Learning, Confidence, and Business Cycles -- by Cosmin L. Ilut, Hikaru Saijo
We build a tractable heterogeneous-firm business cycle model where firms face Knightian uncertainty about their profitability and learn it through production. The cross-sectional mean of firm-level...
View ArticleEstimating market power Evidence from the US Brewing Industry -- by Jan De...
While inferring markups from demand data is common practice, estimation relies on difficult-to-test assumptions, including a specific model of how firms compete. Alternatively, markups can be inferred...
View ArticleEnergy Efficiency Standards Are More Regressive Than Energy Taxes: Theory and...
Economists promote energy taxes as cost-effective. But policymakers raise concerns about their regressivity, or disproportional burden on poorer families, preferring to set energy efficiency standards...
View ArticleAgricultural Fires and Infant Health -- by Marcos A. Rangel, Tom Vogl
Fire has long served as a tool in agriculture, but this practice's human capital consequences have proved difficult to study. Drawing on data from satellites, air monitors, and vital records, we study...
View ArticleA Behavioral New Keynesian Model -- by Xavier Gabaix
This paper presents a framework for analyzing how bounded rationality affects monetary and fiscal policy. The model is a tractable and parsimonious enrichment of the widely-used New Keynesian model -...
View ArticleHow Destructive is Innovation? -- by Daniel Garcia-Macia, Chang-Tai Hsieh,...
Entrants and incumbents can create new products and displace the products of competitors. Incumbents can also improve their existing products. How much of aggregate productivity growth occurs through...
View ArticleSome Simple Economics of the Blockchain -- by Christian Catalini, Joshua S. Gans
We rely on economic theory to discuss how blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies will influence the rate and direction of innovation. We identify two key costs that are affected by distributed...
View ArticleInterfirm Relationships and Business Performance -- by Jing Cai, Adam Szeidl
We organized business associations for the owner-managers of randomly selected young Chinese firms to study the effect of business networks on firm performance. We randomized 2,800 firms into small...
View ArticleTargeting Policies: Multiple Testing and Distributional Treatment Effects --...
Economic theory often predicts that treatment responses may depend on individuals' characteristics and location on the outcome distribution. Policymakers need to account for such treatment effect...
View ArticleLeveling the Playing Field: How Campaign Advertising Can Help Non-Dominant...
Voters are often uncertain about and biased against non-dominant political parties. By reducing the information gap with dominant parties, political advertising may thus disproportionately benefit...
View ArticleUnderstanding Inflation in India -- by Laurence Ball, Anusha Chari, Prachi...
This paper examines the behavior of quarterly inflation in India since 1994, both headline inflation and core inflation as measured by the weighted median of price changes across industries. We explain...
View ArticleGrowth Policy, Agglomeration, and (the Lack of) Competition -- by Wyatt J....
Industrial clusters are promoted by policy and generally viewed as good for growth and development, but both clusters and policies may also enable non-competitive behavior. This paper studies the...
View ArticleHow Large Are the Gains from Economic Integration? Theory and Evidence from...
In this paper we develop a new approach to measuring the gains from economic integration based on a generalization of the Ricardian model in which heterogeneous factors of production are allocated to...
View ArticleDistributional National Accounts: Methods and Estimates for the United States...
This paper combines tax, survey, and national accounts data to estimate the distribution of national income in the United States since 1913. Our distributional national accounts capture 100% of...
View ArticleGlobalization and Wage Inequality -- by Elhanan Helpman
Globalization has been blamed for rising inequality in rich and poor countries. Yet the views of many protagonists in this debate are not based on evidence. To help form an evidence-based opinion, I...
View ArticleDominant Currency Paradigm -- by Camila Casas, Federico J. Diez, Gita...
Most trade is invoiced in very few currencies. Despite this, the Mundell-Fleming benchmark and its variants focus on pricing in the producer's currency or in local currency. We model instead a...
View ArticleOlder Peoples' Willingness to Delay Social Security Claiming -- by Raimond...
We have designed and fielded an experimental module in the 2014 HRS which seeks to measure older persons' willingness to voluntarily defer claiming of Social Security benefits. In addition, we evaluate...
View ArticleBusiness Cycles, Investment Shocks, and the "Barro-King" Curse --...
Recent empirical evidence identifies investment shocks as key driving forces behind business cycle fluctuations. However, existing New Keynesian models emphasizing these shocks counterfactually imply a...
View ArticleProjections and Uncertainties About Climate Change in an Era of Minimal...
Climate change remains one of the major international environmental challenges facing nations. Yet nations have to date taken minimal policies to slow climate change. Moreover, there has been no major...
View ArticleInternational GAAP 2017: Generally Accepted Accounting Practice under...
IFRSs, the standards set by the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), are complex and sometimes obscure. Understanding their implications and applying them appropriately requires something...
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