顶刊论文流

We study the effects of the largest corporate income tax cut in US history on firms and workers. To identify causal effects, we use employer-employee matched tax records and event studies comparing similarly sized firms in the same industry that faced divergent tax changes due to their preexisting legal status. Tax cuts cause increases in firms' investment, sales, profits, employment, and payrolls, with earnings gains concentrated among highly paid workers. In the short run, 87 percent of private income gains flow to the top 10 percent of the income distribution. (JEL D22, D31, G31, H25, H32, J23, L25)

We document how deepening resource scarcity results in rationing on the basis of race in a high-stakes setting: health care. Using detailed, time stamped data on 107,000 inpatient admissions to a large health system, we find that in-hospital mortality increases for Black but not White patients as hospitals reach capacity. These findings are not explained by differential patient selection. We identify rationing by wait times as a mechanism, documenting that sicker Black patients wait longer for care than healthier White patients at almost all capacity levels. Text analysis of unstructured clinical notes reveals rationing of provider effort as another mechanism. (JEL I11, I12, I14, J15)

Designing public transport networks involves trade-offs between coverage, service frequency, and direct service. We use the expansion of the bus system in Jakarta, Indonesia, to study these trade-offs. We analyze how new direct connections, changes in bus travel time, and wait-time reductions affect bus ridership and aggregate flows and estimate a transit network demand model by matching the route launch events. Commuters in Jakarta are 2–3 times more sensitive to wait time than bus time and inattentive to long routes. We develop a flexible framework to characterize optimal networks. A less concentrated network would increase ridership and commuter welfare. (JEL L92, L98, O18, R41, R42, R48)

A designer employs a dynamic protocol to elicit private information. Protocols produce a set of contextual privacy violations—information learned that may be superfluous given the context. A protocol is maximally contextually private if there is no protocol that produces a proper subset of the violations it produces, while implementing the choice rule. Contextual privacy violations arise when a choice rule makes some agents collectively, but not individually, pivotal. In auctions, designing for contextual privacy requires choosing an initial question posed to each agent and the order for querying agents. Ascending-join protocols are maximally contextually private for k-item Vickrey auctions. (JEL D44, D82)

We provide experimental evidence on the intergenerational impacts of secondary education subsidies in a low-income context, leveraging a randomized controlled trial and 15-year longitudinal follow-up. Secondary school scholarships delay fertility, reduce unwanted pregnancies, and change partner selection. Under-one mortality is reduced by half. We also document cognitive development gains of 0.24 standard deviations of test scores by age five among children of female scholarship recipients. Means-tested secondary school scholarships are a high-return investment, with a conservatively estimated US$4.1 in benefits for each US$1 the policy would cost the government in the long run. (JEL H52, I12, I21, I26, J13, J16, O15)

Experimental and quasi-experimental studies show that childhood neighborhoods have substantial causal impacts on children's adult earnings and other long-term socioeconomic outcomes. Several market failures are likely to lead to excessive residential segregation by parental income and to an undersupply of mixed-income neighborhoods. Missing markets for opportunity originate in capital market imperfections for borrowing on children's future earnings, neighbor spillovers, behavioral biases, and housing search frictions. Customized housing mobility services combined with subsidized housing vouchers can help low-income families move to higher-opportunity areas. Place-based policies that create mixed-income neighborhoods appear to increase long-term outcomes for less-advantaged children. (JEL I12, I32, I38, J13, J15, R23, R38)

Efficient risk sharing implies a simple factor structure for marginal utilities of expenditure (MUEs): Pareto weights divided by a common price. The standard approach infers MUEs from total expenditures, implicitly assuming homothetic preferences, unitary income elasticities, and identical price elasticities. Risk-sharing tests using total expenditures work for idiosyncratic shocks (budgets change, but not prices), but not “covariate” shocks (prices change). I describe all preferences that permit one to infer MUEs from expenditures and estimate nonhomothetic MUEs to test whether covariate shocks are shared efficiently in Uganda. This delivers sensible results; the standard approach suggests that droughts, floods, and pests are beneficial. (JEL D12, D81, O12, O13, Q12)

Digital platforms reduce geographic frictions, enabling better matching between service providers and users. I quantify reallocation gains in Swedish online health care, using nationwide time-conditional random assignment between patients and physicians. Matching high-risk patients with doctors effective at reducing Emergency Room visits lowers such visits by 4.4 percent (SE 1.3); reallocations also reduce Counter-Guideline antibiotics by 3.1 percent (1.4). I find limited trade-offs in matching; horizontal differentiation among doctors and varied patient needs allow improvement in multiple outcomes simultaneously. Efficiency-enhancing reallocations also affect equity. The findings highlight the potential for care reorganization aligning provider heterogeneity with patient needs when geographic constraints are lifted. (JEL C78, H51, I11, I13, I14, I18)

