Economic Inquiry最新文献

During the 2021 pandemic year, the generosity of Unemployment Insurance benefits was expanded (Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation [FPUC]) and eligibility for benefits was broadened (Pandemic Unemployment Assistance [PUA]). These two programs were set to expire in September 2021. In June 2021, 18 states exited both FPUC and PUA and three states exited FPUC (but not PUA). Using Current Population Survey data and a wide range of estimation methods, we find that the flow of unemployed workers into employment increased by around two-thirds following early exit among prime-age workers. We also find evidence of reductions in state-level unemployment rates, increases in employment-populations ratios, and reductions in the share of households that had no difficulty meeting expenses.

The paper examines how pre-play communication between players with partial credibility affects the ensuing strategic interaction. We consider an environment where players are uncertain about the economic and psychological costs of reneging on promises but learn these at the time of their implementation. We demonstrate that in the equilibrium both players make promises. The latter are partially effective in terms of achieving collusive outcomes and improving the players' payoffs under strategic complementarity, where promises are used to signal future collusive behavior. In contrast, under strategic substitutability the ability to make a promise can be used to signal future aggressive behavior and one of the players may even get a lower expected (before the type is revealed) payoff than in the game without communication.

Using individuals' life history information from a large-scale national survey (N = 13,044), we causally evaluate how exposure to SARS-Cov-1, the first global pandemic in the 21st century, affects long-term psychological well-being. We find that exposure to local pandemic risk, that is, local deaths due to the pandemic, significantly reduced people's mental health 12 years later. Consistent with the belief-based account of depression, exposure to pandemic risk resulted in more pessimistic beliefs about the future and survival probability. People reduced savings and increased hedonic consumption, suggesting a “carpe diem” effect of the pandemic exposure.

The National Football League's regular-season games are not of equal importance: some games loom larger than others for determining a team's chance to qualify for the playoffs. We develop an incentive-based measure of the impact of winning a game on a team's qualification probability to study the relationship between stakes and injuries. We find teams are 24 percentage points more likely to suffer concussions in games where a win secures one team a playoff berth. This is the first evidence to support the risk-escalation hypothesis that injuries increase with a competition's stakes. We then discuss implications for sports injury prevention.

We present a two-area endogenous growth model where abstract knowledge flows at no cost across space but tacit knowledge arises from the interaction among researchers and is hampered by distance. Digital communication reduces this “cost of distance” and reinforces productive specialization, leading to an increase in the system-wide growth rate but at the cost of more inequality within and across areas. These results are consistent with evidences on the rise in the concentration of innovative activities, income inequality, and skills and income divergence across US urban areas.

A key economic structure in China is the co-existence of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) being bank-favored firms as well as policy tools, and more productive private firms who can borrow from SOEs through entrusted lending. We explore macroeconomic implications of such a structure in China. Our findings suggest SOEs dampen output volatility at the cost of productivity volatility. In contrast, the healthy development of entrusted lending dampens variations of both output and productivity by reallocating credits between firms. Focusing on the recent growth slowdown in China, we further show conducive effects of entrusted lending on economic growth by mitigating capital misallocation.

We assess whether a light-touch intervention can increase socioeconomic and racial diversity in undergraduate Economics. We randomly assigned over 2200 students a message with basic information about the Economics major; the basic message combined with an emphasis on the rewarding careers or financial returns associated with the major; or no message. Messages increased the proportion of first generation students majoring in Economics by five percentage points. This effect size was sufficient to reverse the gap in Economics majors for first generation students. Suggestive evidence indicates the effects may be driven by first generation students who were not also underrepresented minorities.

This paper examines the impact of social pensions on old-age poverty. To achieve causal identification, we leverage the reduction in the minimum eligibility age of Mexico's flagship non-means-tested social pension program. We find that the program's expansion significantly reduced extreme poverty, mainly among indigenous seniors and in rural areas. However, it had negligible effects on labor force participation, suggesting that social pensions were not effective in ensuring minimum economic well-being and simultaneously inducing retirement among seniors at early stages of old age. The program's small cash transfer and mistargeting are among the main explanations.

We investigated lying as a collective-risk social dilemma. Misreporting resulted in increased individual earnings but when total claims reached a certain threshold, all group members were at risk of collective sanction, regardless of their individual behavior. Due to selfishness and miscoordination, most individuals earned less than the reservation payoff from honest reporting in the group. However, preferences for truth-telling lowered the risk of collective sanction in this setting compared to a social dilemma game in which players could make direct claims without lying. The risk of sanctions decreased with risk aversion and a smaller group size.