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Immigration and the Rise of American Ingenuity Ufuk Akcigit John Grigsby Tom Nicholas

This paper builds on the analysis in Akcigit, Grigsby, and Nicholas (2017) by using U.S. patent and Census data to examine macro and micro-level aspects of the relationship between immigration and innovation. We construct a measure of "foreign born expertise" and show that technology areas where immigrant inventors were prevalent between 1880 and 1940 experienced more patenting and citations between 1940 and 2000. We also show that immigrant inventors were more productive during their life cycle than native born inventors, although they received significantly lower levels of labor income than their native born counterparts. Overall, the contribution of foreign born inventors to US innovation was substantial, but we also find evidence of an immigrant inventor wage-gap that cannot be explained by differentials in productivity.

The Anatomy of Sentiment-Driven Fluctuations Sushant Acharya Jess Benhabib Zhen Huo

We characterize the entire set of linear equilibria of beauty contest games under general information structures. In particular, we focus on equilibria in which sentiments, that is self-fulfilling changes in beliefs that are orthogonal to fundamentals and exogenous noise, can drive aggregate fluctuations. We show that, under rational expectations, there exists a continuum of sentiment-driven equilibria that generate aggregate fluctuations. Without having to take a stance on the private information agents might possess, we provide a general characterization of necessary and sufficient conditions under which a change in sentiments can have prolonged effects on aggregate outcomes and when it can only have short-lived effects. In addition, we also provide a practical way to characterize these equilibria.

The Country Chronologies to Exchange Rate Arrangements into the 21st Century: Will the Anchor Currency Hold? Ethan Ilzetzki Carmen M. Reinhart Kenneth S. Rogoff

Detailed country-by-country chronologies are an informative companion piece to our paper “Exchange Arrangements Entering the 21st Century: Which Anchor Will Hold?,” which provides a comprehensive history of anchor or reference currencies, exchange rate arrangements, and a new measure of foreign exchange restrictions for 194 countries and territories over 1946-2016. The individual country chronologies are also a central component of our approach to classifying regimes. These country histories date dual or multiple exchange rate episodes, as well as to differentiate between pre-announced pegs, crawling pegs, and bands from their de facto counterparts. We think it is important to distinguish between say, de facto pegs or bands from announced pegs or bands, because their properties are potentially different. The chronologies also flag the dates for important turning points, such as when the exchange rate first floated, or when the anchor currency was changed. We extend our chronologies as far back as possible, even though we only classify regimes from 1946 onwards.

Exchange Arrangements Entering the 21st Century: Which Anchor Will Hold? Ethan Ilzetzki Carmen M. Reinhart Kenneth S. Rogoff

This paper provides a comprehensive history of anchor or reference currencies, exchange rate arrangements, and a new measure of foreign exchange restrictions for 194 countries and territories over 1946-2016. We find that the often-cited post-Bretton Woods transition from fixed to flexible arrangements is overstated; regimes with limited flexibility remain in the majority. Our central finding is that the US dollar scores (by a wide margin) as the world’s dominant anchor currency and, by some metrics, its use is far wider today than 70 years ago. In contrast, the global role of the euro appears to have stalled in recent years. While the incidence of capital account restrictions has been trending lower for decades, an important wave toward capital market integration dates as recently as the mid-1990s. We suggest that record accumulation of reserves post 2002 has much to do with many countries’ desire to stabilize exchange rates in an environment of markedly greater capital mobility. Indeed, the continuing desire to manage exchange rates despite increased capital mobility post-2003 may be a key factor underpinning the modern-day Triffin dilemma that some have recently pointed to.

The Global Rise of Corporate Saving Peter Chen Loukas Karabarbounis Brent Neiman

The sectoral composition of global saving changed dramatically during the last three decades. Whereas in the early 1980s most of global investment was funded by household saving, nowadays nearly two-thirds of global investment is funded by corporate saving. This shift in the sectoral composition of saving was not accompanied by changes in the sectoral composition of investment, implying an improvement in the corporate net lending position. We characterize the behavior of corporate saving using both national income accounts and firm-level data and clarify its relationship with the global decline in labor share, the accumulation of corporate cash stocks, and the greater propensity for equity buybacks. We develop a general equilibrium model with product and capital market imperfections to explore quantitatively the determination of the flow of funds across sectors. Changes including declines in the real interest rate, the price of investment, and corporate income taxes generate increases in corporate profits and shifts in the supply of sectoral saving that are of similar magnitude to those observed in the data.

