1.Banking Crises Without Panics
2.The Effects of Police Violence on Inner-City Students
3.Minimum Wages and Racial Inequality
4.Anatomy of Corporate Borrowing Constraints
5.Randomizing Religion: the Impact of Protestant Evangelism on Economic Outcomes
6.Gender Differences in Job Search: Trading off COMMUTE AGAINST WAGE
7.Occupational Licensing and Maternal Health: Evidence from Early Midwifery Laws
8.The Use and Misuse of Coordinated Punishments
9.Capital Obsolescence and Agricultural Productivity
10.The Effect of the Credit Crunch on Output Price Dynamics: The Coeporate Inventory and Liquidity Management Channel
11.Rational Grouothink
12.Health Insurance and Mortality: Experimental Evidence from Taxpayer Outreach
Banking Crises Without Panics
Matthew Baron, Emil Verner, Wei Xiong
Abstract
We examine historical banking crises through the lens of bank equity declines, which cover a broad sample of episodes of banking distress with and without banking panics. To do this, we construct a new data set on bank equity returns and narrative information on banking panics for 46 countries over the period of 1870 to 2016. We find that even in the absence of panics, large bank equity declines are associated with substantial credit contractions and output gaps. Although panics are an important amplification mechanism, our results indicate that panics are not necessary for banking crises to have severe economic consequences. Furthermore, panics tend to be preceded by large bank equity declines, suggesting that panics are the result, rather than the cause, of earlier bank losses. We use bank equity returns to uncover a number of forgotten historical banking crises and create a banking crisis chronology that distinguishes between bank equity losses and panics.
The Effects of Police Violence on Inner-City Students
Nearly 1,000 officer-involved killings occur each year in the United States. This article documents the large, racially disparate effects of these events on the educational and psychological well-being of Los Angeles public high school students. Exploiting hyperlocal variation in how close students live to a killing, I find that exposure to police violence leads to persistent decreases in GPA, increased incidence of emotional disturbance, and lower rates of high school completion and college enrollment. These effects are driven entirely by black and Hispanic students in response to police killings of other minorities and are largest for incidents involving unarmed individuals.
Minimum Wages and Racial Inequality
Authors
Ellora Derenoncourt, Claire Montialoux
The earnings difference between white and black workers fell dramatically in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This article shows that the expansion of the minimum wage played a critical role in this decline. The 1966 Fair Labor Standards Act extended federal minimum wage coverage to agriculture, restaurants, nursing homes, and other services that were previously uncovered and where nearly a third of black workers were employed. We digitize over 1,000 hourly wage distributions from Bureau of Labor Statistics industry wage reports and use CPS microdata to investigate the effects of this reform on wages, employment, and racial inequality. Using a cross-industry difference-in-differences design, we show that earnings rose sharply for workers in the newly covered industries. The impact was nearly twice as large for black workers as for white workers. Within treated industries, the racial gap adjusted for observables fell from 25 log points prereform to 0 afterward. We can rule out significant disemployment effects for black workers. Using a bunching design, we find no aggregate effect of the reform on employment. The 1967 extension of the minimum wage can explain more than 20% of the reduction in the racial earnings and income gap during the civil rights era. Our findings shed new light on the dynamics of labor market inequality in the United States and suggest that minimum wage policy can play a critical role in reducing racial economic disparities.
Anatomy of Corporate Borrowing Constraints
Macro-finance analyses commonly link firms』 borrowing constraints to the liquidation value of physical assets. For U.S. nonfinancial firms, we show that 20% of debt by value is based on such assets (asset-based lending in creditor parlance), whereas 80% is based predominantly on cash flows from firms』 operations (cash flow–based lending). A standard borrowing constraint restricts total debt as a function of cash flows measured using operating earnings (earnings-based borrowing constraints). These features shape firm outcomes on the margin: first, cash flows in the form of operating earnings can directly relax borrowing constraints; second, firms are less vulnerable to collateral damage from asset price declines, and fire sale amplification may be mitigated. Taken together, our findings point to new venues for modeling firms』 borrowing constraints in macro-finance studies.
