This paper explores Paul N. Rosenstein-Rodan's idea that simultaneous industrialization of many sectors of the economy can be profitable for them all even when no sector can break even industrializing alone. The authors analyze this idea in the context of an imperfectly-competitive economy with aggregate demand spillovers, and interpret the big push into industrialization as a move from a bad to a good equilibrium. They present three mechanisms for generating a big push and discuss their relevance for less-developed countries.

We show that the largest increase in unemployment benefits in US history had large spending impacts and small job-finding impacts. This finding has three implications. First, increased benefits were important for explaining aggregate spending dynamics—but not employment dynamics—during the pandemic. Second, benefit expansions allow us to study the MPC of normally low-liquidity households in a high-liquidity state. These households still have high MPCs. This suggests a role for permanent behavioral characteristics, rather than just current liquidity, in driving spending behavior. Third, the mechanisms driving our results imply that temporary benefit supplements are a promising countercyclical tool.

Motivated by the question of how one should evaluate professional election forecasters, we study a novel dynamic mechanism design problem without transfers. A principal who wishes to hire only high-quality forecasters is faced with an agent of unknown quality. The agent privately observes signals about a publicly observable future event, and may strategically misrepresent information to inflate the principal’s perception of his quality. We show that the optimal deterministic mechanism is simple and easy to implement in practice: it evaluates a single, optimally timed prediction. We study the generality of this result and its robustness to randomization and noncommitment.

Premiums in health insurance markets frequently do not reflect individual differences in costs, either because consumers have private information or because prices are not risk rated. This creates inefficiencies when consumers self-select into plans. We develop a simple econometric model to study this problem and estimate it using data on small employers. We find a welfare loss of 2-11 percent of coverage costs compared to what is feasible with risk rating. Only about one-quarter of this is due to inefficiently chosen uniform contribution levels. We also investigate the reclassification risk created by risk rating individual incremental premiums, finding only a modest welfare cost.

High-performance work systems give workers more discretion, thereby increasing effort productivity but also shirking opportunities. We show experimentally that screening for work attitude and labor market competition are causal determinants of the viability of high-performance work systems, and we identify the complementarities between discretion, rent-sharing, and screening that render them profitable. Two fundamentally distinct job designs emerge endogenously in our experiments: “bad” jobs with low discretion, low wages, and little rent-sharing, and “good” jobs with high discretion, high wages, and substantial rent-sharing. Good jobs are profitable only if employees can be screened, and labor market competition fosters their dissemination.

Inequality Aversion, Efficiency, and Maximin Preferences in Simple Distribution Experiments: Comment by Ernst Fehr, Michael Naef and Klaus M. Schmidt. Published in volume 96, issue 5, pages 1912-1917 of American Economic Review, December 2006

Integrated Longitudinal Employer-Employee Data for the United States by John J. Abowd, John Haltiwanger and Julia Lane. Published in volume 94, issue 2, pages 224-229 of American Economic Review, May 2004

Hospital Transaction Prices and Managed-Care Discounting for Selected Medical Technologies by Avi Dor, Michael Grossman and Siran M. Koroukian. Published in volume 94, issue 2, pages 352-356 of American Economic Review, May 2004

The persistently large number of uninsured, roughly 40 million per year since 1993, continues to elicit bipartisan policy interest. Coverage-expansion proposals without mandates, by far the most common since the defeat of the Clinton plan, must address risk-pooling realities in private markets. Insurers have strong financial incentives to segment risks and minimize pooling of heterogeneous risks, and narrow risk-pooling will diminish the adequacy of premium subsidies based on income alone, at least for higher-risk individuals. The current debate over flat tax credits and the non-group market is a case in point (Blumberg, 2001; Center for Studying Health System Change, 2002; Jack Hadley and James D. Reschovsky, 2002). We, along with nine other teams, were asked to develop a proposal that would expand coverage in a large and creative way (see Holahan et al., 2001). The proposal we developed would subsidize low-income individuals and families but also addresses the issue of inefficient and inequitable risk-pooling.

We examine whether public financial statement information is incrementally useful in forecasting confidential taxable income. More precise firm-level taxable income forecasts can improve policymakers' modeling of the tax system and the analysis of proposed changes in corporate tax law, while more accurate macro-level forecasts of corporate taxable income can improve estimates of corporate tax revenues, a significant component of the federal budget. We find the addition of financial statement information improves firm- and industry-level estimates of future taxable income by primarily providing more timely information, but also through accruals. Our results suggest that macroeconomic forecasts of taxable income may be further improved by the aggregation of firm-level forecasts that are generated using financial statement information. Importantly, our results are driven primarily by tax information in financial statements. We also contribute to the research on the information content of financial statement information for forecasting economic activity.