American Economic Review?2023年第5期

Vol. 113 No. 4 May 2023

——更多動(dòng)態(tài)，請持續(xù)關(guān)注gzh：理想主義的百年孤獨(dú)

Nobel Lecture: Banking, Credit, and Economic Fluctuations

諾貝爾演講:銀行、信貸和經(jīng)濟(jì)波動(dòng)

Ben S.Bernanke

Credit markets, including the market for bank loans, are characterized by imperfect and asymmetric information. These informational frictions can interact with other economic forces to produce periods of credit-market stress, in which intermediation is unusually costly and households and businesses have difficulty obtaining credit. A high level of credit-market stress, as in a severe financial crisis, may in turn produce a deep and prolonged recession. I present evidence that financial distress and disrupted credit markets were important sources of the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Recession of 2007–2009. Changes in the state of credit markets also play a role in "garden-variety" business cycles and in the transmission of monetary policy to the economy.

信貸市場，包括銀行貸款市場，具有信息不完全和不對稱的特點(diǎn)。這些信息摩擦可能與其他經(jīng)濟(jì)力量相互作用，產(chǎn)生信貸市場壓力期，在此期間，中介費(fèi)用異常高昂，家庭和企業(yè)難以獲得信貸。在嚴(yán)重的金融危機(jī)中，高水平的信貸市場壓力可能反過來導(dǎo)致深度和長期的衰退。我提供的證據(jù)表明，金融困境和信貸市場混亂是上世紀(jì)30年代大蕭條和2007-2009年大衰退的重要根源。信貸市場狀況的變化也在“普通”商業(yè)周期和貨幣政策向經(jīng)濟(jì)的傳導(dǎo)中發(fā)揮作用。

Information, Mobile Communication, and Referral Effects

信息、移動(dòng)通信和推薦效應(yīng)

Panle JiaBarwick,?Yanyan?Liu,?Eleonora?Patacchini?and?Qi?Wu

This paper uses the universe of cellphone records from a Chinese telecommunication provider for a northern Chinese city to examine the role of information exchange in urban labor markets. We provide the first direct evidence of increased communication among referral pairs around job changes. Information provided by social contacts mitigates information asymmetry and improves labor market performance.

本文利用中國北方某城市電信運(yùn)營商的手機(jī)記錄來考察信息交換在城市勞動(dòng)力市場中的作用。我們提供了第一個(gè)直接證據(jù)，證明轉(zhuǎn)介對之間圍繞工作變化的溝通有所增加。社會(huì)聯(lián)系提供的信息減輕了信息不對稱，提高了勞動(dòng)力市場績效。

The Costs of Job Displacement over the Business Cycle and Its Sources: Evidence from Germany

經(jīng)濟(jì)周期中工作流失的成本及其來源:來自德國的證據(jù)

Johannes F.Schmieder,?Till?von Wachter?and?J?rg?Heining

We document the sources behind the costs of job loss over the business cycle using administrative data from Germany. Losses in annual earnings after displacement are large, persistent, and highly cyclical, nearly doubling in size during downturns. A large part of the long-term earnings losses and their cyclicality is driven by declines in wages. Key to these long-lasting wage declines and their cyclicality are changes in employer characteristics, as displaced workers switch to lower-paying firms. These losses increase with duration of nonemployment. Changes in characteristics of displaced workers or displacing firms, and other post-job loss career outcomes explain little of the cyclicality.

我們使用來自德國的行政數(shù)據(jù)記錄了商業(yè)周期中失業(yè)成本背后的來源。流離失所后的年收入損失是巨大的、持續(xù)的、高度周期性的，在經(jīng)濟(jì)低迷時(shí)期幾乎翻倍。長期收入損失及其周期性在很大程度上是由工資下降造成的。這些長期工資下降及其周期性的關(guān)鍵是雇主特征的變化，因?yàn)槭I(yè)的工人轉(zhuǎn)向工資較低的公司。這些損失隨著失業(yè)時(shí)間的延長而增加。失業(yè)工人或被取代的公司的特征變化，以及其他失業(yè)后的職業(yè)結(jié)果，幾乎不能解釋這種周期性。

Law and Norms: Empirical Evidence

法律與規(guī)范:經(jīng)驗(yàn)證據(jù)

TomLane,?Daniele?Nosenzo?and?Silvia?Sonderegger

A large theoretical literature argues laws exert a causal effect on norms, but empirical evidence remains scant. Using a novel identification strategy, we provide a compelling empirical test of this proposition. We use incentivized vignette experiments to directly measure social norms relating to actions subject to legal thresholds. Our large-scale experiments (n = 7,000) run in the United Kingdom, United States, and China show that laws can causally influence social norms. Results are robust across different samples and methods of measuring norms, and are consistent with a model of social image concerns where individuals care about the inferences others make about their underlying prosociality.

