International Economic Review最新文献

Sourcing internationally allows firms to access cheaper or better inputs but increases logistical costs, particularly through higher inventory holdings. This article examines the productivity gains from trade liberalizations accounting for inventory costs—typically omitted from revenue-based measures of productivity. In model simulations, we show that omitting these overestimates the effect of input tariffs on productivity and that controlling for inventories in the estimation of productivity corrects the bias. We document these facts during India's 1990s reforms. First, firms' inventories increase strongly with imports. Second, productivity gains drop by 20–50% once inventory costs are accounted for.

Claims that individuals have dynamically inconsistent preferences are usually made by studying individual discount rates over different time delays, but where those discount rates are elicited at a single point in time. However, to test dynamic inconsistency one has to know if the same subject has a different discounting function at a later point in time. We evaluate data from a longitudinal field experiment undertaken with a nationally representative sample of the adult Danish population. We cannot reject the hypothesis of constant discounting at the population level, but we reject the hypotheses of temporal stability and dynamic consistency.

Households' income heterogeneity is important to explain consumption dynamics in response to aggregate macro uncertainty: an increase in uncertainty generates a consumption drop that is stronger for lower-income households. At the same time, labor markets are strongly responsive to macro uncertainty. A heterogeneous-agent New Keynesian model with search-and-matching frictions in the labor market can account for these empirical findings. The mechanism at play is a feedback loop between lower-income households who, being subject to higher unemployment risk, contract consumption more in response to heightened uncertainty, and firms that post fewer vacancies following a drop in demand.

We compare the consequences of imposing upon collective choice functions the classical requirement of Condorcet consistency with those arising when requiring the functions to satisfy the principle of pairwise justifiability. We show that, despite the different logic underlying these two requirements, they are equivalent when applied to anonymous and neutral rules defined over a class of domains. The class contains the universal, the single-peaked, and that of order restriction, among other preference domains.

Recent papers use regression discontinuity designs (RDDs) based on age discontinuity to evaluate social assistance (SA) and unemployment insurance (UI) extension policies. Job search theory predicts that such designs generate biased estimates of the policy-relevant treatment effect. Owing to market frictions, people below the age threshold modify their search behavior in expectation of future eligibility. We use a job search model to quantify the biases on various datasets in the literature. The impacts of SA benefits on employment are underestimated, whereas those of UI extensions on nonemployment duration are overestimated. The article provides insights for RDD evaluations of age-discontinuous policies.

After decades of consistent growth, U.S. revolving credit declined drastically post 2009. We study the Ability to Pay provision of the Credit CARD Act of 2009, a policy that restricts credit card limits, as a contributing factor. Extending a model of revolving credit lines, we find that the policy accounts for 54–60% of the decline in revolving credit. Furthermore, the policy accounts for lower utilization rates despite tighter credit limits and higher spreads despite lower default risk. The policy's goal of consumer protection is achieved for a few consumers with time-inconsistent preferences; most individuals are hurt.

A mediator proposes a settlement between two contestants to avoid a conflict where the cost each contestant bears is inversely related to the contestant's privately known strength. Their strength levels are identically distributed, and their welfares weigh equally in the mediator's objective. However, the optimal proposal offers one contestant much more than it does the other so that the former accepts it always, whereas the latter only occasionally. This unequal treatment improves the prospect of peace by making one contestant willing to settle without fearing that the action signals his weakness that his opponent can exploit should conflict occur.