We study the relationship between corporate income taxation and carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) emissions in the United States. We show CO 2 -intensive firms benefit more from the tax advantage of debt and pay lower income taxes on their capital income. Building on these new facts, we provide evidence that a cut in the corporate income tax rate leads to a larger expansion of clean firms. We develop a multisector general equilibrium model that accounts for our evidence and quantify the impact of corporate tax reforms on aggregate emissions. A policy that eliminates the tax advantage of debt could reduce aggregate emissions without affecting GDP. (JEL D22, G32, H25, H32, Q52, Q54, Q58)

We study cultural integration as an equilibrium outcome of marital matching along cultural and education lines and intrahousehold investment decisions regarding fertility and cultural socialization. Our model allows us to identify cultural-ethnic-group-specific investment parameters and spousal preferences for marital matching. Structural estimates reveal a strong demand to preserve cultural identity on the part of immigrants and limited acceptance of the immigrants' cultural diversity on the part of natives. Furthermore, these estimates reveal a substantial heterogeneity of the parental value of children's education across cultures. Nonetheless, our estimates simulate substantial—though heterogeneous—cultural integration rates across immigrant groups. (JEL D13, J12, J13, J15, Z13)

Stefano Giglio, Dacheng Xiu, Dake Zhang

Stefano Rizzelli, Judith Rousseau, Sonia Petrone

Qi Xu, Annie Qu

Yang Ni

Chiara G. Magnani, Matteo Sesia, Aldo Solari

Guenther Walther, Qian Zhao

Xin Lu, Yuhao Wang, Zhiheng Zhang

T. Tony Cai, Dongwoo Kim, Yicheng Li, Dongdong Xiang

David L. Donoho, Jian Kang, Xihong Lin, Bhramar Mukherjee, Dan Nettleton, Rebecca Nugent, Abel Rodriguez, Eric P. Xing, Tian Zheng, Hongtu Zhu

Jing Zeng, Xin Zhang, Ning Hao

Yi Zhang, Wenfu Xu, Zhiqiang Tan

Sidi Wang

Ilyes Hammouda, Mohamed Ndaoud, Abd-Krim Seghouane

Heng Zhang, Zhi-Ping Liu

Robert G. Clark, Francis K. C. Hui

Michael Lindon, Dae Woong Ham, Martin Tingley, Iavor Bojinov

Stephen Bates, Michael I. Jordan, Michael Sklar, Jake A. Soloff

Chenyang Wang, Yun Yang

Shihao Wu, Gongjun Xu, Ji Zhu

Luke Hagar, Shirin Golchi, Marina B. Klein

Mechanisms that aim to reduce environmental degradation at low cost can be undermined when participants' conservation actions are not marginal to the incentive—or “additional”—as the lowest-cost participants may not be the highest social value. We investigate this challenge in the Conservation Reserve Program's auction mechanism for ecosystem services, linking bids to satellite-derived land use. Three-quarters of marginal auction winners are not additional. The heterogeneity in counterfactual land use introduces adverse selection. We develop a model of bidding and additionality to quantify welfare implications. Alternative auctions increase efficiency by using scoring rules that incorporate expected land use impacts. (JEL D44, D82, Q24, Q57, R14)

We study the role of victim reporting in the production of public safety. We examine the Secure Communities program, a crime-reduction policy that involved police in detecting unauthorized immigrants and increased deportation fears in immigrant communities. We find that the policy reduced the likelihood that Hispanic victims report crimes to police and increased offending against Hispanics. The number of reported crimes is unchanged, masking these opposing effects. We show that reduced reporting drives the offending increase and provide the first elasticity of offending to victim reporting in the literature, calculating that a 10 percent decline in reporting increases offending by 7.9 percent. (JEL J15, K37, K42)

Relative to remote work, working downtown facilitates valuable interactions with other in-office workers but entails commuting costs. The resulting coordination mechanism can lead to multiple stationary equilibria with varying levels of remote work. Temporary reductions in commuters, as in the COVID-19 pandemic, can lead to persistently large fractions of remote workers. Cell phone-based mobility data for the United States shows commuting trips in the largest cities, which are more likely to exhibit multiplicity, have stabilized at only 60 percent of prepandemic levels, while they are fully back in smaller cities. Cities with permanently low commuting experience average welfare losses of 2.3 percent. (JEL I12, J22, M54, R23, R31)

