Economic Inquiry最新文献

This paper examines the effects of an international quality-enhancing technology spillover on the international industry distribution and innovation in a dynamic North-South model. When a Southern firm receives a technology transfer from the North through international licensing, the technology spills over to other Southern firms by enhancing the quality of their products. We find that a stronger spillover effect depresses both Northern innovative R&D and Southern adaptive R&D, and thus is welfare-impairing both for the advanced country and recipient country. The results cast doubt on the common view that regards the technology spillover as a positive externality.

This paper uses the quasi-random assignment of IRS Revenue Officers to tax debtors' cases as an instrumental variable to identify the causal effects of suspending debt collection on tax compliance and future income. In contrast to uninstrumented estimates, we find no statistically significant evidence that putting off attempts to collect debt reduces compliance with future tax obligations or future reported income. Among marginal hardship cases, pausing collection instead increases future income, specifically wage earnings by the taxpayer's spouse. In addition, we address concerns about potential non-random assignment of Revenue Officers.

We present a systematic examination of the impact of frictions on optimal pandemic response, bridging the significant gap between policy recommendations and implementation. We focus in particular on constraints in testing delivery and in lockdown efficacy in the context of a canonical pandemic model. The latter is modified for a more faithful representation of lockdowns. The paper sheds light on nuanced, and sometimes counter-intuitive, relationships. It rationalizes key but divergent findings in the literature on the extent of substitution and complementarity between lockdowns and testing. It also demonstrates remarkable robustness in lockdown policy to changes in its efficiency.

Providing replication code is an inexpensive way to facilitate reproducibility. However, little is known about the extent of replication code provision. Therefore, we examine the availability of replication code for over 2500 peer-reviewed articles based on the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), one of the most widely used datasets in economics and other social sciences. We find that only 6% of SOEP-based studies have code available, but that this proportion has increased sharply over time. We provide evidence that the increase in code provision is driven by technological advances, individual researcher initiatives, and journal policies.

I show that parenthood contributes to the downward-sloping age-occupational-mobility profile. After the birth of the first child, men experience a 20% decline in occupational switching which is uniform across upward and downward mobility. For women, the decline is 14%, which is larger for upward than for downward occupational mobility. Therefore, parenthood can explain 22% and 12% of the declines in occupational mobility for working men and women between 25 and 45 years of age, respectively. Workers in disadvantaged groups experience larger decreases, highlighting the potential impacts of parenthood on their occupational choices.

We propose an economic lexicon (EL) specifically designed for textual applications in economics. We construct the dictionary with two important characteristics: (1) to have a wide coverage of terms used in documents discussing economic concepts, and (2) to provide a human-annotated sentiment score in the range [−1, 1]. We illustrate the use of the EL in the context of a simple sentiment measure and consider several applications in economics. The comparison to other lexicons shows that the EL is superior due to its wider coverage of domain relevant terms and its more accurate categorization of the word sentiment.

Fiscal consolidation literature often neglects that there are economies characterized by sizable underground sectors, with their mechanisms of response to fiscal policy shocks. Therefore, reliable analyses of fiscal consolidation plans call for the decomposition of Gross Domestic Product in its regular and hidden components. We investigate fiscal consolidation effects in the context of tax evasion for the Italian economy. Results show that a temporary cut in public spending associated with a permanent drop in tax rate yet entails tax evasion reduction. The main underlying mechanism is the strong responsiveness of the underground sector, implying a reallocation of resources toward the regular sector.