Knowledge that Transforms

In this paper, we examine the sources of the productivity growth in the U.S. computer industry from 1978 to 1999. We estimate a joint production model of output quantity and quality that distinguishes two types of technological changes: process and product innovations. Based on the estimation results, we decompose total factor productivity (TFP) growth rate into the contributions of process and product innovations and scale economies. We find that product innovation associated with better quality accounts for about 30% of the TFP growth in the computer industry. Furthermore, the TFP acceleration in the computer industry in the late 1990s is mainly derived from a rapid increase in product innovation.

This paper provides an answer to an important empirical puzzle in the retirement literature: while most people know little about their own pension plans, retirement behavior is strongly affected by pension incentives. We combine administrative and self-reported pension data to measure the retirement response to actual and perceived financial incentives and document an important role for self-reported pension data in determining retirement behavior. Well-informed individuals are far more responsive to pension incentives than the average individual. Ill-informed individuals seem to respond systematically to their own misperceptions of pension incentives.

We examine the effect of corruption on foreign direct investment (FDI). Starting out from the theory of FDI, we show that corruption can have different effects on horizontal investments, which are primarily aimed at sales to the local market, compared with vertical investments, which are made to access lower factor costs for export sales. Using Swedish firm-level data, we find that corruption reduces the probability that a firm will invest in a country. Moreover, when studying the different types of investments, we find that horizontal investments, measured by affiliate local sales, are deterred by corruption to a larger extent than are vertical investments. We are also able to establish a causal effect of corruption on FDI.

Empirical researchers sometimes misinterpret how additional regressors, heterogeneity corrections, and multilevel factors impact the interpretation of the estimated parameters in binary outcome models such as logit and probit. This can result in incorrect inferences about the importance of incorporating such features in these nonlinear statistical models. Some reports of biases in binary outcome models appear related to the arbitrary variance normalization required in binary outcome models. A focus on readily interpretable numerical quantities, rather than conveniently chosen “effects” as measured by arbitrarily scaled coefficients, would eliminate nearly all of the interpretation problems we highlight in this paper.

This article estimates marginal propensities to consume (MPC) out of current and lagged income for U.S. states using panel data regressions that control for time-specific and state-level fixed effects. The MPCs vary across states; in particular, the MPC out of current income is higher in states where income is more persistent, and the MPC out of lagged income is lower in agricultural states. We show that the estimated MPCs can be matched by a model of forward-looking consumers that includes all of the following features: time aggregation, durable goods, impatience, credit constraints, and risk sharing.

Results from the incentive literature suggest that performance measures are often distorted, eliciting dysfunctional and unintended responses. The existence of these responses, however, is difficult to demonstrate in practice because this behavior is typically hidden from the researcher. We present a simple model showing that one can test for the existence of distortions by estimating the change in the association between a performance measure and the true goal of the organization with the measure's introduction. Using data from a public-sector organization, we find evidence consistent with the existence of distortions. We draw implications for the selection of performance measures.

This paper brings historical evidence to bear on the stylized fact that the yield curve predicts future growth. The spread between corporate bonds and commercial paper reliably predicts future growth over the period 1875–1997. This predictability varies over time, however, and has been strongest in the post–World War II period.

Using information on birth and kindergarten start dates to generate an exogenous measure of the relative age of a student's peer group, we find that, controlling for age, females with older peers are more likely to use substances than females with younger peers. Because there is no reason to suspect that birth and kindergarten start dates should be correlated with the choice of school, the socioeconomic status of a child's peers, or neighborhood unobservables, we view our results with regard to females as providing support for the idea that peer behavior can be contagious. Copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

I examine the impact of competition on wages and productivity using a panel data set of U.K. manufacturing industries over 1954–1973. The introduction of cartel law in the United Kingdom in the late 1950s caused an intensification of price competition in previously cartelized manufacturing industries, but it did not affect those industries that were not cartelized. The econometric results from a comparison of the two groups of industries before and after the introduction of cartel law provide strong evidence of a negative effect of collusion on labor productivity growth. There is no evidence of any effect of collusion on wages. These results are robust to controlling for the potential endogeneity of collusion and are further strengthened by a comparison with U.S. data.

We compare the empirical performance of unitary and collective labor supply models, using representative data from the Dutch DNB Household Survey. We conduct a nonparametric analysis that avoids the distortive impact of an erroneously specified functional form for the preferences and/or the intrahousehold bargaining process. Our analysis focuses on the goodness of fit of the two behavioral models. To guarantee a fair comparison, we complement this goodness-of-fit analysis with a power analysis. Our results strongly favor the collective approach to modeling the behavior of multiperson households.