We study the problem of designing a dynamic reassignment mechanism when agents' preferences over objects change over time. In the context of Norway's system for (re)assigning patients to general practitioners (GPs), we provide direct evidence of misallocation under the current mechanism—patients waiting for each others' GPs, but who cannot trade—and estimate a structural model of GP-switching behavior to evaluate alternatives. Introducing top trading cycles (TTC) would, on average, reduce waiting times and increase patient welfare. However, patients endowed with less desirable GPs would be harmed. Prioritizing these patients can avoid these harms while preserving most of the gains from TTC. (JEL D82, H51, I11, I13, I18)

Most organizations rely on managers to identify talented workers. However, managers who are evaluated on team performance have an incentive to hoard workers. This study provides the first empirical evidence of talent hoarding using personnel records and survey evidence from a large firm. Talent hoarding is self-reported by three-fourths of managers, is detectable in manager ratings of worker talent, and occurs more frequently under stronger hoarding incentives, proxied by performance-related pay, team size, and talent visibility. Using quasi-random exposure to talent hoarding, I show that hoarding deters internal job applications, inhibiting career progression and altering talent allocation in the firm. (JEL D22, J23, L60, M12, M51, M54)

The random utility model (RUM), a cornerstone in economics, is typically studied under the assumption that choice frequencies of all alternatives are observable. In practice, however, some alternatives have unobservable choice frequencies and are commonly aggregated into a single category called an outside option. We study RUM in such environments and derive a finite, nonredundant system of inequality constraints on observed choice frequencies that characterizes RU-rationalizability. We show that the conventional practice of aggregating unobserved alternatives can miss key information leading to incorrect conclusions such as that observed choices are rationalizable, even when no RUM is consistent with them. (JEL D11, D44, D83)

This paper studies the productivity of nurse practitioners (NPs) and physicians, two professions performing overlapping tasks but with starkly different backgrounds, training, and pay. Using quasi-experimental variation in patient assignment to NPs versus physicians in Veterans Health Administration emergency departments, we find that, on average, NPs use more resources and exhibit a higher 30-day preventable hospitalization rate than physicians. However, the NP-physician performance difference varies by case complexity and severity. Importantly, even larger productivity variation exists within each profession, leading to substantial overlap between the productivity distributions of the two professions; NPs outperform physicians in 38 percent of random pairs. (JEL I11, I18, J24, J44, M53)

Abstract Developing countries face high pharmaceutical prices despite the presence of multiple generic producers. One key reason is excessive spending on sales and marketing by drug firms. This paper examines how centralized drug procurement can curb such marketing efforts and reduce prices, using a policy experiment in China where certain generics are procured through centralized auctions in pilot cities. Winning firms gain large market shares directly without high marketing costs. We find that the centralized auction significantly reduces both sales costs and prices, with winning firms experiencing notable decreases in marketing-related labor demand.

Abstract This paper studies how to design experiments when the experimental units are large aggregate entities (e.g., markets), and only one or a small number of units can be treated. We propose a class of non-randomized experimental designs using the synthetic control method, which jointly selects treated units and untreated units to serve as a comparison group. We analyze the properties of estimators under these synthetic control designs and develop new inferential techniques. We show that, in experiments with aggregate units, synthetic control designs can substantially reduce estimation bias relative to randomized experiments.

Abstract We study the effect of the MeToo movement on reports of sex crimes to the police. Using multiple empirical strategies, including a triple-difference design comparing crime types across countries and over time, we find that the movement increased reported sex crimes by approximately 10%. Analyzing incident-level US data, we find that the movement also increased arrests and had similar effects across racial and socioeconomic groups. The evidence suggests that the increase reflects a higher propensity to report sex crimes rather than an increase in their incidence. Our results demonstrate that social movements can rapidly and persistently change high-stakes personal decisions.

Abstract We study how public disclosure of politicians’ outside income affects their behavior. We exploit a disclosure reform targeting German federal MPs and tax-return data in a difference-indifferences setup using unaffected state MPs as controls. MPs increase their outside income by 24%, driven by likely right-leaning MPs. A representative survey experiment uncovers that right-leaning voters interpret outside income as a signal of competence and hard work, while left-leaning voters associate it with weaker representation. Consistent with this, we show that newspapers cover right-leaning MPs’ outside activities more favorably. Our findings suggest that politicians strategically use public disclosure as a signaling tool.

Abstract We study the unintended effects of Fair Access to Insurance Requirements (FAIR) plans developed by 26 states in the 1960s to address insurance redlining in urban neighborhoods. FAIR plans’ problematic features included prohibitions on considering environmental hazards in underwriting, mandatory insurer participation in pools that diluted underwriting incentives, and payouts exceeding market values in declining areas. Using a triple-difference design comparing pre/post-FAIR periods, neighborhoods with/without likely FAIR access, and participating/non-participating states, we find that FAIR inadvertently led to significant housing disinvestment and accelerated declines in neighborhood population, with simultaneous increases in the Black population share.

