2018年上半年的 Workshop 文章开始认领。我们将继续在劳动（包括健康、政策评估）、区域和城市、政治经济学、社会经济学、发展经济学等领域内选择论文。时间：每周二下午3点半至5点半，地点在复旦大学经济学院 714 或 710。请参与者积极认领，并与陈乔伊（joychen93@163.com）和刘志阔（lzhikuo@163.com）和联系。我们的微信号（flcds2014），也将在第一时间推送最新信息和相关评论，欢迎大家关注。
Ufuk, A., Salomé, B., & Stefanie, S. (2016). Taxation and the International Mobility of Inventors. American Economic Review, 106(10), 2930-2981.
Abstract: We study the effect of top tax rates on “superstar” inventors’ international mobility since 1977, using panel data on inventors from the US and European Patent Offices. We exploit the differential impact of changes in top tax rates on inventors of different qualities. Superstar inventors’ location choices are significantly affected by top tax rates. In our preferred specification, the elasticity to the net-of-tax rate of the number of domestic superstar inventors is around 0.03, while that of foreign superstar inventors is around 1. These elasticities are larger for inventors in multinational companies. An inventor is less sensitive to taxes in a country if his company performs a higher share of its research there.
Aghion, P., Akcigit, U., Bergeaud, A., Blundell, R., & Hémous, D. (2015). Innovation and top income inequality, NBER Working Paper
Abstract: In this paper we use cross-state panel data to show a positive and significant correlation between various measures of innovativeness and top income inequality in the United States over the past decades. Two distinct instrumentation strategies suggest that this correlation (partly) reflects a causality from innovativeness to top income inequality, and the effect is significant: for example, when measured by the number of patent per capita, innovativeness accounts on average across US states for around 17% of the total increase in the top 1% income share between 1975 and 2010. Yet, innovation does not appear to increase other measures of inequality which do not focus on top incomes. Next, we show that the positive effects of innovation on the top 1% income share are dampened in states with higher lobbying intensity. Finally, from cross-section regressions performed at the commuting zone (CZ) level, we find that: (i) innovativeness is positively correlated with upward social mobility; (ii) the positive correlation between innovativeness and social mobility, is driven mainly by entrant innovators and less so by incumbent innovators, and it is dampened in states with higher lobbying intensity. Overall, our findings vindicate the Schumpeterian view whereby the rise in top income shares is partly related to innovation-led growth, where innovation itself fosters social mobility at the top through creative destruction.
Anton Cheremukhin, Mikhail Golosov, Sergei Guriev, Aleh Tsyvinski (2015) The Economy of People's Republic of China from 1953, NBER Working Paper No. 21397
Abstract: This paper studies growth and structural transformation of the Chinese economy from 1953 to 2012 through a lens of a two-sector growth model. The main goal of the paper is to provide a systematic analysis of both the pre-1978 reform and post-1978 reform periods in a unified framework. First, we construct a dataset that allows the application of the neoclassical model and computation of wedges, their components, and rates of TFP growth. Second, we determine the key quantitative factors behind growth and structural transformation. The changes in the intersectoral labor wedge play the dominant role in accounting for the change in the share of labor force in agriculture. TFP growth and changes in the intersectoral wedges are the two most significant factors contributing to GDP growth. Further decomposing the effects of reduction in wedges, we find that two components: the production component (the gap between the ratio of the marginal products of labor and relative wages) and the consumption component (the gap between the marginal rate of substitution and the relative prices) play a particularly large role. Third, we use the pre-reform period as a key benchmark to measure the success of the post-1978 reforms. We show that reforms yielded a significant growth and structural transformation differential. GDP growth is 4.2 percentage points higher and the share of the labor force in agriculture is 23.9 percentage points lower compared with the continuation of the pre-1978 policies. We provide extensive historical evidence for the reforms that are consistent with the evolution of the components of the wedges. The decrease in the production component of the intersectoral wedge is consistent with increased competition and demonopolization of the economy. The decrease in the consumption component of the wedge is consistent with the price and housing reforms. Finally, we project the path of the Chinese economy until 2050 and also calculate a lower bound on future growth by projecting pre-reform trends.