The Recent Growth Boom in Developing Economies: A Structural Change Perspective Xinshen Diao Margaret McMillan Dani Rodrik

Growth has accelerated in a wide range of developing countries over the last couple of decades, resulting in an extraordinary period of convergence with the advanced economies. We analyze this experience from the lens of structural change – the reallocation of labor from low- to high-productivity sectors. Patterns of structural change differ greatly in the recent growth experience. In contrast to the East Asian experience, none of the recent growth accelerations in Latin America, Africa, or South Asia was driven by rapid industrialization. Beyond that, we document that recent growth accelerations were based on either rapid within-sector labor productivity growth (Latin America) or growth-increasing structural change (Africa), but rarely both at the same time. The African experience is particularly intriguing, as growth-enhancing structural change appears to have come typically at the expense of declining labor productivity growth in the more modern sectors of the economy. We explain this anomaly by arguing that the forces that promoted structural change in Africa originated on the demand side, through either external transfers or increase in agricultural incomes. In contrast to Asia, structural change was the result of increased demand for goods and services produced in the modern sectors of the economy rather than productivity improvements in these sectors.

Antitrust Treatment of Nonprofits: Should Hospitals Receive Special Care? Cory Capps Dennis W. Carlton Guy David

Nonprofit hospitals receive favorable tax treatment in exchange for providing socially beneficial activities. Extending this rationale would suggest that, insofar as suppression of competition would allow nonprofits to cross-subsidize care for needy populations, nonprofit hospital mergers should be evaluated differently than mergers of for-profit hospitals. However, this rationale rests upon the premise that nonprofit hospitals with greater market power provide more care to the needy. In this paper, we develop a theoretical model showing that the welfare implications of an antitrust policy that favors nonprofit hospitals depends on the link between market power and charity care provision. To test the link, we use three measures of charity care—two dollar-denominated and one based on service volume—to study charity care provision by for-profit and non-profit hospitals under different competition conditions. Using detailed California data from 2001 to 2011, we find no evidence that nonprofit hospitals are more likely than for-profit hospitals to provide more charity care, or to offer more unprofitable services, when competition falls. Overall, while some courts have given deference to defendants’ nonprofit status, our study finds no empirical evidence that such hospitals provide greater charity care as they have greater market power.

Social Ties and Favoritism in Chinese Science Raymond Fisman Jing Shi Yongxiang Wang Rong Xu

We study favoritism via hometown ties, a common source of favor exchange in China, in fellow selection of the Chinese Academies of Sciences and Engineering. Hometown ties to fellow selection committee members increase candidates' election probability by 39 percent, coming entirely from the selection stage involving an in-person meeting. Elected hometown-connected candidates are half as likely to have a high-impact publication as elected fellows without connections. CAS/CAE membership increases the probability of university leadership appointments and is associated with a US$9.5 million increase in annual funding for fellows' institutions, indicating that hometown favoritism has potentially large effects on resource allocation.

Capital Misallocation: Frictions or Distortions? Joel M. David Venky Venkateswaran

We study a model of investment in which both technological and informational frictions as well as institutional/policy distortions lead to capital misallocation, i.e., static marginal products are not equalized. We devise an empirical strategy to disentangle these forces using readily observable moments in firm-level data. Applying this methodology to manufacturing firms in China reveals that adjustment costs and uncertainty have significant aggregate consequences but account for only a modest share of the observed dispersion in the marginal product of capital. A substantial fraction of misallocation stems from firm-specific distortions, both productivity/size-dependent as well as permanent. For large US firms, adjustment costs are relatively more salient, though permanent firm-level factors remain important. These results are robust to the presence of liquidity/financial constraints.

Land Misallocation and Productivity Diego Restuccia Raul Santaeulalia-Llopis

Using detailed household-level data from Malawi on physical quantities of outputs and inputs in agricultural production, we measure total factor productivity (TFP) for farms controlling for land quality, rain, and other transitory shocks. We find that operated land size and capital are essentially unrelated to farm TFP implying substantial factor misallocation. The aggregate agricultural output gain from a reallocation of factors to their efficient use among existing farmers is a factor of 3.6-fold. We directly link factor misallocation to severely restricted land markets as the vast majority of land is allocated by village chiefs and not marketed. In particular, the output gain from reallocation are 2.6 times larger for farms with no marketed land than for farms that only operate marketed land.

