American Economic Review 2023年第10期

Vol. 113, Issue 10

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

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The Economic Origins of Government

政府的經(jīng)濟(jì)起源

Robert C. Allen, Mattia C. Bertazzini and Leander Heldring

We test between cooperative and extractive theories of the origins of government. We use river shifts in southern Iraq as a natural experiment, in a new archeological panel dataset. A shift away creates a local demand for a government to coordinate because private river irrigation needs to be replaced with public canals. It disincentivizes local extraction as land is no longer productive without irrigation. Consistent with a cooperative theory of government, a river shift away led to state formation, canal construction, and the payment of tribute. We argue that the first governments coordinated between extended households which implemented public good provision.

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Regulation Design in Insurance Markets

保險(xiǎn)市場(chǎng)的監(jiān)管設(shè)計(jì)

Dhruva Bhaskar, Andrew McClellan and Evan Sadler

Regulators often impose rules that constrain the behavior of market participants. We study the design of regulatory policy in an insurance market as a delegation problem. A regulator restricts the menus of contracts an informed firm is permitted to offer, the firm offers a permitted menu to each consumer, and consumers choose contracts from offered menus. If consumer types and firm signals are ordered in a way that reflects coverage need, the regulator can leverage the firm's information by forcing the firm to offer specified additional options on each menu. Several extensions illustrate the practical application of our results.

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Optimal Insurance: Dual Utility, Random Losses, and Adverse Selection

最優(yōu)保險(xiǎn):雙重效用、隨機(jī)損失和逆向選擇

Alex Gershkov, Benny Moldovanu, Philipp Strack and Mengxi Zhang

We study a generalization of the classical monopoly insurance problem under adverse selection (see Stiglitz 1977) where we allow for a random distribution of losses, possibly correlated with the agent's risk parameter that is private information. Our model explains patterns of observed customer behavior and predicts insurance contracts most often observed in practice: these consist of menus of several deductible-premium pairs or menus of insurance with coverage limits–premium pairs. A main departure from the classical insurance literature is obtained here by endowing the agents with risk-averse preferences that can be represented by a dual utility functional (Yaari 1987).

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Intrinsic Information Preferences and Skewness

內(nèi)在信息偏好和偏度

Yusufcan Masatlioglu, Ye?im Orhun and Collin Raymond

We examine whether people have an intrinsic preference for negatively skewed or positively skewed information structures and how these preferences relate to intrinsic preferences for informativeness. The results from lab experiments show a strong intrinsic preference for positively skewed information and suggest that providing such information can improve information uptake. Evidence from field studies in decision- and ego-relevant contexts replicates these findings. We discuss our findings through the lens of existing theories and the potential trade-offs in information provision policies.

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A Signal to End Child Marriage: Theory and Experimental Evidence from Bangladesh

結(jié)束兒童婚姻的信號(hào):孟加拉國(guó)的理論和實(shí)驗(yàn)證據(jù)

Nina Buchmann, Erica Field, Rachel Glennerster, Shahana Nazneen and Xiao Yu Wang

Child marriage remains common even where female schooling and employment opportunities have grown. We experimentally evaluate a financial incentive to delay marriage alongside a girls' empowerment program in Bangladesh. While girls eligible for two years of incentive are 19 percent less likely to marry underage, the empowerment program failed to decrease adolescent marriage. We show that these results are consistent with a signaling model in which bride type is imperfectly observed but preferred types (socially conservative girls) have lower returns to delaying marriage. Consistent with our theoretical prediction, we observe substantial spillovers of the incentive on untreated nonpreferred types.

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Matching Mechanisms for Refugee Resettlement

難民安置匹配機(jī)制

David Delacrétaz, Scott Duke Kominers and Alexander Teytelboym

Current refugee resettlement processes account for neither the preferences of refugees nor the priorities of hosting communities. We introduce a new framework for matching with multidimensional knapsack constraints that captures the (possibly multidimensional) sizes of refugee families and the capacities of communities. We propose four refugee resettlement mechanisms and two solution concepts that can be used in refugee resettlement matching under various institutional and informational constraints. Our theoretical results and simulations using refugee resettlement data suggest that preference-based matching mechanisms can improve match efficiency, respect priorities of communities, and incentivize refugees to report where they would prefer to settle.

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The Behavioral Foundations of Default Effects: Theory and Evidence from Medicare Part D

違約效應(yīng)的行為基礎(chǔ):來自醫(yī)療保險(xiǎn)D部分的理論與證據(jù)

Zarek Brot-Goldberg, Timothy Layton, Boris Vabson and Adelina Yanyue Wang

We show in two natural experiments that default rules in Medicare Part D have large, persistent effects on enrollment and drug utilization of low-income beneficiaries. The implications of this phenomenon for welfare and optimal policy depend on the sensitivity of passivity to the value of the default option. Using random assignment to default options, we show that beneficiary passivity is extremely insensitive, even when enrolling in the default option would result in substantial drug consumption losses. A third natural experiment suggests that variation in active choice is driven by random transitory shocks rather than the inherent attentiveness of some beneficiaries.

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Profits, Scale Economies, and the Gains from Trade and Industrial Policy

利潤(rùn)、規(guī)模經(jīng)濟(jì)以及貿(mào)易和產(chǎn)業(yè)政策的收益

Ahmad Lashkaripour and Volodymyr Lugovskyy

This paper examines the efficacy of second-best trade restrictions at correcting sectoral misallocation due to scale economies or profit-generating markups. To this end, we characterize optimal trade and industrial policies in an important class of quantitative trade models with scale effects and profits, estimating the structural parameters that govern policy outcomes. Our estimates reveal that standalone trade policy measures are remarkably ineffective at correcting misallocation, even when designed optimally. Unilateral adoption of corrective industrial policies is also ineffective due to immiserizing growth effects. But industrial policies coordinated internationally via a deep agreement are more transformative than any unilateral policy alternative.