Gollin, D., Kirchberger, M., & Lagakos, D. (2017). In Search of a Spatial Equilibrium in the Developing World.
Abstract: In most developing countries, there is a large gap in income per head between urban and rural areas. One interpretation of this gap is a spatial equilibrium, in which the higher incomes of urban areas are offset by lower non-monetary amenities. In this paper, we draw on new spatial evidence to document how amenities vary across space within a large set of developing countries. We focus on measures of health, housing quality, crime and pollution, which vary substantially across space, and for which high quality data are available. We find that in almost all countries, and for almost all measures, amenities are constant or increasing in population density. In addition, in most countries net internal migration rates are toward denser areas. These finding are hard to reconcile with a spatial equilibrium. Instead, they suggest that developing countries are undergoing a reallocation of workers to denser areas, where living standards are on average higher.
Hendricks, L. (2011). The skill composition of US cities. International economic review, 52(1), 1-32.
Abstract: This article explores why the fraction of highly educated workers varies across U.S. metropolitan areas. It documents a set of facts that pose challenges for a number of theories. Notably, (i) cities are characterized by industry neutral differences in skilled labor productivity and (ii) the size of the business services sector is strongly correlated with cities' skill compositions. Motivated by these observations, I propose an input sharing model, in which nontraded business services complement skilled labor. I show that the model accounts for all of the empirical regularities documented in the article.
David Atkin, Benjamin Faber, Marco Gonzalez-Navarro (2016). Retail Globalization and Household Welfare: Evidence from Mexico, NBER Working Paper No. 21176
Abstract: The arrival of global retail chains in developing countries is causing a radical transformation in the way households source their consumption. This paper draws on a rich collection of Mexican micro data to estimate the effect of foreign supermarket entry on household welfare, and decomposes this effect into six channels. We find foreign entry causes large welfare gains for the average household predominantly driven by a reduction in the cost of living-both through price reductions at domestic stores and through the direct consumer gains from foreign stores. These gains are on average positive for all income groups but are regressive.
Eeckhout, J., Pinheiro, R., & Schmidheiny, K. (2014). Spatial Sorting. Journal of Political Economy, 122(3), 554-620.
Abstract: We investigate the role of skill complementarities in production and mobility across cities. The nature of the complementarities determines the equilibrium skill distribution across cities. With extreme-skill complementarity, the skill distribution has thicker tails in large cities; with top-skill complementarity, there is first-order stochastic dominance. Using wage and housing price data, we find robust evidence of thick tails in large cities: large cities disproportionately attract both high- and lowskilled workers, while average skills are constant across city size. This pattern of spatial sorting is consistent with extreme-skill complementarity, where the productivity of high-skilled workers and of the providers of low-skilled services are mutually enhanced.
Margarida Duarte, Diego Restuccia. (2017) Relative Prices and Sectoral Productivity, NBER Working Paper
Abstract: The relative price of services rises with development. A standard interpretation of this fact is that productivity differences across countries are larger in manufacturing than in services. The service sector comprises heterogeneous categories. We document the behavior of relative prices and expenditure shares across two broad classifications of services: traditional services, such as health and education, featuring a rising relative price with development, and non-traditional services, such as communication and transportation, featuring a falling relative price. We find a strong reallocation of real expenditures from traditional to nontraditional services with development. Using a standard multi-sector model extended to incorporate an input-output structure, we show that cross-country productivity differences are much larger in non-traditional services (a factor of 106.5-fold between rich and poor countries) than in manufacturing (only 24.5-fold). Moreover, the productivity difference between non-traditional services and manufacturing is reduced by half when abstracting from intermediate inputs. Development requires solving the productivity problem in non-traditional services in poor countries.
Richard Rogerson. (2008). Structural Transformation and the Deterioration of European Labor Market Outcomes. Journal of Political Economy, 116(2), 235-259.
Abstract: This paper examines hours worked in continental Europe and the United States from 1956 to 2003. The empirical work establishes two results. First, hours worked in Europe decline by almost 45 percent compared to the United States over this period. Second, this decline is almost entirely accounted for by the fact that Europe develops a much smaller market service sector than the United States. A simple model of time allocation is used to understand these patterns. I find that relative increases in taxes and technological catch-up can account for most of the differences between the European and American time allocations over this period.
