership markedly improved the efficiency of firms, whereas domestic private ownership did not; domestic firms are not catching up to the (world) efficiency standard given by foreign-owned firms. This is due in part to a slower growth of efficiency in domestic firms over time. However, foreigners' acquisitions of more efficient domestic firms are also contributing to the gap. Domestic firms closer to the frontier are not more likely to catch up than firms farther from the frontier, although foreign firms do exhibit this behavior. The distance of Russian firms to the efficiency frontier is much larger than that of Czech firms. Nevertheless, after nearly a decade of reforms, neither model of development has resulted in convergence of domestic firms to the world standard.

Using a very large sample of matched author-referee pairs, we examine how referees' and authors' genders affect the referees' recommendations. Relying on changing author-referee matches, we find no evidence of gender differences among referees in charitableness, nor is there any effect of the interaction between the referees' and authors' genders. With substantial laboratory research showing gender differences in fairness, the results suggest that outside the laboratory, an ethos of objectivity can overcome possible tendencies toward same-group favoritism or opposite-group discrimination.

This paper tests the effect of background risk on university endowment portfolios, where background risk is defined as the volatility of universities' nonfinancial income. The results show that higher background risk is associated with lower portfolio standard deviations. Universities with higher background risk invest significantly more in fixed income and less in alternative assets. A 1 standard deviation increase in background risk increases the allocation to fixed income by approximately 15% relative to the mean. There is also evidence that wealthier, highly selective universities hold riskier portfolios.

This paper shows that utility differences between the self-employed and employees increase with financial development. This effect is explained not by increased profits but by an increased value of nonmonetary benefits, in particular job independence. We interpret these findings by building a simple occupational choice model in which financial constraints may impede the creation of firms and depress labor demand, thereby pushing some individuals into self-employment for lack of salaried jobs. In this setting, financial development favors a better matching between individual motivation and occupation, thereby increasing entrepreneurial utility despite increasing competition and so reducing profits.

We develop a simple model to study the interactions between a supplier's financial constraints and contract incompleteness in a vertical relationship. Applied to the analysis of multinational firms' sourcing strategies, the model predicts: (i) that complex and specific inputs are more likely to be sourced from financially developed countries and (ii) that multinationals are more likely to integrate suppliers located in countries with poor financial institutions, especially when trade involves complex goods. These predictions are examined and validated using firm-level trade data on multinational firms with operations in France.

Due to its simplicity and familiarity, the Gaussian copula is popular in calculating risk in collaterized debt obligations, but it imposes asymptotic independence such that extreme events appear to be unrelated. This restriction might be innocuous in normal times, but during extreme events, such as the housing crisis, the Gaussian copula might be inappropriate. This paper explores various copula specifications and finds that the degree to which housing prices are related based on the Gaussian copula is too small compared with real housing price data. © 2012 The President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The goal of this paper is to develop techniques to simplify semiparametric inference. We do this by deriving a number of numerical equivalence results. These illustrate that in many cases, one can obtain estimates of semiparametric variances using standard formulas derived in the well-known parametric literature. This means that for computational purposes, an empirical researcher can ignore the semiparametric nature of the problem and do all calculations as if it were a parametric situation. We hope that this simplicity will promote the use of semiparametric procedures.

We document a within-month mortality cycle where deaths decline before the first day of the month and spike after the first. This cycle is present across a wide variety of causes and demographic groups. A similar cycle exists for a range of economic activities, suggesting the mortality cycle may be due to short-term variation in levels of economic activity. We provide evidence that the within-month activity cycle is generated by liquidity. Our results suggest a causal pathway whereby liquidity problems reduce activity, which in turn reduces mortality. These relationships may help explain the procyclical nature of mortality.

Government regulation of firms is associated with more negative externalities and unofficial activity across countries. I argue that this correlation mainly reflects causality going from concerns about market failures to demand for government intervention. Using trust in others as a proxy for such concerns, I show that differences in trust explain a great deal of variation in entry regulations. Then, controlling for trust in the regression of market failures on regulation, the latter is no longer associated with worse economic outcomes. The same result is confirmed when I exploit country population as an alternative source of variation in regulation.