infonet-economy

The large regional variation of minimum wage changes in 2002—08 implies that Chinese manufacturing firms experienced competitive shocks as a function of firm location and their low-wage employment share. We find that minimum wage hikes accelerate the input substitution from labor to capital in low-wage firms, reduce employment growth, but also accelerate total factor productivity…

In April 2010, Greece became the first euro area country to request financial support from the IMF. The IMF joined the European Commission (EC) and the European Central Bank (ECB)—thus constituting what informally came to be known as the troika—in providing emergency financing, with the Fund’s contribution taking the form of a €30 billion three-year Stand-By Arrangement (SBA)…

Using a unique dataset collected in 59 rural Gambian villages, we study how ethnic heterogeneity is related to the structure of four economic exchange networks: land, labor, inputs and credit. We find that different measures of village-level ethnic fragmentation are mostly uncorrelated with network structure. At a more disaggregated level, household heads belonging to ethnic…

This study empirically evaluates the impact of the war in eastern Ukraine on the political attitudes aThis paper proposes a difference-in-differences approach for disentangling a total treatment effect on some outcome into a direct impact as well as an indirect effect operating through a binary intermediate variable – or mediator – within strata defined upon how the mediator reacts…

A nudge is a paternalistic government intervention that attempts to improve choices by changing the framing of a decision problem. We propose a welfare- theoretic foundation for nudging similar in spirit to the classical revealed preference approach, by investigating a model where preferences and mistakes of an agent can be elicited from her choices under different frames. We provide…

We study targeted information in a duopoly model with differentiated products, allowing for consumers with limited attention. The presence of inattentive consumers incentivizes firms to behave as if they were mass-advertisers, despite their ability to direct their mes- sages precisely towards consumers with the strongest preferences. We show that the scope for targeting as an…

We propose that heterogeneous asset trading behavior is the result of two distinct, non-convertible mental dimensions: analytical (“quantitative”) capability and mentalizing (“perspective-taking”) capability. We develop a framework of mental capabilities that yields testable predictions about individual trading behavior, revenue distribution and aggregate outcomes. The two-…

Höchste Zeit für ein paar Zahlen und Fakten gegen die pessimistische Verklärung unserer Gegenwart

This paper studies optimal dynamic tax policy under the threat of political reform. A policy will be reformed ex post if a large enough coalition of citizens supports reform; thus, sustainable policies are those that will continue to attract enough political support in the future. We find that optimal marginal capital taxes are either progressive or U-shaped, so that savings are…