Atkin, D., Chaudhry, A., Chaudry, S., Khandelwal, A. K., & Verhoogen, E. (2017). Organizational Barriers to Technology Adoption: Evidence from Soccer-Ball Producers in Pakistan*. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 132(3), 1101-1164.
Abstract: This article studies technology adoption in a cluster of soccer-ball producers in Sialkot, Pakistan. We invented a new cutting technology that reduces waste of the primary raw material and gave the technology to a random subset of producers. Despite the clear net benefits for nearly all firms, after 15 months take-up remained puzzlingly low. We hypothesize that an important reason for the lack of adoption is a misalignment of incentives within firms: the key employees (cutters and printers) are typically paid piece rates, with no incentive to reduce waste, and the new technology slows them down, at least initially. Fearing reductions in their effective wage, employees resist adoption in various ways, including by misinforming owners about the value of the technology. To investigate this hypothesis, we implemented a second experiment among the firms that originally received the technology: we offered one cutter and one printer per firm a lump-sum payment, approximately a month’s earnings, conditional on demonstrating competence in using the technology in the presence of the owner. This incentive payment, small from the point of view of the firm, had a significant positive effect on adoption. The results suggest that misalignment of incentives within firms is an important barrier to technology adoption in our setting.
Yagan, D. (2015). Capital tax reform and the real economy: The effects of the 2003 dividend tax cut. The American Economic Review, 105(12), 3531-3563.
Abstract: This paper tests whether the 2003 dividend tax cut---one of the largest reforms ever to a U.S. capital tax rate---stimulated corporate investment and increased labor earnings, using a quasi-experimental design and U.S. corporate tax returns from years 1996-2008. I estimate that the tax cut caused zero change in corporate investment and employee compensation. Economically, the statistical precision challenges leading estimates of the cost-of-capital elasticity of investment, or undermines models in which dividend tax reforms affect the cost of capital. Either way, it may be difficult to implement an alternative dividend tax cut that has substantially larger near-term effects.
Angrist, J. D., Cohodes, S. R., Dynarski, S. M., Pathak, P. A., & Walters, C. R. (2016). Stand and Deliver: Effects of Boston’s Charter High Schools on College Preparation, Entry, and Choice. Journal of Labor Economics, 34(2), 275-318.
Abstract: We use admissions lotteries to estimate effects of attendance at Boston’s charter high schools on college preparation and enrollment. Charter schools increase pass rates on Massachusetts’ high-stakes exit exam, with large effects on the likelihood of qualifying for a state-sponsored scholarship. Charter attendance also boosts SAT scores sharply and increases the likelihood of taking an Advanced Placement (AP) exam, the number of AP exams taken, and AP scores. Charters induce a substantial shift from 2- to 4-year institutions, though the effect on overall college enrollment is modest. Charter effects on college-related outcomes are strongly correlated with charter effects on earlier tests.
四万亿和地方债务，建议四篇文章一起报告（2个小时）
Huang Y, Pagano M, Panizza U. Local Crowding Out in China[R]. 2017.
Bai, Chong-En, Chang-Tai Hsieh, and Zheng (Michael) Song (2016). .The Long Shadow of a Fiscal Expansion,.Brookings Papers in Economic Activity, Fall, 129-181.
Chen, Zhuo, Zhiguo He, and Chun Liu (2016). .The Financing of Local Government in China: Stimulus Loan Wanes and Shadow Banking Waxes,.Working Paper, University of Chicago.
Cong, Lin William, Haoyu Gao, Jacopo Ponticelli, and Xiaoguang Yang (2017). .Credit Allocation under Economic Stimulus: Evidence from China,. SSRN Working Paper No. 2862101
Liu, Ernest. "Industrial policies and economic development." (2017).
Abstract: Many developing countries adopt industrial policies that push resources towards selected economic sectors. How should countries choose which sectors to promote? I answer this question by characterizing optimal industrial policy in production networks embedded with market imperfections. My key finding is that effects of market imperfections accumulate through backward demand linkages, thereby generating aggregate sales distortions that are largest in the most upstream sectors. The distortion in sectoral sales is a sufficient statistic for the ratio between social and private marginal product of sectoral inputs; therefore, there is an incentive for a well-meaning government to subsidize upstream sectors. My sufficient statistic predicts the sectors targeted by government interventions in South Korea in the 1970s and in modern-day China.