Rents, Technical Change, and Risk Premia: Accounting for Secular Trends in Interest Rates, Returns on Capital, Earning Yields, and Factor Shares Ricardo J. Caballero Emmanuel Farhi Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas

The secular decline in safe interest rates since the early 1980s has been the subject of considerable attention. In this short paper, we argue that it is important to consider the evolution of safe real rates in conjunction with three other first-order macroeconomic stylized facts: the relative constancy of the real return to productive capital, the decline in the labor share, and the decline and subsequent stabilization of the earnings yield. Through the lens of a simple accounting framework, these four facts offer suggestive insights into the economic forces that might be at work.

Re-examining the Middle-Income Trap Hypothesis (MITH): What to Reject and What to Revive? Xuehui Han Shang-Jin Wei

Do middle-income countries face difficult challenges producing consistent growth? Using transition matrix analysis, we can easily reject any unconditional notion of a “middle-income trap” in the data. However, countries have different fundamentals and policies. Using a nonparametric classification technique, we search for variables that separate fast- and slow-growing countries. For middle-income countries, a relatively large working age population, sex ratio imbalance, macroeconomic stability, and financial development appear to be the key discriminatory variables. We do the same exercise for low-income countries. This framework yields conditions under which countries in the low- and middle-income ranges move forward or backward, or are trapped.

Immigration Restrictions as Active Labor Market Policy: Evidence from the Mexican Bracero Exclusion Michael A. Clemens Ethan G. Lewis Hannah M. Postel

An important class of active labor market policy has received little rigorous impact evaluation: immigration barriers intended to improve the terms of employment for domestic workers by deliberately shrinking the workforce. Recent advances in the theory of endogenous technical change suggest that such policies could have limited or even perverse labor-market effects, but empirical tests are scarce. We study a natural experiment that excluded almost half a million Mexican ‘bracero’ seasonal agricultural workers from the United States, with the stated goal of raising wages and employment for domestic farm workers. We build a simple model to clarify how the labor-market effects of bracero exclusion depend on assumptions about production technology, and test it by collecting novel archival data on the bracero program that allow us to measure state-level exposure to exclusion for the first time. We cannot reject the hypothesis that bracero exclusion had no effect on U.S. agricultural wages or employment, and find that important mechanisms for this result include both adoption of less labor-intensive technologies and shifts in crop mix.

On the Global Financial Market Integration "Swoosh" and the Trilemma Geert Bekaert Arnaud Mehl

We propose a simple measure of de facto financial market integration based on a factor model of monthly equity returns, which can be computed back to the first era of financial globalization for 17 countries. Global financial market integration follows a “swoosh” shape – i.e. high pre-1913, still higher post-1990, low in the interwar period – rather than the other shapes hypothesized in earlier literature. We find no evidence of financial globalization reversing since the Great Recession as claimed in other recent studies. De jure capital account openness and global growth uncertainty are the two main determinants of long-run global financial market integration. We use our measure to revisit the debate on the trilemma between financial openness, the exchange rate regime, and monetary policy autonomy, and on whether the trilemma has recently morphed into a dilemma due to global financial cycles. We find evidence consistent with the trilemma and inconsistent with the dilemma hypothesis, both throughout history and for the recent decades; non-US central banks still exert more control over domestic interest rates when exchange rates are flexible in economies open to global finance.

When No Bad Deed Goes Punished: Relational Contracting in Ghana versus the UK Elwyn Davies Marcel Fafchamps

In relational contracting the threat of punishment in future periods provides an incentive not to cheat. But to what extent do people actually carry out this punishment? We compare relational contracting patterns in Ghana and the United Kingdom by conducting a repeated principal agent lab experiment, framed in a labour market setting. Each period, employers make offers to workers, who can choose to accept or reject this offer and, after accepting and being paid, what effort to exert. The employers and workers interact repeatedly over several periods. In the UK, subjects behave in line with theoretical predictions and previous experiments: high effort is rewarded and low effort punished. However, we do not find evidence for the use of such incentives in Ghana. As a result, employers fail to discipline a subgroup of “selfish” workers, resulting in a low average effort and low employers’ earnings. Set identification of Fehr-Schmidt preferences of the Ghanaian and British workers also shows that the share of “selfish” workers in our experiment in Ghana is not substantially different from the UK. Introducing competition for workers or a reputation mechanism do not significantly improve workers’ effort.