Randomizing Religion: the Impact of Protestant Evangelism on Economic Outcomes
Gharad Bryan, James J Choi, Dean Karlan
We study the causal impact of religiosity through a randomized evaluation of an evangelical Protestant Christian values and theology education program delivered to thousands of ultrapoor Filipino households. Six months after the program ended, treated households have higher religiosity and income; no statistically significant differences in total labor supply, consumption, food security, or life satisfaction; and lower perceived relative economic status. Exploratory analysis suggests that the income treatment effect may operate through increasing grit. Thirty months after the program ended, significant differences in the intensity of religiosity disappear, but those in the treatment group are less likely to be Catholic and more likely to be Protestant, and there is some mixed evidence that their consumption and perceived relative economic status are higher.
Gender Differences in Job Search: Trading off COMMUTE AGAINST WAGE
Thomas Le Barbanchon, Roland Rathelot, Alexandra Roulet
We relate gender differences in willingness to commute to the gender wage gap. Using French administrative data on job search criteria, we first document that unemployed women have a lower reservation wage and a shorter maximum acceptable commute than their male counterparts. We identify indifference curves between wage and commute using the joint distributions of reservation job attributes and accepted job bundles. Indifference curves are steeper for women, who value commute around 20% more than men. Controlling in particular for the previous job, newly hired women are paid after unemployment 4% less per hour and have a 12% shorter commute than men. Through the lens of a job search model where commuting matters, we estimate that gender differences in commute valuation can account for a 0.5 log point hourly wage deficit for women, that is, 14% of the residualized gender wage gap. Finally, we use job application data to test the robustness of our results and to show that female workers do not receive less demand from far-away employers, confirming that most of the gender gap in commute is supply-side driven.
Crimes Against Morality: Unintended Consequences of Criminalizing Sex Work
Lisa Cameron, Jennifer Seager, Manisha Shah
We examine the impact of criminalizing sex work, exploiting an event in which local officials unexpectedly criminalized sex work in one district in East Java, Indonesia, but not in neighboring districts. We collect data from female sex workers and their clients before and after the change. We find that criminalization increases sexually transmitted infections among female sex workers by 58 percent, measured by biological tests. This is driven by decreased condom access and use. We also find evidence that criminalization decreases earnings among women who left sex work due to criminalization and decreases their ability to meet their children’s school expenses while increasing the likelihood that children begin working to supplement household income. Although criminalization has the potential to improve population STI outcomes if the market shrinks permanently, we show that five years postcriminalization the market has rebounded and the probability of STI transmission in the general population is likely to have increased.
The Use and Misuse of Coordinated Punishments
Daniel Barron, Yingni Guo
Communication facilitates cooperation by ensuring that deviators are collectively punished. We explore how players might misuse communication to threaten one another, and we identify ways that organizations can deter misuse and restore cooperation. In our model, a principal plays trust games with a sequence of short-run agents who communicate with each other. An agent can shirk and then extort pay by threatening to report that the principal deviated. We show that these threats can completely undermine cooperation. Investigations of agents』 efforts, or dyadic relationships between the principal and each agent, can deter extortion and restore some cooperation. Investigations of the principal’s action, on the other hand, typically do not help. Our analysis suggests that collective punishments are vulnerable to misuse unless they are designed with an eye toward discouraging it.
Capital Obsolescence and Agricultural Productivity
Julieta Caunedo, Elisa Keller
This article argues that accounting for capital-embodied technology greatly increases the importance of capital in explaining cross-country differences in agricultural labor productivity. To do so, we draw on a novel data set of agricultural capital prices. We document that new capital is more expensive in richer countries, both in absolute terms and relative to old capital. A model of endogenous adoption of capital of different quality links these price differences to the path of capital-embodied technology. In particular, our model recovers the level of embodied technology from the price of new capital and the growth rate of embodied technology from the price of new capital relative to old capital. We then measure the stocks of quality-adjusted capital in agriculture for a sample of 16 countries at different stages of development. We find that adjusting for differences in quality almost doubles the importance of capital in accounting for cross-country differences in agricultural labor productivity: from 21% to 37%. In addition, improvements in capital quality have been an important source of agricultural labor productivity growth over the past 25 years, accounting for 21% and 35% of the productivity growth in poor and rich countries, respectively.