Acemoglu D, Restrepo P. The race between man and machine: Implications of technology for growth, factor shares and employment[J]. American Economics Review, Forthcoming
Abstract: We examine the concerns that new technologies will render labor redundant in a framework in which tasks previously performed by labor can be automated and new versions of existing tasks, in which labor has a comparative advantage, can be created. In a static version where capital is fixed and technology is exogenous, automation reduces employment and the labor share, and may even reduce wages, while the creation of new tasks has the opposite effects. Our full model endogenizes capital accumulation and the direction of research towards automation and the creation of new tasks. If the long-run rental rate of capital relative to the wage is sufficiently low, the long-run equilibrium involves automation of all tasks. Otherwise, there exists a stable balanced growth path in which the two types of innovations go hand-in-hand. Stability is a consequence of the fact that automation reduces the cost of producing using labor, and thus discourages further automation and encourages the creation of new tasks. In an extension with heterogeneous skills, we show that inequality increases during transitions driven both by faster automation and introduction of new tasks, and characterize the conditions under which inequality is increasing or stable in the long run.
建议结合这篇实证一起报告：
Acemoglu D, Restrepo P. Robots and Jobs: Evidence from US Labor Markets[R]. National Bureau of Economic Research, 2017.
Ayumu Ken Kikkawaa ,Imperfect Competition and the Transmission of Shocks: The Network Matters, Job Market Paper
Abstract: This paper studies the aggregate implications of the firm-to-firm production network structure. Using a dataset on all domestic transactions between Belgian firms, we establish two facts: firms charge higher markups if they have higher input shares within their customers, and firms experience larger churn of suppliers if they face a larger reduction in foreign goods’ prices. Motivated by these two facts, we build a model where firms compete as oligopolies to supply inputs to each customer and where firms optimally choose their suppliers. The network structure becomes irrelevant in a benchmark case where we impose perfect competition and hold the network fixed. In this case, firm-level variables are suffcient to compute the welfare response to a large fall in import prices. Allowing for oligopolistic competition generates two counteracting forces within supplier-customer pairs. A supplier raises its markup to a customer when its costs decline, but it reduces the markup if other firms supplying the same customer receive the shock. Further, allowing for endogenous networks amplifies the impact of the shock as firms begin importing and begin sourcing from other firms exposed to the import shock. Due to the omission of these dynamics, the aggregate response in the benchmark case is less than one quarter of those in the full estimated model.
建议搭配Ayumu Ken Kikkawa关于Network的其他研究，比如：Trade and Domestic Production Networks
Aghion, P., Bergeaud, A., Lequien, M., & Melitz, M. (2017). The Impact of Exports on Innovation: Theory and Evidence. working paper.
Abstract: A simple model of trade and innovation with heterogeneous firms predicts that a positive export shock should raise innovation more for more productive firms. Two channels coexist: the innovation effort increases for all firms because the accompanying rents increase with a firm’s market size (market size effect); the innovation effort decreases because competition toughens. This competition effect dissipates with higher firm productivity. It is therefore most salient for the least productive firms and can potentially overturn the direct market size effect. We test this prediction with patent, customs and production data covering all French firms. To disentangle the direction of causality between innovation and export performance, we construct various firm-level export demand measures. These variables capture the extent to which demand fluctuations in a firm’s foreign markets should influence its exports and through them weigh on its innovation decisions; but they remain exogenous to those firm-level decisions. We show that patenting robustly increases more with demand for initially more productive firms. This effect is reversed for the least productive firms as the negative competition effect dominates.
Chetty R. Sufficient statistics for welfare analysis: A bridge between structural and reduced-form methods[R]. National Bureau of Economic Research, 2008.
