Economic Inquiry最新文献

In light of recent interest in “generational wealth” and its potential to close racial disparities in wealth, this paper revisits an older literature with updated and improved data and methods. Relative to past research, this paper uses more recent data (through 2019) that includes a wider range of retirement assets and recovers intergenerational transfers not reflected in prior research. Despite these innovations, our findings are consistent with earlier research that intergenerational transfers can account for a relatively small share of the racial disparities in wealth that we observe in the data.

Gagliarducci and Paserman study gender differences in cooperation among politicians using data from the U.S. House of Representatives in 1988–2010. The evidence is consistent with commonality of interest driving cooperation, rather than gender per se. We show that GP's results are robust to the correction of some errors in the control variables and to clustering standard errors at the individual level, instead of individual-term. Additional data from 2011 to 2020 confirms the relevance of the ideological distance between male and female representatives, but also indicates that in recent years female politicians tend to recruit more co-sponsors for the bills that they sponsor.

We use proprietary house sales data and program data to investigate impacts of 39 projects supported by USDA's Broadband Initiatives Program on house prices and estimate the capitalized economic benefits of those projects. These projects increased house prices by an average of 2.5 percent after all projects were approved. The estimated benefits of these projects totaled $2.0 billion, 2.8 times the investment costs. We found larger benefits per house for higher cost projects and projects promoting fiber-to-the-household or DSL technology than for wireless projects, but similar positive benefits per house in metropolitan, micropolitan, and small town/rural regions.

This paper develops a theoretical model of cyberwarfare between nations, focusing on the factors that determine the severity and outcomes of cyber conflicts. We introduce a two-country model where nations invest in offensive or defensive cyber capabilities across networked systems. We show that resource expenditure intensifies when players' effective values are similar, which can help explain the rise of cyberwarfare. We explore the implications of network structures, showing how larger attack surfaces worsen outcomes for defenders. Additionally, we investigate the impact of private cyber defence provision, and find that centralized policies may either improve or exacerbate cyber conflict.

A recent article presents a synthetic control model showing de-prosecution in Philadelphia in the mid to late 2010s greatly increased the city's homicides. We point out several potential problems with the analysis and re-estimate the relationship between de-prosecution and homicide under different model specifications. We reproduce the author's results after addressing these issues and find that the effect presented in Hogan occurs only in certain model specifications and other decisions that maximize the reported effect of de-prosecution on homicide counts.

Policy advocates often promote market-like incentives for publicly provided services like education or healthcare (e.g., Medicare). Evidence for performance incentives in these sectors is mixed, possibly due to production uncertainty represented as uncertainty about the marginal effect of inputs. Using a principal-agent model, we demonstrate that such uncertainty can lead to inefficiencies in output-based incentives. The model illustrates how employees favor inputs with lower uncertainty and reduce overall effort. Input-based incentives might be more effective in such cases. We conduct a real-effort lab experiment which validates these predictions: participants shift from efficient inputs as uncertainty grows, and reduce overall effort.

This paper uses searches via Google to evaluate the importance of uncertainty in driving demand for entertainment events. We consider various dimensions of uncertainty of outcome in European football to examine whether the removal of uncertainty surrounding the winner of a competition before its conclusion reduces interest. We find a significant decrease in interest, although this appears mitigated by the existence of multiple objectives, such as qualifying for European competitions and avoiding relegation. We conclude that such a diversified and open structure (including promotion and relegation) is desirable in leagues that do not have a final play-off system.

We find that manufacturing sectors specializing in the processing and assembly of foreign-owned intermediate goods had higher employment volatility in Mexico from 2007 to 2020, whereas specialization in trade had limited impacts on volatility. In general, the co-evolution of trade integration and international outsourcing complicates efforts to disentangle the distinct effects of trade versus offshoring on developing-country labor markets. We approach that problem by using official statistics that distinguish between production sharing processes typical of offshoring-intensive sectors versus traditional trade activities. The empirical strategy exploits regional and temporal variation within industries using data supplied for this project.

We analyze a general equilibrium model of attack and defense with production. One attacker and one defender allocate fixed endowments between producing butter and guns. We characterize the unique interior and unique corner equilibrium, and find that (i) the defenders may spend more resources on conflict than the attacker even without loss aversion or other preferential bias, (ii) the attackers may expend all their resources only in conflict, and (iii) the interior and the corner equilibria cannot coexist. These results may help explain Ukraine's sustained high defense effort and Russia's militarized economy, or the excessive conflict expenditure by Hamas etc.