Abstract We study how employer concentration affects job design, focusing on schedule flexibility as a non-wage job attribute. Using the full text of 46 million UK job vacancies from 2014–2019, we construct new measures of flexible work arrangements using supervised machine learning and large-language-model—assisted annotations. Adopting an instrumental variable strategy using a Bartik-style prediction of the change in employer concentration based on nationwide hiring trends, we show that higher concentration reduces the value of worker compensation partly through shifts toward “risky” flexibility that exposes workers to earnings volatility.

Abstract This paper reevaluates the longstanding debate on capital-labor substitution by examining the role of external inputs: raw materials, intermediate goods and services, imports, offshoring. Both a meta-analysis (analyzing existing estimates of substitution) and direct estimation (using U.S. data for 1963-2016) indicate that external inputs disproportionately displace labor. These findings imply (1) that the capital-labor ratio responds 40-80% more strongly to the price of labor than to the price of capital, (2) that value added cannot be modeled separably from gross output, and (3) that historical disagreements regarding substitution can be recast as an omitted variable bias involving external inputs.

Abstract Globally, one-third of food is discarded, generating lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions comparable to those from road transport. Further, waste management is among the largest municipal budget items worldwide. Exploiting plausibly exogenous unit-based food waste tax expansions in South Korea, I find that the tax substantially reduces food waste by discouraging excessive grocery purchases. Households sustain food intake despite buying less, but at the cost of additional time spent on meal production. Nonpecuniary motivations appear central to the policy’s e!ectiveness, and the tax is likely welfare-improving because more e"cient food use not only reduces externalities but also offsets time costs.

Abstract A recent literature studies fiscal policy with realistic intertemporal marginal propensities to consume and the absence of Ricardian equivalence. This literature shows that fiscal policy boosts consumption and is effective: (i) Cumulative fiscal multipliers are above one, and (ii) fiscal policy is fully self-financing. I show this does not extend to small open economies by providing conditions where (i) the cumulative fiscal multiplier is exactly one, and (ii) fiscal deficits are not fully self-financing. This is because the initial debt-fueled rise in consumption is offset by a drop to repay foreign debt. Finally, I provide conditions to overturn this result.

Abstract We identify the distributional and quantile marginal treatment effect functions when the outcome is right-censored. Our method requires a conditionally exogenous instrument and random censoring. We propose asymptotically consistent semi-parametric estimators and valid inferential procedures for the target functions . To illustrate, we evaluate the effect of alternative sentences (fines and community service vs. no punishment) on recidivism in Brazil. Our results highlight substantial treatment effect heterogeneity: we find that people whom most judges would punish take longer to recidivate, while people who would be punished only by strict judges recidivate at an earlier date than if they were not punished.

Abstract While the relationship between health insurance coverage and health outcomes has been extensively studied, there is limited evidence on which specific features of insurance matter. We address this gap by leveraging the abrupt termination of Colombia’s largest health insurer and examining the spillover effects on patients who were not enrolled with the terminated insurer. The termination caused a 10% decrease in the breadth of provider networks among incumbent insurers and a 20% increase in mortality rates. We show two mechanisms drove the change in mortality: increased congestion stemming from the surge of enrollees at incumbent insurers and reduced provider network breadth. Insurers narrowed their networks by excluding higher-quality providers that served sicker, more expensive patients, whoin turn died at much higher rates than their counterparts. Findings suggest insurers play a key role in patient health through their provider networks.

Abstract The paper studies nonstationary high-dimensional vector autoregressions of order k, VAR(k). Additional deterministic terms such as trend or seasonality are allowed. The number of time periods, T, and the number of coordinates, N, are assumed to be large and of the same order. Under this regime the first-order asymptotics of the Johansen likelihood ratio (LR), Pillai-Bartlett, and Hotelling-Lawley tests for cointegration are derived: The test statistics converge to nonrandom integrals. For more refined analysis, the paper proposes and analyzes a modification of the Johansen test. The new test for the absence of cointegration converges to the partial sum of the Airy1 point process. Supporting Monte Carlo simulations indicate that the same behavior persists universally in many situations beyond those considered in our theorems. The paper presents empirical implementations of the approach for the analysis of S&P100 stocks and of cryptocurrencies. The latter example has a strong presence of multiple cointegrating relationships, while the results for the former are consistent with the null of no cointegration.