Abstract: The debate between "structural" and "reduced-form" approaches has generated substantial controversy in applied economics. This article reviews a recent literature in public economics that combines the advantages of reduced-form strategies -- transparent and credible identification -- with an important advantage of structural models -- the ability to make predictions about counterfactual outcomes and welfare. This recent work has developed formulas for the welfare consequences of various policies that are functions of high-level elasticities rather than deep primitives. These formulas provide theoretical guidance for the measurement of treatment effects using program evaluation methods. I present a general framework that shows how many policy questions can be answered by identifying a small set of sufficient statistics. I use this framework to synthesize the modern literature on taxation, social insurance, and behavioral welfare economics. Finally, I discuss topics in labor economics, industrial organization, and macroeconomics that can be tackled using the sufficient statistic approach.
Saez E, Zucman G. Wealth inequality in the United States since 1913: Evidence from capitalized income tax data[R]. National bureau of economic research, 2014.
Abstract: This paper combines income tax returns with Flow of Funds data to estimate the distribution of household wealth in the United States since 1913. We estimate wealth by capitalizing the incomes reported by individual taxpayers, accounting for assets that do not generate taxable income. We successfully test our capitalization method in three micro datasets where we can observe both income and wealth: the Survey of Consumer Finance, linked estate and income tax returns, and foundations' tax records. Wealth concentration has followed a U-shaped evolution over the last 100 years: It was high in the beginning of the twentieth century, fell from 1929 to 1978, and has continuously increased since then. The rise of wealth inequality is almost entirely due to the rise of the top 0.1% wealth share, from 7% in 1979 to 22% in 2012--a level almost as high as in 1929. The bottom 90% wealth share first increased up to the mid-1980s and then steadily declined. The increase in wealth concentration is due to the surge of top incomes combined with an increase in saving rate inequality. Top wealth-holders are younger today than in the 1960s and earn a higher fraction of total labor income in the economy. We explain how our findings can be reconciled with Survey of Consumer Finances and estate tax data.
Malmendier U, Nagel S. Learning from inflation experiences*[J]. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2015: qjv037.
Abstract: How do individuals form expectations about future inflation? We propose that individuals overweight inflation experienced during their lifetimes. This approach modifies existing adaptive learning models to allow for age-dependent updating of expectations in response to inflation surprises. Young individuals update their expectations more strongly than older individuals since recent experiences account for a greater share of their accumulated lifetime history. We find support for these predictions using 57 years of microdata on inflation expectations from the Reuters/Michigan Survey of Consumers. Differences in experiences strongly predict differences in expectations, including the substantial disagreement between young and old individuals in periods of highly volatile inflation, such as the 1970s. It also explains household borrowing and lending behavior, including the choice of mortgages.
城市经济学
理论与实证结合的文章：
Serrato J C S, Zidar O. Who benefits from state corporate tax cuts? A local labor markets approach with heterogeneous firms[J]. The American Economic Review, 2016, 106(9): 2582-2624.
Abstract: This paper estimates the incidence of state corporate taxes on workers, landowners, and firm owners in a spatial equilibrium model in which corporate taxes affect the location choices of both firms and workers. Heterogeneous, location-specific productivities and preferences determine the mobility of firms and workers, respectively. Owners of monopolistically competitive firms receive economic profits and may bear the incidence of corporate taxes as heterogeneous productivity can make them inframarginal in their location choices. We derive a simple expression for equilibrium incidence as a function of a few estimable parameters. Using variation in state corporate tax rates and apportionment rules, we estimate the reduced-form effects of tax changes on firm and worker location decisions, wages, and rental costs. We then use minimum distance methods to recover the parameters that determine equilibrium incidence as a function of these reduced-form effects. In contrast to previous assumptions of infinitely mobile firms and perfectly immobile workers, we find that firms are only approximately twice as mobile as workers over a ten-year period. This fact, along with equilibrium impacts on the housing market, implies that firm owners bear roughly 40% of the incidence, while workers and land owners bear 35% and 25%, respectively. Finally, we derive revenue-maximizing state corporate tax rates and discuss interactions with other local taxes and apportionment formulae.
城市经济学
Ciccone A, Papaioannou E. Estimating Cross-Industry Cross-Country Interaction Models Using Benchmark Industry Characteristics[R]. National Bureau of Economic Research, 2016.
