Economic Inquiry最新文献

We construct a matched database of land transactions and Chinese listed companies. By analyzing the stock market's reaction to these transactions, we investigate the hidden cost of political connections for firms. Our results show a negative market response to land deals by politically connected companies. This suggests that potential future political or legal risks associated with the land transaction could harm the firm. To strengthen our findings, we leverage the anti-corruption campaign as a natural experiment and employ a difference-in-differences approach. This analysis yields consistent results. Furthermore, we discover that short-term and long-term investors have differing views on political connections.

Multiple agents are competing for a prize. Each agent is privately informed about his type. The principal who allocates the prize wants to give it to the agent with the highest type. Each agent can take a test that reveals his type at a cost. I show that an increase in competition makes the principal more informed when the cost is high, and less informed when the cost is low. Nevertheless, the principal always benefits from greater competition. Making the test mandatory for receiving the prize is Pareto-dominated by voluntary verification unless competition is low.

We estimate the effect of unconditional cash transfers on voter turnout, leveraging a large-scale natural experiment, the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD) program, which has provided residents with a check of varying size 1 month before election day since 1982. We find that larger transfers cause people to vote, especially in gubernatorial elections in which a 10% increase in cash ($190) causes a 1.4 percentage point increase in turnout. Effects are concentrated among the young and poor. Survey data suggests the mechanism is reduced voter apathy. Implications are discussed.

Though 18 states will index their minimum wage to the Consumer Price Index by 2025, few studies have examined indexing's differential employment effects. Leveraging a period of stability in minimum wages (2000–2007) and two distinct national geocoded databases of establishments, we explore how indexing affected employment in Oregon restaurants, one of the earliest indexing states (2003). Nearest-neighbor matching is used as a preprocessing step before regression, pairing individual restaurants in Oregon to restaurants with similar characteristics in states where the minimum wage was unchanged. We find evidence that establishment employment falls 3.6% after indexing, implying an employment elasticity of −0.18.

In their 2022 study, ‘The Effects of Naloxone Access Laws on Opioid Abuse, Mortality, and Crime,’ Doleac and Mukherjee conclude that broadening access to a life-saving drug—naloxone—does not reduce opioid-related mortality as the drug simultaneously encourages riskier drug use. I show issues with their data, design, and estimation methods. For example, their Google Search data has an unverifiable origin, the law timing is incorrect, and the statistical inference is invalid. Correcting these issues within a triple difference design shows that naloxone, contrary to their findings, does not increase ER opioid admissions. I conclude that the moral hazard (and the ensuing adverse consequences) of naloxone use lacks empirical support.

Do changes in government spending affect voluntary contributions to those recipients? We examine how changes in K-12 education budgets impact donations to teachers using data from DonorsChoose.org, an online crowdfunding platform for public school teachers to raise money. We find a positive correlation between budgets and voluntary contributions when not accounting for their endogenous relationship. Estimates using instrumental variables show evidence for crowd-out of private giving, though the magnitudes are small relative to spending and do not meaningfully offset budget changes. These results are driven entirely by teachers' posting of requests.

This paper evaluates the impact of 50/50 custody laws on mothers' decision to leave the labor force for caregiving during the COVID-19 pandemic. During the onset of the pandemic, variation in family law regarding shared parenting may have affected the labor market decisions of mothers and the impact may have been stronger for those in fragile non-cooperative relationships. We use monthly CPS data from January 2019 to May 2021 to show that the impact of COVID-19 changed the labor force outcomes for mothers based on child custody laws, marital status and parental educational attainment.

One-shot public-good situations are prominent in the public debate, and a prime example for behavior diverging from the standard Nash-equilibrium. Could a Nash-equilibrium predict one-shot public-good behavior in principle? A “revealed-preference Nash-equilibrium” (rpne) out-of-sample predicts behavior, outperforming other social-preference models. The rpne is the set of “mutual conditional contributions,” interpreting elicited conditional contributions as best-responses. Individual-level analyses confirm the results and allow for studying equilibrium selection. While the Pareto-dominant equilibrium is the modal choice, many participants use other criteria. Given the predictive positive-contributions rpnes, many real-life public-good problems may be solvable if players could coordinate on an equilibrium-selection criterion beforehand.

This paper combines exogenous variation in house prices with anonymized individual-level expenditures data to identify a causal channel from housing wealth to consumption. We show that the Sandy Hook school shooting provided a large negative exogenous shock to local housing which lowered credit card spending by about 4.2 cents for each $1 fall in house prices: rescaled this translates to an annual marginal propensity to consume (MPC) of about 9 cents on the dollar. These consumption sensitivities are driven entirely by creditworthy middle-aged consumers, with those closest to the retirement threshold reacting the strongest.