Abstract This paper estimates the relationship between the U.S. tariff increases of 2018–2019 and outcomes in domestic manufacturing. Despite being intended to boost manufacturing activity, we find U.S. industries more exposed to tariff increases experience relative reductions in employment, as a small positive effect from import protection is offset by larger negative effects from rising input costs and retaliatory tariffs. Higher tariffs are also associated with relative increases in producer prices due to rising input costs. Last, we document broader labor market impacts, as counties more exposed to rising tariffs exhibit relative increases in unemployment and declines in labor force participation.

Abstract Migrant workers and employers rely on intermediaries to facilitate labor market placements. If information frictions obscure their reputation, however, intermediaries may underinvest in placement quality. Using data on more than 1.5 million Sri Lankan migrants to the Gulf region, we examine the effects of a government-run intermediary rating program that publicly revealed ratings two years after it was announced. Prior to the ratings’ public release, underperforming intermediaries invest in the rating criteria and place migrants in less abusive and more remunerative employment. Our results suggest the government’s threat of quality revelation induced intermediaries to prospectively screen employers and improve placement quality.

Abstract We study the effects of uncertainty on time use and their macroeconomic implications. Employing data from the American Time Use Survey and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we document that heightened uncertainty increases housework and reduces market hours, mildly impacting leisure. We then propose a model that quantitatively accounts for these estimates. We show that substitution between market and housework provides self-insurance to households, weakening precautionary motives. However, it also reduces aggregate demand, ultimately amplifying uncertainty’s recessionary impact. Time reallocation can lead to higher inflation, particularly when uncertainty is coupled with policies redirecting time use towards housework (e.g., lockdown restrictions).

Abstract We study communication frictions within multinationals (MNCs), hypothesizing that language barriers reduce management knowledge transfers within the organization. A distinct feature of such MNCs is a three-tier hierarchy: foreign managers (FMs) supervise domestic managers (DMs) who supervise production workers. Tailored surveys from our setting—MNCs in Myanmar—reveal that language barriers impede interactions between FMs and DMs. A first experimental protocol offers DMs free English courses and confirms that lowering communications costs increases their interactions with FMs. A second experimental protocol that asks human-resource managers at domestic firms to rate hypothetical resumes reveals that multinational experience and, specifically, DM-FM interactions are valued in the domestic labor market. Together, these results suggest that reducing language barriers can improve transfers of management knowledge, an interpretation supported by improvements in soft skills among treatment DMs in the first experiment. A model in which communication within MNCs is noncontractible—a realistic feature of workplace life—reveals that the experimental results are consistent with underinvestment in language training and provide a rationale for policy intervention.

Abstract Changes in the minimum wage may impact college enrollment and educational attainment. Using institutional data on college enrollment and program completion, we find that enrollment falls markedly among students at public two-year institutions in response to increases in the minimum wage. The largest enrollment effects are seen for those students who are enrolled part-time at community colleges. We find little evidence of negative effects on the attainment of certificates or degrees, suggesting that increases in the minimum wage are unlikely to divert students from degree attainment.

Abstract This paper presents an alternative perspective to a longstanding empirical puzzle: that most entrepreneurs persevere despite persistently low earnings. Because entrepreneurial earnings are notoriously difficult to measure, I approach the question from an expenditure angle. I look at how switching into self-employment corresponds to changes in reported earnings versus expenditure. Using 45 years of longitudinal data, I find that individuals report earning 27.7% less in self-employment, while spending 3.8% more. This household expenditure premium accrues with entrepreneurial experience and is not offset by lower savings or longer work hours. The results hold in highly educated and incorporated business owner subsamples.

Abstract We disprove the exchange rate macroeconomic disconnect puzzle by showing that macroeconomic news can explain most variation in exchange rates at monthly and quarterly frequencies, accounting for up to 91% of the quarterly exchange rate variation during U.S. recessions and 65% over all periods. The main driver of the reconnect is exchange rates responding to past news—a result inconsistent with the theory of uncovered interest rate parity under full information rational expectations (UIP-FIRE). We discuss theoretical models that can explain this surprising result, including models featuring currency risk premia, regulatory or institutional frictions, or deviation from FIRE.

Abstract We leverage the high degree of worker mobility across production lines in a large Indian manufacturer to estimate the sorting of workers to managers, using data on daily worker productivity. We find negative assortative matching (NAM): better workers tend to be matched with worse managers. Estimates of the production technology, however, reveal that productivity would increase by up to 4% under positive sorting. Exploiting a survey of managers and data on orders from multinational brands, we document that NAM arises, at least partly, because maintaining valuable relationships with buyers provides strong incentives to avoid delays on any given production line.