Abstract: Empirical cross-industry cross-country models are applied widely in economics, for example to investigate the determinants of economic growth or international trade. Estimation generally relies on US proxies for unobservable technological industry characteristics, for example industries' dependence on external finance or relationship-specific inputs. We examine the properties of the estimator and find that estimates can be biased towards zero (attenuated) or away from zero (amplified), depending on how technological similarity with the US covaries with other country characteristics. We also develop an alternative estimator that yields a lower bound on the true effect in cross-industry cross-country models of comparative advantage.
Aghion, Philippe, et al. "Creative Destruction and Subjective Well-Being." American Economic Review 106.12 (2016): 3869-97.
Abstract: In this paper we analyze the relationship between turnover-driven growth and subjective well-being. Our model of innovation-led growth and unemployment predicts that: (i) the effect of creative destruction on expected individual welfare should be unambiguously positive if we control for unemployment, less so if we do not; (ii) job creation has a positive and job destruction has a negative impact on well-being; (iii) job destruction has a less negative impact in areas with more generous unemployment insurance policies; and (iv) job creation has a more positive effect on individuals that are more forward-looking. The empirical analysis using cross sectional MSA (metropolitan statistical area)-level and individual-level data provide empirical support to these predictions.
Adamopoulos, Tasso, and Diego Restuccia. "The size distribution of farms and international productivity differences." The American Economic Review 104.6 (2014): 1667-1697.
Abstract: There is a 34-fold difference in average farm size (land per farm) between rich and poor countries and striking differences in their size distributions. Since labor productivity is much higher in large relative to small farms, we study the determinants of farm-size differences across countries and their impact on agricultural and aggregate productivity. We develop a quantitative model of agriculture and non-agriculture that features a non-degenerate size distribution of farms. We find that measured aggregate factors such as capital, land, and economy-wide productivity cannot account for more than 1/4 of the observed differences in farm size and productivity. We argue that, among the possible explanations, farm-level policies that misallocate resources from large to small farms have the most potential to account for the remaining differences. Such farm-size distortions are prevalent in poor countries. We quantify the effects of two specific policies in developing countries: (a) a land reform that imposes a ceiling on farm size and (b) a progressive land tax. We find that each individual policy generates a reduction of 3 to 7% in average size and productivity.
David, Joel M., Hugo A. Hopenhayn, and Venky Venkateswaran. "Information, misallocation and aggregate productivity." The Quarterly Journal of Economics (2016): qjw006.
Abstract: We propose a theory linking imperfect information to resource misallocation and hence to aggregate productivity and output. In our setup, firms look to a variety of noisy information sources when making input decisions. We devise a novel empirical strategy that uses a combination of firm-level production and stock market data to pin down the information structure in the economy. Even when only capital is chosen under imperfect information, applying this methodology to data from the United States, China, and India reveals substantial losses in productivity and output due to the informational friction. Our estimates for these losses range from 7% to 10% for productivity and 10% to 14% for output in China and India, and are smaller, though still significant, in the United States. Losses are substantially higher when labor decisions are also made under imperfect information. We find that firms turn primarily to internal sources for information; learning from financial markets contributes little, even in the United States.
宏观发展的一系列文章
Gollin D. Getting income shares right[J]. Journal of political Economy, 2002, 110(2): 458-474.
Abstract: Many widely used economic models implicitly assume that income shares should be identical across time and space. Although time-series data from industrial countries appear consistent with this notion, cross-section data generally appear to contradict%the assumption. A commonly used calculation suggests that labor shares of national income vary from about .05 to about .80 in international cross-section data. This paper suggests that the usual approach underestimates labor income in small firms. Several adjustments for calculating labor shares are identified and compared. They all yield labor shares for most countries in the range of .65-.80.
Henderson J V, Storeygard A, Weil D N. Measuring economic growth from outer space[J]. The American Economic Review, 2012, 102(2): 994-1028.
Abstract: We develop a statistical framework to use satellite data on night lights to augment official income growth measures. For countries with poor national income accounts, the optimal estimate of growth is a composite with roughly equal weights on conventionally measured growth and growth predicted from lights. Our estimates differ from official data by up to three percentage points annually. Using lights, empirical analyses of growth need no longer use countries as the unit of analysis; we can measure growth for sub- and supranational regions. We show, for example, that coastal areas in sub-Saharan Africa are growing slower than the hinterland.
