We use Spain’s Equality Law to test for the existence of agency problems between party leaders and their constituents. The law mandates a 40 percent female quota on electoral lists in towns with ...populations above 5,000. Using pre- and postquota data by party and municipality, we implement a triple-difference design. We find that female quotas resulted in slightly better electoral results for the parties that were most affected by the quota. Our evidence shows that party leaders were not maximizing electoral results prior to the quota, suggesting the existence of agency problems that hinder female representation in political institutions.
This article develops a welfare theoretic framework for interpreting evidence on the impacts of public programs on housing markets. We extend Rosen's hedonic model to explain how housing prices ...capitalize exogenous shocks to public goods and externalities. The model predicts that trading between heterogeneous buyers and sellers will drive a wedge between these "capitalization effects" and welfare changes. We test this hypothesis in the context of changes in measures of school quality in five metropolitan areas. Results from boundary discontinuity designs suggest that capitalization effects understate parents' willingness to pay for public school improvements by as much as 75%.
The Origins of Savings Behavior Cronqvist, Henrik; Siegel, Stephan
The Journal of political economy,
02/2015, Letnik:
123, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Analyzing the savings behavior of a large sample of identical and fraternal twins, we find that genetic differences explain about 33 percent of the variation in savings propensities across ...individuals. Individuals are born with a persistent genetic predisposition to a specific savings behavior. Parenting contributes to the variation in savings rates among younger individuals, but its effect decays over time. The environment when growing up (e.g., parents’ wealth) moderates genetic effects. Finally, savings behavior is genetically correlated with income growth, smoking, and obesity, suggesting that the genetic component of savings behavior reflects genetic variation in time preferences or self-control.
Abstract
This paper studies how economic incentives influence cultural transmission, using a crucial expression of cultural identity: child naming decisions. Our focus is on Arabic versus non-Arabic ...names given in France over the 2003–2007 period. Our model of cultural transmission features three determinants: (i) vertical (parental) cultural transmission culture; (ii) horizontal (neighbourhood) influence; (iii) information on the economic penalty associated with Arabic names. We find that economic incentives largely influence naming choices: if the parental expectation on the economic penalty was zero, the annual number of babies born with an Arabic name would be more than 50% larger.
Although relatively under-studied, industrial symbiosis may be a particularly valuable type of interfirm action for creating value under economic constraints, such as increased environmental ...regulations, because it involves firms collaborating to find economical ways to “do more with less”, by taking wastes and excess resources from one firm and processing them into valuable inputs for another. To better understand its value-creating potential, we analyzed firm- and policy-level environmental and economic outcomes for 313 industrial symbiosis exchanges across the United Kingdom, during a period of increasing environmental taxation and regulation. We found that, 1) exchanges involving larger volumes of material resources are more likely to create firm- and policy-level value; 2) firms with prior industrial symbiosis experience are more likely to create firm-level value; and, 3) exchanges involving dedicated waste firms are more likely to create policy-level value, although somewhat less likely to create firm-level value. Extending prior work on intra-firm action research, we show how firms can also create value through interfirm industrial symbiosis collaborations in response to regulatory constraints. We develop a deeper understanding of the types of outcomes likely to occur from industrial symbiosis exchanges, and detail firm- and policy-level implications and questions for future research.
The good, the bad, and the average Lavy, Victor; Silva, Olmo; Weinhardt, Felix
Journal of labor economics,
04/2012, Letnik:
30, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
We study ability peer effects in English secondary schools using data on four cohorts of students taking age-14 national tests and measuring peers’ ability by prior achievements at age 11. Our ...identification is based on within-pupil regressions exploiting variation in achievements across three compulsory subjects tested at age 14 and age 11. Using this novel strategy, we find significant and sizable negative effects arising from bad peers at the bottom of the ability distribution but little evidence that average peer quality and good peers matter. However, these results are heterogeneous, with girls benefiting from academically bright peers and boys not.
In this paper, we investigate the relation between firm-level corporate governance and firm value based on a large and previously unused dataset from Governance Metrics International (GMI) comprising ...6663 firm-year observations from 22 developed countries over the period from 2003 to 2007. Based on a set of 64 individual governance attributes we construct two alternative additive corporate governance indices with equal weights attributed to the governance attributes and one index derived from a principal component analysis. For all three indices we find a strong and positive relation between firm-level corporate governance and firm valuation. In addition, we investigate the value relevance of governance attributes that document the companies' social behavior. Regardless of whether these attributes are considered individually or aggregated into indices, and even when “standard” corporate governance attributes are controlled for, they exhibit a positive and significant effect on firm value. Our findings are robust to alternative calculation procedures for the corporate governance indices and to alternative estimation techniques.
The effect of competition on the quality of health care remains a contested issue. Most empirical estimates rely on inference from nonexperimental data. In contrast, this paper exploits a ...procompetitive policy reform to provide estimates of the impact of competition on hospital outcomes. The English government introduced a policy in 2006 to promote competition between hospitals. Using this policy to implement a difference-in-differences research design, we estimate the impact of the introduction of competition on not only clinical outcomes but also productivity and expenditure. We find that the effect of competition is to save lives without raising costs.
This article analyzes the effect of exporting activity on the innovative performances of firms in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and UK. It argues that the positive effect of exporting on innovation ...usually found in the literature varies according to the specific destinations of exports, and it identifies two dimensions along which export destinations might differ: the level of foreign technological spillovers available to exporting firms (the technological learning effect) and the type of foreign demand that exporting firms are able to access (the foreign demand effect). The empirical analysis, which takes advantage of firm-level information about the export destinations of exporters, shows that while the technological learning effect increases mainly the incentives to introduce brand new product innovations, the foreign demand effect fosters the adoption of process innovations.
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