I study the overstatement of economic growth in autocracies by comparing self-reported GDP figures to night-time light recorded by satellites from outer space. I show that the night-time-light elasticity of GDP is larger in authoritarian regimes, even accounting for differences in multiple country characteristics. This autocracy gradient in the elasticity is greater when the incentive to exaggerate economic growth is stronger or when the constraints on exaggeration are weaker. The results suggest that autocracies overstate yearly GDP growth by approximately 35%. Adjusting the data for manipulation leads to a more nuanced view on the recent economic success of autocracies.

Common resources may be managed with inefficient policies for the sake of equity. We study how rationing the commons shapes the efficiency and equity of resource use in the context of agricultural groundwater use in Rajasthan, India. We find that rationing binds on input use, such that farmers, despite trivial prices for water extraction, use roughly the socially optimal amount of water on average. The rationing regime is still grossly inefficient, because it misallocates water across farmers, lowering productivity. Pigouvian reform would increase agricultural surplus by 12% of household income yet fall well short of a Pareto improvement over rationing.

This paper studies the extent to which centrality measures share a common structure. In contrast with prior work, I take an ordinal approach, defining centrality measures as preorders that satisfy an axiom called recursive monotonicity. From this axiom, I derive two fundamental measures, strong and weak centrality, and I relate these to the equilibria of network games. Any equilibrium in a game of strategic complements implicitly orders the players by their actions. Strong centrality captures comparisons shared across all equilibria in all such games. Weak centrality captures comparisons shared across minimal and maximal equilibria in all such games

Teachers and mentors in creative fields shape their students’ skills and views of the craft and thus the work they produce. How significant and persistent is this influence? Are there consequences for the variety and quality of students’ inventive output? We study these questions in the context of Western music composition over five centuries, during which musical lineages are well documented, the content of composers’ work can be directly compared, and its lasting value can be measured. We find strong evidence of influence, document when it arises and persists, and evaluate its consequences. The results provide insight into where creative ideas come from, why certain ideas get produced as opposed to others, and what the ramifications might be

Macroeconomists increasingly use external sources of exogenous variation for causal inference. However, unless such external instruments (proxies) capture the underlying shock without measurement error, existing methods are silent on the importance of that shock for macroeconomic fluctuations. We show that, in a general moving average model with external instruments, variance decompositions for the instrumented shock are interval-identified, with informative bounds. Various additional restrictions guarantee point identification of both variance and historical decompositions. Unlike SVAR analysis, our methods do not require invertibility. Applied to U.S. data, they give a tight upper bound on the importance of monetary shocks for inflation dynamics.

We describe how capital accumulation and the network structure of US production interact to amplify the effects of sectoral trend growth rates in total factor productivity and labor on trend GDP (gross domestic product) growth. We derive expressions that conveniently summarize this long-run amplification effect by way of sectoral multipliers. We estimate that sector-specific factors have historically accounted for approximately three-fourths of long-run changes in GDP growth. Trend GDP growth fell by nearly 3 percentage points over the postwar period, with especially significant contributions from the Construction sector in 1950–80 and the Durable Goods sector in 2000–2018. No sector has contributed any steady significant increase to the trend growth rate of GDP in the past 70 years.

This paper considers top income taxation when (i) new ideas drive economic growth, (ii) the reward for successful innovation is a top income, and (iii) innovation cannot be perfectly targeted by a research subsidy—think about the business methods of Walmart, the creation of Uber, or the “idea” of Amazon. These conditions lead to a new force affecting the optimal top tax rate: by slowing the creation of new ideas that drive aggregate GDP, top income taxation reduces everyone’s income, not just income at the top. This force sharply constrains both revenue-maximizing and welfare-maximizing top tax rates

The vast majority of the pay inequality in organizations comes from differences in pay between employees and their bosses. But are employees aware of these pay disparities? Are employees demotivated by this inequality? To address these questions, we conducted a natural field experiment with a sample of 2,060 employees from a multibillion-dollar corporation in Southeast Asia. We document large misperceptions among employees about the salaries of their managers and smaller but still significant misperceptions of the salaries of their peers, and we show that these perceptions have a significant causal effect on the employees’ own behavior.