Caselli F, Feyrer J. The marginal product of capital[J]. The quarterly journal of economics, 2007, 122(2): 535-568.
Abstract: Whether or not the marginal product of capital (MPK) differs across countries is a question that keeps coming up in discussions of comparative economic development and patterns of capital flows. Using easily accessible macroeconomic data we find thatMPKs are remarkably similar across countries. Hence, there is no prima facie support for the view that international credit frictions play a major -role in preventing capital flows from rich to poor countries. Lower capital ratios in these countries areinstead attributable to lower endowments of complementary factors and lower efficiency, as well as to lower prices of output goods relative to capital. We also show that properly accounting for the share of income accruing to reproducible capital is critical to reach these conclusions. One implication of our findings is that increased aid flows to developing countries will not significantly increase these countries capital stocks and incomes.
Schoellman T. Education quality and development accounting[J]. The Review of Economic Studies, 2011, 79(1): 388-417.
Abstract: This paper measures the role of quality-adjusted years of schooling in accounting for cross-country output per worker differences. While data on years of schooling are readily available, data on education quality are not. I use the returns to schooling of foreign-educated immigrants in the U.S. to measure the education quality of their birth country. Immigrants from developed countries earn higher returns than do immigrants from developing countries. I show how to incorporate this measure of education quality into an otherwise standard development accounting exercise. The main result is that cross-country differences in education quality are roughly as important as cross-country differences in years of schooling in accounting for output per worker differences, raising the total contribution of education from 10% to 20% of output per worker differences.
Lagakos D, Moll B, Porzio T, et al. Life-Cycle Human Capital Accumulation Across Countries: Lessons From US Immigrants[R]. National Bureau of Economic Research, 2016.
Abstract: How much does life-cycle human capital accumulation vary across countries? This paper seeks to answer this question by studying U.S. immigrants, who come from a wide variety of countries but work in a common labor market. We document that returns to potential experience among U.S. immigrants are higher on average for workers coming from rich countries than for those coming from poor countries. To understand this fact we build a model of life-cycle human capital accumulation that features three potential theories, working respectively through cross-country differences in: selection, skill loss, and human capital accumulation. To distinguish between theories, we use new data on the characteristics of immigrants and non-migrants from a large set of countries. We conclude that the most likely theory is that immigrants from poor countries accumulate relatively less human capital in their birth countries before migrating. Our findings imply that life cycle human capital stocks are on average much larger in rich countries than poor countries.
Schmitz Jr J A. What determines productivity? Lessons from the dramatic recovery of the US and Canadian iron ore industries following their early 1980s crisis[J]. Journal of political Economy, 2005, 113(3): 582-625.
Abstract: Great Lakes iron ore producers had faced no competition from foreign iron ore in the Great Lakes steel market for nearly a century as the 1970s closed. In the early 1980s, as a result of unprecedented developments in the world steel market, Brazilian producers were offering to deliver iron ore to Chicago (the heart of the Great Lakes market) at prices substantially below prices of local iron ore. The U.S. and Canadian iron ore industries faced a major crisis that cast doubt on their future. In response to the crisis, these industries dramatically increased productivity. Labor productivity doubled in a few years.
Hsieh C T, Hurst E, Jones C I, et al. The allocation of talent and us economic growth[R]. National Bureau of Economic Research, 2013.
Abstract: Over the last 50 years, there has been a remarkable convergence in the occupational distribution between white men, women, and blacks. We measure the macroeconomic consequences of this convergence through the prism of a Roy model of occupational choice in which women and blacks face frictions in the labor market and in the accumulation of human capital. The changing frictions implied by the observed occupational convergence account for 15 to 20 percent of growth in aggregate output per worker since 1960.
Gollin D, Lagakos D, Waugh M E. The agricultural productivity gap[J]. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2013, 129(2): 939-993.