Keepin' 'em Down on the Farm: Migration and Strategic Investment in Children's Schooling Robert Jensen Nolan H. Miller

In rural areas of most developing countries, intergenerational coresidence is both widespread and an important determinant of well-being for the elderly. Most parents want at least one adult child to remain at home (e.g., so they can work on the family farm or provide care and assistance around the house). However, children themselves may prefer to migrate when they grow up, and parents cannot directly prevent them from doing so. We present a model where parents may strategically limit investments in some children's education so that they will not find it optimal to migrate when they reach maturity, and will thus voluntarily choose to remain home. We provide evidence for the model’s predictions using an intervention that provided recruiting services for the business process outsourcing industry in randomly selected rural Indian villages. Because awareness of these high-paying, high education, urban jobs was limited at baseline, the intervention increased the attractiveness of migration for educated children. Consistent with the model, in response to the treatment we find declines in school enrollment among children that parents reported wanting to remain home at baseline. Children that parents want to migrate have increased enrollment, and parents want more children to migrate.

Assessing Managerial Ability: Implications for Corporate Governance Benjamin Hermalin Michael Weisbach

A manager’s current and potential future employers are continually assessing her or his ability. Such assessment is a crucial component of corporate governance and this chapter provides an overview of the research on that aspect of governance. In particular, we review how assessment generates incentives (both good and bad), generates risks that must be faced by both managers and firms, and affects the contractual relationships between those parties in important ways. Assessment (or learning) proves a key perspective from which to study, evaluate, and possibly even regulate corporate governance. Moreover, because learning is a behavior notoriously subject to systematic biases, this perspective is a natural avenue through which to introduce behavioral and psychological insights into the study of corporate governance.

Who Becomes a Politician? Ernesto Dal Bó Frederico Finan Olle Folke Torsten Persson Johanna Rickne

Can a democracy attract competent leaders, while attaining broad representation? Economic models suggest that free-riding incentives and lower opportunity costs give the less competent a comparative advantage at entering political life. Moreover, if elites have more human capital, selecting on competence may lead to uneven representation. This paper examines patterns of political selection among the universe of municipal politicians and national legislators in Sweden, using extraordinarily rich data on competence traits and social background for the entire population. We document four new facts that together characterize an “inclusive meritocracy.” First, politicians are on average significantly smarter and better leaders than the population they represent. Second, this positive selection is present even when conditioning on family (and hence social) background, suggesting that individual competence is key for selection. Third, the representation of social background, whether measured by parental earnings or occupational social class, is remarkably even. Fourth, there is at best a weak tradeoff in selection between competence and social representation, mainly due to strong positive selection of politicians of low (parental) socioeconomic status. A broad implication of these facts is that it is possible for democracy to generate competent and socially-representative leadership.

Global Inequality Dynamics: New Findings from WID.world Facundo Alvaredo Lucas Chancel Thomas Piketty Emmanuel Saez Gabriel Zucman

This paper presents new findings on global inequality dynamics from the World Wealth and Income Database (WID.world), with particular emphasis on the contrast between the trends observed in the United States, China, France, and the United Kingdom. We observe rising top income and wealth shares in nearly all countries in recent decades. But the magnitude of the increase varies substantially, thereby suggesting that different country-specific policies and institutions matter considerably. Long-run wealth inequality dynamics appear to be highly unstable. We stress the need for more democratic transparency on income and wealth dynamics and better access to administrative and financial data.

Measuring Loan Outcomes at Postsecondary Institutions: Cohort Repayment Rates as an Indicator of Student Success and Institutional Accountability Tiffany Chou Adam Looney Tara Watson

Low- and middle-income college borrowers often struggle with economic opportunity and loan burdens after leaving school. However, some institutions, including some non-selective schools, do a good job of providing economic mobility to low-income students. This implies that there is scope for a policy to redirect loan dollars – and therefore students – from low-performing schools to higher-performing ones. Here we define a particular metric of institutional loan performance, the cohort repayment rate, and describe its distribution. We demonstrate that the cohort repayment rate is correlated with other institutional outcomes of interest, and thus could be used as an institutional accountability tool.

Decomposing Medical-Care Expenditure Growth Abe Dunn Eli B. Liebman Adam Shapiro

Medical-care expenditures have been rising rapidly, accounting for over 17 percent of GDP in 2012. In this study, we assess the sources of the rising medical-care expenditures in the commercial sector. We employ a novel framework for decomposing expenditure growth into four components at the disease level: service price growth, service utilization growth, treated disease prevalence growth, and demographic shift. The decomposition shows that growth in prices and treated prevalence are the primary drivers of medical-care expenditure growth over the 2003 to 2007 period. There was no growth in service utilization at the aggregate level over this period. Price and utilization growth were especially large for the treatment of malignant neoplasms. For many conditions, treated prevalence has shifted towards preventive treatment and away from treatment for late-stage illnesses.