This paper develops a flexible recipe for identifying unobserved input allocations, as well as quantity- and revenue-based total factor productivity (TFP) across product lines, for multiproduct producers, using demand- and supply-side information. Applying variants of this recipe to a panel of plants manufacturing machinery in India from 2000–2007 yields sizable within-plant TFP differences. Removing an average plant’s lowest-performing product increases the unweighted average of plant-level revenue-based productivity by 10%–65%. A 1 standard deviation decline in product-level revenue-based TFP generates around a 6 percentage point increase in the probability of dropping that product

Previous articleNext article FreeRecent RefereesPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreJournal of Political Economy acknowledges the assistance of:Manuel AdelinoJonathan AlevyOmar Al-UbaydliLuis AraujoScott AshworthMarco BattagliniNathaniel Baum-SnowMartin BerajaChristopher BerryJohn BeshearsAyan BhattacharyaAdrien BilalChristopher BlattmanLarry BlumeStéphane BonhommeTimo BoppartEric BudishLorenzo CaliendoCaterina CalsamigliaFilipe CampanteSarah CattanGabe Chodorow-ReichStephen CoateZoë CullenPatricio DaltonThomas DavidoffEduardo DavilaDavid de la CroixDouglas DiamondJulian di GiovanniJonathan DingelUmut DurChristian DustmannTore EllingsenRicardo EstradaFederico EtroArmin FalkErnst FehrIván Fernández-ValRam FishmanChristopher FlinnAnthony FowlerAlexander FrankelJoachim FreybergerXavier GabaixDouglas GalePeter GanongPieter GautierAnne GielenAndy GloverBart GolsteynArpit GuptaJonathan GuryanValentin HaddadGeorge HallNikolaj HarmonJonathan HeathcoteBenjamin HébertOri HeffetzDaniel HerbstBerthold HerrendorfMitchell HoffmanDaniel HungermanYuhta IshiiPamela JakielaLisa KahnAmir KermaniJun Hyung KimNobuhiro KiyotakiRalph KoijenFuhito KojimaAnton KorinekStefan KrasaArvind KrishnamurthyKory KroftJulien LabonneDavid LagakosEdwin LaiNathaniel LaneJean-François LaslierAndrei LevchenkoJonathan LibgoberAndrea LinarelloIlse LindenlaubMichael LipsitzAriel ListoErnest LiuGiovanni MaggiIsabela ManeliciZacharias ManiadisIsaac MbitiDavid McKenzieStephan MeierMarti MestieriRobert MoffittCorina MommaertsAlexander Monge-NaranjoIsmael MourifiéDmitry MukhinGisle NatvikDavid NeumarkWhitney NeweySam NorrisLee OhanianAtsushi OhyamaSantiago OliverosRalph OssaNicholas PapageorgeFernando ParroLuboš PástorPetra PerssonTommaso PorzioFabien Postel-VinayDavid PowellGautam RaoPhilip RenySteven RivkinRoberto RobattoEvan RoseMark RosenzweigEvan SadlerSally SadoffBernard SalaniéJames SalleeAnya SamekJuan SánchezPeter SavelyevEdouard SchaalFabiano SchivardiChristoph SchlomMolly SchnellAmit SeruFelipe SeverinoYotam Shem-TovRan ShorrerRon SiegelJirka SlacalekLones SmithXi SongKonstantin SoninSebastian SoteloRobert StaigerColin StewartJohannes StroebelDavid StrömbergGuido TabelliniMichele TertiltDuncan ThomasRobert TopelAlexander TorgovitskyGaute TorsvikFabrice TourreMathias TrabandtAntonella TrigariFabio TufanoBertil TungoddenChristine ValenteMichelangelo VastaDimitri VayanosChristian vom LehnJessica WachterChristopher WaltersMark WatsonHongcen WeiDaniel WilhelmMatthew WiswallNikolaus WolfMichael WoodfordRandall WrightDaniel Yi XuJunsen Zhang Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Journal of Political Economy Volume 130, Number 2February 2022 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/719114 Views: 1008 © 2022 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.