Abstract: According to national accounts data, value added per worker is much higher in the nonagricultural sector than in agriculture in the typical country, particularly in developing countries. Taken at face value, this “agricultural productivity gap” suggests that labor is greatly misallocated across sectors. In this article, we draw on new micro evidence to ask to what extent the gap is still present when better measures of sector labor inputs and value added are taken into consideration. We find that even after considering sector differences in hours worked and human capital per worker, as well as alternative measures of sector output constructed from household survey data, a puzzlingly large gap remains.
Herrendorf B, Schoellman T. Why is measured productivity so low in agriculture?[J]. Review of Economic Dynamics, 2015, 18(4): 1003-1022.
Abstract: In poor countries, labor productivity in agriculture is considerably lower than in the rest of the economy. We assess whether this well-known fact implies that labor is mis-allocated between the two sectors. We make several observations that suggest otherwise. First, the same fact holds for US states where severe mis-allocation is implausible. Second, the gaps between the marginal value products of agriculture and non-agriculture are considerably smaller when measured through wages than through labor productivities. Third, labor productivity in agriculture is severely mis-measured in the US.
Adamopoulos T, Restuccia D. The size distribution of farms and international productivity differences[J]. The American Economic Review, 2014, 104(6): 1667-1697.
Abstract: We study the determinants of di fferences in farm-size across countries and their impact on agricultural and aggregate productivity using a quantitative sectoral model featuring a distribution of farms. Measured aggregate factors (capital, land, economy-wide productivity) account for ? of the observed differences in farm size and productivity. Policies and institutions that misallocate resources across farms have the potential to account for the remaining diff erences. Exploiting within-country variation in crop-specifi c price distortions and their correlation with farm size, we construct a cross-country measure of farm-size distortions which together with aggregate factors accounts for ? of the cross-country diff erences in size and productivity.
实证方法
de Chaisemartin, C. and X. D'Haultfoeuille. Fuzzy Differences-in-Differences[J]. Review of Economic Studies, 2017, 01: 1-30.
Abstract: Difference-in-differences (DID) is a method to evaluate the effect of a treatment. In its basic version, a "control group" is untreated at two dates, whereas a "treatment group" becomes fully treated at the second date. However, in many applications of the DID method, the treatment rate only increases more in the treatment group. In such fuzzy designs, a popular estimator of the treatment effect is the DID of the outcome divided by the DID of the treatment. We show that this ratio identifies a local average treatment effect only if the effect of the treatment is stable over time, and if the effect of the treatment is the same in the treatment and in the control group. We then propose two alternative estimands that do not rely on any assumption on treatment effects, and that can be used when the treatment rate does not change over time in the control group. We prove that the corresponding estimators are asymptotically normal. Finally, we use our results to revisit Duo (2001).
Knoll, Katharina, Moritz Schularick, and Thomas Steger. "No price like home: global house prices, 1870–2012." The American Economic Review 107.2 (2017): 331-353.
Abstract: How have house prices evolved over the long run? This paper presents annual house prices for 14 advanced economies since 1870. We show that real house prices stayed constant from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, but rose strongly and with substantial cross-country variation in the second half of the twentieth century. Land prices, not replacement costs, are the key to understanding the trajectory of house prices. Rising land prices explain about 80 percent of the global house price boom that has taken place since World War II. Our findings have implications for the evolution of wealth-to-income ratios, the growth effects of agglomeration, and the price elasticity of housing supply.
Garicano, Luis, Claire Lelarge, and John Van Reenen. "Firm size distortions and the productivity distribution: Evidence from France." The American Economic Review 106.11 (2016): 3439-3479.
Abstract: We show how size-contingent laws can be used to identify the equilibrium and welfare effects of labor regulation. Our framework incorporates such regulations into the Lucas (1978) model and applies it to France where many labor laws start to bind on firms with 50 or more employees. Using population data on firms between 1995 and 2007, we structurally estimate the key parameters of our model to construct counterfactual size, productivity, and welfare distributions. We find that the cost of these regulations is equivalent to that of a 2.3 percent variable tax on labor. In our baseline case with French levels of partial real wage inflexibility, welfare costs of the regulations are 3.4 percent of GDP (falling to 1.3 percent if real wages were perfectly flexible downward). The main losers from the regulation are workers—and to a lesser extent, large firms—and the main winners are small firms.
