1,720,989 research outputs found
Comment on: “Institutional causes, macroeconomic symptoms: volatility, crises and growth”
No full textDo institutions have a role in explaining cross-country differences in growth performance? This interesting paper not only argues that the answer is yes, but suggests that institutions are the deep factor driving these differences and that macroeconomic policies are only one of the mediating channels through which
institutions affect growth and growth volatility. In this paper I show that the variable used by the authors to capture
the degree of democracy of current institutions is determined by two components: early institutions and time of independence. Moreover, only this second variable seems to affect volatility of output growth
The Roots of Low European Employment: Family Culture? A Comment
No full textThis paper offers a new interpretation of the patterns of European employment rates over the last 30 years that is based on the crucial role of the family. It presents some interesting evidence on the evolution of the employment rates of the different demographic groups and develops
a model based on the interaction between technology and family
preferences that is able to capture the main features of the data
The Great Moderation and the US External Imbalance
No full textThe early 1980s marked the onset of two striking features of the current
world macroeconomy: the fall in U.S. business cycle volatility (the “great
moderation”) and the large and persistent U.S. external imbalance. In this
paper, we argue that an external imbalance is a natural consequence of the
great moderation. If a country experiences a fall in volatility greater than
that of its partners, its incentives to accumulate precautionary savings fall
and this results in a permanent deterioration of its external balance.To assess how much of the current U.S. imbalance can be explained by this channel, we consider a standard two-country business cycle model in which households are subject to business cycle shocks they cannot perfectly insure against. The model suggests that a fall in business cycle volatility like that observed in the United States can account for about 20 percent of the actual U.S. external imbalance
Culture: An Empirical Investigation of Beliefs, Work, and Fertility
No full textWe study culture by examining the work and fertility behavior of second-generation American women. Culture is proxied with past female labor force participation and total fertility rates from the woman's country of ancestry. The values of these variables capture not only economic and institutional conditions but also the country's preferences and beliefs regarding women's roles. Since the women live in the United States, only the belief and preference components are potentially relevant. We show that the cultural proxies have positive significant explanatory power even after controlling for education and spousal characteristics, and we demonstrate that the results are unlikely to be explained by unobserved human capital
Nature or Nurture? Learning and the Geography of Female Labor Force Participation
No full textOne of the most dramatic economic transformations of the past century has been the entry of women into the labor force. While many theories explain why this change took place, we in-vestigate the process of transition itself. We argue that local information transmission generates changes in participation that are geographically heterogeneous, locally correlated and smooth in the aggregate, just like those observed in our data. In our model, women learn about the effects of maternal employment on children by observing nearby employed women. When few women participate in the labor force, data is scarce and participation rises slowly. As informa-tion accumulates in some regions, the effects of maternal employment become less uncertain, and more women in that region participate. Learning accelerates, labor force participation rises faster, and regional participation rates diverge. Eventually, information diffuses throughout the economy, beliefs converge to the truth, participation flattens out and regions become more sim-ilar again. To investigate the empirical relevance of our theory, we use a new county-level data set to compare our calibrated model to the time-series and geographic patterns of participation
Mothers and Sons: Preference Formation and Female Labor Force Dynamics
No full textThis paper argues that the growing presence of a new type of man—one brought up in a family in which the mother worked—has been a significant factor in the increase in female labor force participation over time. We present cross-sectional evidence showing that the wives of men whose mothers worked are themselves significantly more likely to work. We use variation in the importance of World War II as a shock to women's labor force participation—as proxied by variation in the male draft rate across U. S. states—to provide evidence in support of the intergenerational consequences of our propagation mechanism
The Geography of the Great Recession
No full textThis paper documents, using county level data, some geographical features of the US business cycle over the past 30 years, with particular focus on the Great Recession. It shows that county level unemployment rates are spatially dispersed and spatially correlated, and documents how these characteristics
evolve during recessions. It then shows that some of these features of county data can be generated by a model which includes simple channels of transmission of economic conditions from a county to its neighbors. The model suggests that these local channels are quantitatively important for the amplification/muting of aggregate shocks
"Fertility: The Role of Culture and Family Experience,"
Full text linkThis paper attempts to disentangle the direct effects of experience from those of culture
in determining fertility. We use the GSS to examine the fertility of women born in the US
but from different ethnic backgrounds. We take lagged values of the total fertility rate in the woman’s country of ancestry as the cultural proxy and use the woman’s number of siblings to capture her direct family experience. We find that both variables are significant determinants of fertility, even after controlling for several individual and family-level characteristics
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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