A Fast Literature Search Engine based on top-quality journals, by Dr. Mingze Gao.
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- Please kindly let me know [mingze.gao@mq.edu.au] in case of any errors.
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Results 198 resources
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The change to the minimum school-leaving age in the United Kingdom from 14 to 15 had a powerful and immediate effect that redirected almost half the population of 14-year-olds in the mid-twentieth century to stay in school for one more year. The magnitude of this impact provides a rare opportunity to (a) estimate local average treatment effects (LATE) of high school that come close to population average treatment effects (ATE); and (b) estimate returns to education using a regression discontinuity design instead of previous estimates that rely on difference-in-differences methodology or relatively weak instruments. Comparing LATE estimates for the United States and Canada, where very few students were affected by compulsory school laws, to the United Kingdom estimates provides a test as to whether instrumental variables (IV) returns to schooling often exceed ordinary least squares (OLS) because gains are high only for small and peculiar groups among the more general population. I find, instead, that the benefits from compulsory schooling are very large whether these laws have an impact on a majority or minority of those exposed.
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Using large samples of estate tax returns, we construct new series on wealth concentration in Paris and France from 1807 to 1994. Inequality increased until 1914 because industrial and financial estates grew dramatically. Then, adverse shocks, rather than a Kuznets-type process, led to a massive decline in inequality. The very high wealth concentration prior to 1914 benefited retired individuals living off capital income (rentiers) rather than entrepreneurs. The very rich were in their seventies and eighties, whereas they had been in their fifties a half century earlier and would be so again after World War II. Our results shed new light on ongoing debates about wealth inequality and growth.
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Using data on prices, production, and exports, we are able to identify marginal costs as well as the effectiveness of the Norwegian cement industry cartel. We find that our marginal cost estimates are very much in line with the detailed cost accounting data. We show that the cement cartel has been ineffective because the sharing rule induces "overproduction" and exporting below marginal costs. It is consumers – not firms – who benefit from the sharing rule. The ineffectiveness of the cartel was becoming so large that domestic welfare of a merger to monopoly would be positive around 1968, which is when the merger actually took place! We also show that competition would have resulted in even higher welfare gains over the entire sample.
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The canonical inflation specification in sticky-price rational expectations models (the new-Keynesian Phillips curve) is often criticized for failing to account for the dependence of inflation on its own lags. In response, many studies employ a "hybrid" specification in which inflation depends on its lagged and expected future values, together with a driving variable such as the output gap. We consider some simple tests of the hybrid model that are derived from its closed form. We find that the hybrid model describes inflation dynamics poorly, and find little empirical evidence for the type of rational, forward-looking behavior that the model implies.
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The property rights approach to the theory of the firm suggests that ownership structures are chosen in order to provide ex ante investment incentives, while bargaining is ex post efficient. In contrast, transaction cost economics emphasizes ex post inefficiencies. In the present paper, a party may invest and acquire private information about the default payoff that it can realize on its own. Inefficient rent seeking can overturn prominent implications of the property rights theory. In particular, ownership by party B may be optimal, even though only the indispensable party A makes an investment decision.
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A multivariate regime-switching model for monetary policy is confronted with U.S. data. The best fit allows time variation in disturbance variances only. With coefficients allowed to change, the best fit is with change only in the monetary policy rule and there are three estimated regimes corresponding roughly to periods when most observers believe that monetary policy actually differed. But the differences among regimes are not large enough to account for the rise, then decline, in inflation of the 1970s and 1980s. Our estimates imply monetary targeting was central in the early 1980s, but also important sporadically in the 1970s.
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Previous experiments using the minimum-effort coordination game reveal a striking regularity—large groups never coordinate efficiently. Given the frequency with which large real-world groups, such as firms, face similarly difficult coordination problems, this poses an important question: Why do we observe large, successfully coordinated groups in the real world when they are so difficult to create in the laboratory? This paper presents one reason. The experiments show that, even though efficient coordination does not occur in groups that start off large, efficiently coordinated large groups can be "grown." By starting with small groups that find it easier to coordinate, we can add entrants—who are aware of the group's history—to create efficiently coordinated large groups. This represents the first experimental demonstration of large groups tacitly coordinated at high levels of efficiency.