Economic Journal最新文献

‘Multigenerational mobility’ refers to the associations in socio-economic status across three or more generations. This article begins by summarising the long-standing but recently growing empirical literature on multigenerational mobility. It then discusses multiple theoretical interpretations of the empirical patterns, including the one recently proposed in Gregory Clark's book The Son Also Rises.

Nearly all intergenerational mobility studies focus on fathers and sons. The possibility that the process is more than simply two-generational (AR(1)) has been difficult to assess because of the lack of the necessary multi-generational data. We remedy this shortcoming with new data that links grandfathers, fathers and sons in Britain and the US between 1850 and 1910. We find that grandfathers mattered: even controlling for father's occupation, grandfather's occupation significantly influenced the occupation of the grandson. For both Britain and the US in this time period, therefore, assessments based on two-generation estimates significantly overstate the true amount of social mobility.

This paper studies the relationship between group size and informal risk sharing. It shows that under limited commitment with coalitional deviations, this relationship is theoretically ambiguous. It investigates this question empirically using data on sibship size of household heads and spouses from rural Malawi, exploiting a social norm among the main sample ethnic group to define the potential risk-sharing group. We uncover evidence of worse risk sharing of crop losses in larger potential risk-sharing groups, and rule out alternative explanations for the findings. A simple calibration exercise indicates that our empirical findings are consistent with the theory.

This article uses a novel identification strategy to measure power in the household. Our strategy is to elicit women's willingness to pay to receive a cash transfer instead of their spouse receiving it. We selected participants from a sample of women who had already participated in a policy intervention in Macedonia offering poor households cash transfers conditional on having their children attending secondary school. The programme randomised transfers at the municipality level to either household heads (generally a male) or mothers. We show that women who were offered the transfer on average have stronger measured empowerment. Here, IV estimation confirms this result.

Information provision is only an effective behaviour-change strategy if the information is credible. A novel programme augments conventional hygiene instruction by showing participants everyday microbes under a microscope. Through a randomised evaluation in Pakistan, we show that this programme leads to meaningful hygiene and health improvements, while instruction alone does not. Traditional medicine, which offers an alternative disease model, may undermine learning by strengthening prior beliefs about hygiene. We show that believers in traditional medicine have smaller impacts, suggesting that traditional and modern medical beliefs are substitutes and that traditional medicine may exacerbate the infectious disease burden in this context.

External sources of as-if randomness — that is, external instruments — can be used to identify the dynamic causal effects of macroeconomic shocks. One method is a one-step instrumental variables regression (local projections – IV); a more efficient two-step method involves a vector autoregression. We show that, under a restrictive instrument validity condition, the one-step method is valid even if the vector autoregression is not invertible, so comparing the two estimates provides a test of invertibility. If, however, lagged endogenous variables are needed as control variables in the one-step method, then the conditions for validity of the two methods are the same.

Motivated by recent controversies surrounding the role of commercial lenders in microfinance, and calls for regulation of the sector, we analyse borrower welfare under different market structures, considering a benevolent non-profit lender, a for-profit monopolist and a competitive credit market. To understand the magnitude of the effects analysed, we simulate the model with parameters estimated from the MIX Market database. Our results suggest that market power can have severe implications for borrower welfare, while despite possible enforcement externalities competition typically delivers similar borrower welfare to non-profit lending.

By exploiting the cancellation of the 2012 American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, we investigate the role of conferences in facilitating academic collaboration. We assembled data sets comprising 17,467 academics, and in difference-in-differences analysis we find that the conference cancellation led to a decrease in individuals’ likelihood of co-authoring an article with another attendant by 16%. Moreover, collaborations formed among attendants of (occurring) conferences are associated with more successful co-publications: an effect which is sharpest for teams that are new or non-collocated. Conferences seem to de-cluster the co-authorship network. Altogether, our findings demonstrate the importance of conferences in scientific production.

The original code producing the results in Affeldt et al. (2013) did not calculate the two-sided diversion ratios correctly. In this corrigendum, we present results that are obtained using revised code. The code is also provided as an updated replication package.

Tables 2 and 4 are affected by the coding error. Here, we present corrected versions of those tables. Comparing Table 2 to the original one in the published article shows that diversion ratios in the bottom panel and in the last column of the top panel are affected. In the article, we point out that two-sided diversion ratios on the advertising side are positive and explain why this is to be expected. This is still the case.

Comparing Table 4 to the corresponding one in the published article shows that results for two-sided upward pricing pressure (UPP) measures are affected mainly on the advertising side. The necessary efficiency credits are lower than previously reported. Nevertheless, there is evidence for UPP on both market sides, while we have already documented in the article that one-sided UPP measures only suggest this to be the case for the readership side. So, importantly, the main conclusion that one cannot, in general, use one-sided UPP measures in two-sided markets, still holds.

We take advantage of the expansion of the French High-speed Rail to study the impact of decreases in communication costs in the form of lower travel times between headquarters and affiliated plants of corporate groups. We show that such shocks foster the functional specialisation of remote affiliates on their production activities. Support activities shrink because of the transfer of high-skilled managers to headquarters. These organisational rationalisations have a significant but small impact on overall profit. Our results hold across all industries but are strongest in services where the information to be transmitted across sites is arguably softer.