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Intergenerational Mobility in Ottoman Istanbul: Evidence from Court Records
Full text linkWe use data from the Istanbul court registers spanning from the 16th -19th centuries to establish, for the first time, long-term trends in intergenerational mobility in a major premodern city. The dataset contains information on over 270,000 individuals who appeared in court in various roles, including litigants, witnesses, and representatives. Crucially, it records the honorific titles (if any) of individuals and their fathers, which we use as measures for socioeconomic status. Our goal is to trace long-term changes in Istanbul’s social structure, analyze the relationship between fathers’ and sons’ titles to assess shifts in intergenerational mobility, and determine whether these shifts reflect primarily horizontal movements within social strata or also include greater mobility across class boundaries. We find that the share of titled individuals followed a non-monotonic but ultimately upward trajectory between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. During the same period, the intergenerational transmission of titles declined, indicating increased mobility. However, this mobility was largely confined within the elite strata, suggesting a consolidation of power and status among the upper classes rather than a broad opening of the social hierarchy
Intra-Household Welfare Inequality and Household Public Goods
Full text linkIn this paper we develop a novel approach to measuring individual welfare within households, recognizing that individuals may have both different preferences (particularly regarding public consumption) and differential access to resources. We construct a money metric measure of welfare that accounts for public goods (by using personalized prices) and the allocation of time. We then use our conceptual framework to analyse intrahousehold inequality in Japan, allowing for the presence of two public goods: expenditures on children and other public goods including housing. We show empirically that women have much stronger preferences for both public goods and this has critical implications for the distribution of welfare in the household
Optimal Pricing of Cloud Services: Committed Spend under Demand Uncertainty
Full text linkWe consider a seller who offers services to a buyer with multi-unit demand. Prior to the realization of demand, the buyer receives a noisy signal of their future demand, and the seller can design contracts based on the reported value of this signal. Thus, the buyer can contract with the service provider for an unknown level of future consumption, such as in the market for cloud computing resources or software services. We characterize the optimal dynamic contract, extending the classic sequential screening framework to a nonlinear and multi-unit setting. The optimal mechanism gives discounts to buyers who report higher signals, but in exchange they must provide larger fixed payments. We then describe how the optimal mechanism can be implemented by two common forms of contracts observed in practice, the two-part tariff and the committed spend contract. Finally, we use extensions of our base model to shed light on policy-focused questions, such as analyzing how the optimal contract changes when the buyer faces commitment costs, or when there are liquid spot markets
Kol mekadesh shevi\u27i : A Liturgical Melody Sung at Home
Full text linkThis article draws upon the unusual characteristics, origins and prevalence of the melody to the poem Kol mekadesh shevii [He who sanctifies the Seventh day] and discusses how it came to be recognized in the past seventy years as a signifier of Ashkenazi pre-Holocaust musical and religious culture and in particular as a sonic marker of liturgical sound, although it was sung at home. The Kol mekadesh melody came over time to represent two vastly different symbolic positions. As a melody adopted from non-Jewish sources bringing new, sometimes controversial sounds into the synagogue, and as a typical synagogal sound. Twentieth-century norms of aesthetic and social preference shunned Kol mekadesh once extremely popular, which was now deemed untuneful and unsuitable for new contexts and styles of performance practice. Its perceived antiquity as compared to other Zemiroth melodies ensured it remained in continuous use while at the same time relegated it as different and unique. Kol mekadesh remains a story of musical adoption and rejection and at its core reveals the complex and at times contradictory sonic economies of liturgical sounds in Ashkenazic Jewish domestic traditions of the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries
Lessons Learned: Cecilia Skingsley
Full text linkDuring the Swedish banking crisis of the early 1990s, Cecilia Skingsley was the press secretary for the Ministry of Finance. She held various roles, including chief economist, at Swedbank, one of Sweden’s largest banks, from 2007 to 2013, a period that included the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and European Sovereign Debt Crisis. Swedbank suffered heavy losses amid the GFC and relied on a government guarantee program for support. In 2013, she became a deputy governor of Sveriges Riksbank, Sweden’s central bank; in 2019, she became first deputy governor. Skingsley left the Riksbank in September 2022 to become head of the Bank for International Settlements’s Innovation Hub
Eliminating Discount Window Stigma: What Can We Learn from Abroad?
Full text linkThis article picks up from an earlier Journal of Financial Crisis policy note on discount window design to see how the experiences of other central banks can inform work to redesign the discount window to reduce stigma. As explained in that article, banks’ reluctance to use the discount window is problematic for financial stability as it constrains the Fed’s ability to use its liquidity provision tools to stem runs and mitigate contagion in times of stress. The stigma associated with discount window borrowing in the United States is well documented and is a multifaceted phenomenon
Ad Hoc Emergency Liquidity Programs in the 21st Century
Full text linkThis paper surveys 22 case studies of 21st century instances when financial crisis-fighters implemented ad hoc emergency liquidity (AHEL) interventions, interventions designed to provide liquidity to a troubled institution that the authorities believe is systemically important. While emergency liquidity support is often introduced with the real or communicated intention of preventing illiquidity from leading to insolvency, the liquidity crisis should instead be viewed as the manifestation of the market’s assessing the firm as nonviable as a going concern. For that reason, authorities should provide AHEL assistance only to institutions that they have deemed viable or that they have committed to make viable through additional interventions, most commonly through a government capital injection or merger with a stronger institution. Despite AHEL assistance, which the authorities in several cases sized to meet all potential funding outflows from the troubled firms, in no cases did liquidity provision alone prove a “cure” to the run on the institution. Crisis-fighters also should not use the terms of an AHEL intervention to manage moral hazard. Moral hazard can be addressed in the more structural policy responses that will need to follow AHEL assistance. AHEL programs should focus on providing sufficient liquidity to get the institution through its acute crisis phase
Firm Selection and Growth in Carbon Offset Markets: Evidence from the Clean Development Mechanism
Full text linkWe study carbon offsets sold by firms in China under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). We find that offset-selling firms, meant to cut carbon emissions, instead increase them by 49% after starting an offset project. In a model of firm investment decisions and offset review, we estimate that CDM firms increase emissions due to both the selection of higher-growth firms into projects (35 pp) and because offset projects themselves boost firm growth and therefore emissions (14 pp). The CDM reduces global surplus by causing damages from increased emissions four times greater than private gains from trade in the offset market
College Application Mistakes and the Design of Information Policies at Scale
No full textWe examine whether large-scale information interventions can improve college application outcomes in a centralized admissions system. Using nationwide surveys from Chile, we document widespread information frictions and frequent application mistakes, such as omitting attainable preferred programs or failing to include safety options. To address these frictions, we partnered with the Ministry of Education to implement a large-scale field experiment that provided applicants with personalized information on admission probabilities and program characteristics through customized online platforms. The intervention increased the probability that previously unmatched students received an assignment by 44% and improved placement into higher-ranked programs by 20%. Building on these results, the policy was scaled nationwide, reaching all applicants. The scaled-up version, evaluated via an encouragement design, confirmed substantial gains, including higher admission rates for initially unmatched students and persistent enrollment improvements. Our findings show that low-cost, personalized information policies, when integrated into centralized admissions platforms, can substantially reduce application mistakes and improve student outcomes at scale. The results also highlight how leveraging existing market design infrastructure can enable scalable, cost-effective interventions that enhance efficiency and equity in higher education access