大量的理論文獻(xiàn)認(rèn)為法律對規(guī)范產(chǎn)生因果關(guān)系，但經(jīng)驗(yàn)證據(jù)仍然不足。使用一種新的識(shí)別策略，我們對這一命題提供了一個(gè)令人信服的實(shí)證檢驗(yàn)。我們使用激勵(lì)性小插圖實(shí)驗(yàn)來直接測量與受法律閾值約束的行為相關(guān)的社會(huì)規(guī)范。我們在英國、美國和中國進(jìn)行的大規(guī)模實(shí)驗(yàn)(n = 7000)表明，法律可以對社會(huì)規(guī)范產(chǎn)生因果影響。結(jié)果在不同的樣本和測量規(guī)范方法中都是穩(wěn)健的，并且與社會(huì)形象關(guān)注模型一致，即個(gè)人關(guān)心他人對其潛在親社會(huì)性的推斷。

Social Exclusion and Social Preferences: Evidence from Colombia's Leper Colony

社會(huì)排斥和社會(huì)偏好:來自哥倫比亞麻風(fēng)病人聚居地的證據(jù)

DiegoRamos-Toro

This paper explores the intergenerational consequences of social exclusion on prosociality. A lab-in-the-field approach in the historical region of Colombia's leper colony reveals that descendants of socially excluded individuals are locally altruistic and extend such altruism to outsiders who have undergone similar circumstances. These individuals also display mistrust toward those who have, historically, been exclusionary—in this case, doctors. The content of historical narratives shared by ancestors who were excluded, which emphasize the endured mistreatment and doctors' historical misinformation, is one mechanism that partially explains the intergenerational patterns.

本文探討了社會(huì)排斥對親社會(huì)性的代際影響。在哥倫比亞麻風(fēng)病人殖民地的歷史地區(qū)進(jìn)行的一項(xiàng)實(shí)地實(shí)驗(yàn)表明，被社會(huì)排斥的個(gè)體的后代在當(dāng)?shù)厥抢?，并將這種利他主義擴(kuò)展到經(jīng)歷過類似情況的外人。這些人也對那些在歷史上被排斥的人表現(xiàn)出不信任——在這種情況下，是醫(yī)生。被排除在外的祖先分享的歷史敘述內(nèi)容強(qiáng)調(diào)忍受虐待和醫(yī)生的歷史錯(cuò)誤信息，這是部分解釋代際模式的機(jī)制之一。

Smart Contracts and the Coase Conjecture

智能合約和科斯猜想

ThomasBrzustowski,?Alkis?Georgiadis-Harris?and?Balázs?Szentes

This paper reconsiders the problem of a durable-good monopolist who cannot make intertemporal commitments. The buyer's valuation is binary and his private information. The seller has access to dynamic contracts and, in each period, decides whether to deploy the previous period's contract or to replace it with a new one. The main result of the paper is that the Coase conjecture fails: the monopolist's payoff is bounded away from the low valuation irrespective of the discount factor.

本文重新考慮了不能作出跨期承諾的持久利益壟斷者的問題。買方的估價(jià)是二元的，而且是他的私人信息。賣方可以訪問動(dòng)態(tài)合同，并在每個(gè)時(shí)期決定是否部署前一時(shí)期的合同或用新合同替換它。這篇論文的主要結(jié)論是科斯猜想失敗了:無論貼現(xiàn)因素如何，壟斷者的收益都被限制在低估值之外。

The Cost of Information: The Case of Constant Marginal Costs

信息成本:邊際成本不變的情況

LucianoPomatto,?Philipp?Strack?and?Omer?Tamuz

We develop an axiomatic theory of information acquisition that captures the idea of constant marginal costs in information production: the cost of generating two independent signals is the sum of their costs, and generating a signal with probability half costs half its original cost. Together with Blackwell monotonicity and a continuity condition, these axioms determine the cost of a signal up to a vector of parameters. These parameters have a clear economic interpretation and determine the difficulty of distinguishing states.

我們發(fā)展了一個(gè)信息獲取的公理理論，它抓住了信息生產(chǎn)中恒定邊際成本的概念:產(chǎn)生兩個(gè)獨(dú)立信號(hào)的成本是它們成本的總和，而產(chǎn)生一個(gè)信號(hào)的概率是原始成本的一半。與布萊克威爾單調(diào)性和連續(xù)性條件一起，這些公理確定了信號(hào)到一個(gè)參數(shù)向量的代價(jià)。這些參數(shù)具有明確的經(jīng)濟(jì)解釋，并決定了區(qū)分狀態(tài)的難度。