The Effect of the Credit Crunch on Output Price Dynamics: The Coeporate Inventory and Liquidity Management Channel
I study how a credit crunch affects output price dynamics. I build a unique micro-level data set that combines scanner-level prices and quantities with producer information, including the producer’s banking relationships, inventory, and cash holdings. I exploit the Lehman Brothers failure as a quasi-experiment and find that the firms facing a negative credit supply shock decrease their output prices approximately 15% more than their unaffected counterparts. I hypothesize that such firms reduce prices to liquidate inventory and generate additional cash flow from the product market. I find strong empirical support for this hypothesis: (i) the firms that face a negative bank shock temporarily decrease their prices and inventory and increase their market share and cash holdings relative to their counterparts, and (ii) this effect is stronger for the firms and sectors with a high initial inventory or small initial cash holdings.
Matan Harel, Elchanan Mossel, Philipp Strack, Omer Tamuz
We study how long-lived rational agents learn from repeatedly observing a private signal and each others』 actions. With normal signals, a group of any size learns more slowly than just four agents who directly observe each others』 private signals in each period. Similar results apply to general signal structures. We identify rational groupthink—in which agents ignore their private signals and choose the same action for long periods of time—as the cause of this failure of information aggregation.
Health Insurance and Mortality: Experimental Evidence from Taxpayer Outreach
Jacob Goldin, Ithai Z Lurie, Janet McCubbin
We evaluate a randomized outreach study in which the IRS sent informational letters to 3.9 million households that paid a tax penalty for lacking health insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act. Drawing on administrative data, we study the effect of this intervention on taxpayers』 subsequent health insurance enrollment and mortality. We find the intervention led to increased coverage during the subsequent two years and reduced mortality among middle-aged adults over the same time period. The results provide experimental evidence that health insurance coverage can reduce mortality in the United States.
編輯 陳婷
來源《QJE》
監製 安然
「大金融」概念，在學理上源於黃達教授所倡導的宏微觀金融理論相結合的基本思路，在理念上源於金融和實體經濟作為一個不可分割的有機整體的系統思維。中國人民銀行副行長陳雨露在《大金融論綱》中系統論證了「大金融」命題的基本內涵和方法論思想，為全面構建有利於促進長期經濟增長和增強國家競爭力的「大金融」體系框架奠定了理論和實證基礎。
本公眾號由中國人民大學國際貨幣研究所（IMI）負責維護及推送，圍繞大金融理念，專注傳播優秀學術研究成果，加強大金融學術研究交流。
中國人民大學國際貨幣研究所（IMI）成立於2009年12月20日，是專注於貨幣金融理論、政策與戰略研究的非營利性學術研究機構和新型專業智庫。研究所聘請了來自國內外科研院所、政府部門或金融機構的90餘位著名專家學者擔任顧問委員、學術委員和國際委員，80餘位中青年專家擔任研究員。
研究所長期聚焦國際金融、貨幣銀行、宏觀經濟、金融監管、金融科技、地方金融等領域，定期舉辦國際貨幣論壇、貨幣金融（青年）圓桌會議、大金融思想沙龍、麥金農大講壇、陶湘國際金融講堂、IMF經濟展望報告發布會、金融科技公開課等高層次系列論壇或講座，形成了《人民幣國際化報告》《天府金融指數報告》《金融機構國際化報告》《宏觀經濟月度分析報告》等一大批具有重要理論和政策影響力的學術成果。
2018年，研究所榮獲中國人民大學優秀院屬研究機構獎，在182家參評機構中排名第一；在《智庫大數據報告（2018）》中獲評A等級，在參評的1065個中國智庫中排名前5%。
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