Economic Inquiry最新文献

We examine how voters choose to influence others' attitudes toward policy, focusing on the context of Pigouvian taxation. Data from a controlled laboratory experiment show that individuals are generally reluctant to stand up and persuade others. Among those who do, both tax supporters and objectors are equally likely to volunteer—and equally persuasive. As a result, overall negative attitudes toward Pigouvian taxes persist. Moreover, it is the strength of individuals' initial views, rather than an informational advantage, that increases the likelihood of self-nomination as first voters, regardless of the direction of those views. These findings help explain the enduring lack of public support for welfare-enhancing tax policies and suggest avenues for addressing it.

We provide evidence from advanced and emerging economies on the supply-side effects of monetary policy, that is, the cost channel. We employ sign restrictions to identify demand-driven and supply-driven components of inflation and loan rates to test for the cost channel. A monetary policy tightening, by reducing banks' loan supply, increases the supply loan rate and the borrowing costs faced by firms. The subsequent contraction in aggregate supply raises supply inflation. We find this effect is larger in emerging economies. In a stylized New Keynesian model both reactions are related to the pass-through of firms' costs to prices and banks' costs to rates.

When employees are employed in a temporary capacity, employers should be less willing to invest in their human capital relative to permanent employees. This study uses the context of injury management by Major League Baseball teams to test for differential investment in the protection of player human capital. Injury management is inherently uncertain as medical professionals can give differing opinions, so teams may be able to influence recovery times. Using a panel dataset and estimating player fixed-effects regressions, players are found to miss significantly fewer games to injury when employed on a temporary basis.

This paper replicates studies on alumni visits and email interventions in Economics Principles courses to address diversity among students majoring in economics. Using a new, racially diverse sample reflecting national demographics, we find that two 15-min visits from female alumnae, mostly African American, or an encouraging email can increase enrollment in upper-level economics courses, but combining these interventions is potentially less effective. Alumnae visits increased upper-level economics course completion among Black and Latinx students by almost 12 percentage points more than they increased completion among white students. Our results suggest that alumni visits can increase racial diversity at a relatively low cost.

Waldinger finds a positive relationship between temperature and city size during the climate change of 1600–1850. We show the main result differs by city size. Cities with less than 1000 inhabitants (which make up 23.5% of observations and are 49.6% of cities at some point) exhibit a strong and positive relationship between temperature and city size, whereas cities with always more than 1000 inhabitants exhibit a negative relationship. Further examination of the underlying city size data, which bins populations into coarse thousand-wide population intervals, finds the original analysis to be robust to a number of reasonable alternative researcher choices.

We employ Chinese firm-level data to examine the interconnections among firm ownership, environmental regulation, and non-environmental economic policies. We find that there are substantial differences between state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and privately-owned enterprises (POEs) in their responses to government anti-pollution mandates. SOEs reduced emissions more than POEs, with the former relying mainly on abatement investment and the latter on reducing outputs. An average POE's marginal abatement cost is more than nine times that of an average SOE, suggesting significant inefficiencies in policy implementation. Policies liberalizing financial markets could affect POEs' abatement costs and improve the cost-effectiveness of environmental policies.

This article concerns the optimal choice of flat taxes on labor and capital income, and on consumption, in a tractable economic model in which agents are subject to idiosyncratic investment risk. We identify the tax rates which maximize welfare in stationary equilibrium while preserving tax revenue, finding that an increase in welfare equivalent to a permanent increase in consumption of nearly 7% can be achieved by only taxing capital income and consumption. The Domar-Musgrave effect explains cases where it is optimal to tax capital income. We characterize the dynamic response to the substitution of consumption taxation for labor income taxation.

This paper explores how international trade recovers after war, emphasizing the role of dispute resolution mechanisms (DRMs). Wars typically prolong negative trade impacts due to heightened tensions, but DRMs—such as General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade/World Trade Organization and diplomatic exchanges—can reduce these tensions, lower policy uncertainty, and ease economic frictions, facilitating recovery. Using the gravity model, the study analyzes trade flows between countries with a history of conflict to test if DRM membership brings additional trade benefits. Results indicate that DRM membership is linked to positive trade effects for countries affected by war, likely accelerating recovery from disruptions caused by conflict.

Customer switching and firm entry are central to market performance, yet the linkages between these market characteristics has not been empirically examined. This study seeks to rectify this lacuna by examining the customer switching-firm entry relationship using direct observations on both. We do so in the context of the Maryland retail electricity industry, which began to allow both entry and customer switching in the late 1990s. Our empirical analysis provides support for the interplay between these market characteristics, as well as the important role that legislative and regulatory market design mechanisms have on both consumer switching and entry.