Economic Inquiry最新文献

Using a dynamic preferential trade agreement (PTA) formation model, we show that political biases in exporting and import-competing sectors substantially impact the extent of PTA formation. While both exclusion and free riding incentives constrain the expansion to global free trade in a free trade agreement (FTA) game, only the former incentive arises in a customs union (CU) game. When we endogenize the choice between FTAs and CUs, the tension between the flexibility benefit of FTAs and the coordination benefit of CUs reveals that FTAs always serve as PTA building blocks while CUs may serve as PTA building or stumbling blocks.

This paper analyzes the welfare impact of expanding the negotiation agenda of an international agreement between asymmetric countries (e.g., including specific negotiations over environmental regulations or labor standards in a conventional trade agreement) and demonstrates why such proposed expansions are contentious. A main result is that agenda expansions that provide more bargaining flexibility will increase the efficiency of the agreement but can result in a less equitable agreement that hurts the country that is at a bargaining disadvantage. Similarly, we demonstrate that decreases in bargaining game asymmetry can also make the disadvantaged country worse-off even as it increases global welfare.

We investigate how the inclination to cheat changes when agents report the result of multiple realizations of a (private information) stochastic event rather than a single outcome. Multiple realizations render extreme outcomes unlikely, facilitating the identification of opportunistic behaviors and exposing to reputation concerns the individuals who report them. Consequently, multiple realizations lead to a significant reduction of cheating by large amounts. Simultaneously multiple realizations also diminish the intrinsic cost of lying, thereby inducing a widespread inclination to adjust upward the observed outcome in a plausible manner. The overall effect is only a marginal decrease in the degree of cheating.

We investigate the effects of three events with major importance for climate policy on energy sector stocks: the Paris Agreement, the Trump election and presidency, and the Biden election. By combining event studies with impulse-indicator saturation methods, we show that the Paris Agreement and the election of Mr. Biden benefited renewable industries, while the election of Mr. Trump had negative effects. For fossil fuel industries, the effects were largely the opposite. Despite Trump's efforts to eliminate environmental regulations, his presidency did however witness a decrease in both US coal production and consumption, while natural gas and oil consumption increased.

Do men incur a psychological cost when they are outperformed by a woman competitor? We conduct a laboratory experiment that allows us to measure this cost. The experiment is conducted in both the US and China. In our Chinese sample, men are willing to pay more to hide the fact that they have performed worse than another individual than women are, while there is no gender difference in the US. In China, women are willing to pay more to hide poor performance when losing to another woman than to a man, while in the US, the opposite pattern is observed.

Do financial crises affect long-term public health? To answer this question, we examined the relationship between the 2007–2009 Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and the 2020–2022 COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, we examined the relationship between the financial losses derived from the GFC, and the health outcomes associated with the first wave of the pandemic. European countries that were more affected by the financial crisis had more deaths relative to coronavirus cases. An analogous relationship emerged across Spanish provinces and US states. Part of the transmission from finances to health outcomes appears to have occurred through cross-sectional differences in health care facilities.

Designing the markets that allocate public school seats is a crucial policy consideration. This paper compares the design of school choice mechanisms in terms of economic efficiency, stability, and strategic behavior. We estimate demand for schools using data from a large US public school system with novel indicators of students' levels of strategic sophistication. We find important benefits of reserving a set of seats to be assigned by a pure lottery. In settings that share features in common with the school system we study, our findings suggest that non-selective criteria such as lotteries induce a large increase in truth-telling.

Legitimacy may result from support for projects that a government implements. However, legitimacy may also result from the opportunity to participate in the selection process of projects. We tested the strength of these competing sources of legitimacy experimentally and their relationship. We find a straightforward effect of the former: the more projects a participant supports, the higher their taxes. Participants are also willing to pay for participation; if they have had a say, they pay higher taxes. Yet, most of this effect is actually instrumental: participants want participation to ensure that their taxes are used for purposes they deem acceptable.

There is an inverted u-shaped relationship between age and wages in most labor markets, but the effects of age on productivity are often unclear. We use panel data in a market of high earners, professional footballers (soccer players) in North America, to estimate age-productivity and age-wage profiles. We find stark differences; wages increase for several years after productivity has peaked, before dropping sharply at the end of a career. This poses the question: why are middle-aged workers seemingly overpaid? We investigate a range of possible mechanisms that could be responsible, only finding evidence that tentatively supports a talent discovery theory.

College-educated workers in jobs unrelated to their degree generally receive lower wages compared to well-matched workers. Our analysis of data from the National Survey of College Graduates shows that although the rate of this mismatch declined only slightly (18%–17%), the wage penalty increased by 56% between 1993 and 2019. Changes in the composition of field of study over time, as well as declining returns to “excess” education above what is required for the occupation both help to explain the increasing penalty, especially for women. Mismatch has become more closely associated with lower-return occupations for men but not women.