NBER Working Papers Digest NBER 工作论文速递

This paper asks why openness has been such a strong catalyst for catch-up growth in some regions or countries, while in others openness has been followed by stalled convergence, divergence, or stagnation. We conclude that “openness” in today’s geoeconomically fragmented world is much more than trade intensity or trade integration. Positioning in trade networks, trade fundamentals, human capital, institutional capacity and stability matters for the potential for trade-induced productivity gains. We explore the global heterogeneity across continents between 1960 and 2024, unbalanced panel of up to 145 economies per year and estimate a growth equation using a dynamic approach for countries and years. We build a baseline equation relating real GDP growth to lagged income and growth. We complement the traditional drivers of growth by contorting for positionings variables the world economy: a proxy for economic integration measuring the number of regional trade arrangements ratified by each economy, a commodity dependence indicator; metrics related to export networks geoeconomic vulnerability (GeoV). measure country’s export position with geopolitically distant partnerships; geoeconomic connectivity (GeoC) measuring the degree that trade relationships are across greater spectrum of geopolitics. The GeoC measures external “connectors” positioning that may counterbalance costs of geoeconomic fragmentation by securing access to greeter variety of markets and resources. Notably, the Geoeconomic linkages add an important element of “positioning,” indicating that the more “geopolitically” connected is a country, the greater are the investment-growth links. A greater diverse positioning of countries’ economies improves their capacity to transform investment into output in a more diversified setting. This also indicate a lesser dependent growth on “momentum” by countries’ economy, pointing to a greater shock-absorption capacity, confirming the benefits of diversified structure for growth from investments facing pressures from fragmentation.

We study the distributional consequences of monetary policy-induced credit supply in the German labor market. Firms in relationships with banks that are more exposed to the introduction of negative interest rates in 2014 experience a relative contraction in credit supply, associated with lower average wages. Within firms, initially lower-paid workers are more likely to leave employment, while initially higher-paid workers see a relative decline in wages. Between firms, wages fall by more at initially higher-paying employers. Our results suggest that credit affects the distribution of wages and employment both within and between firms.

This paper shows that the industrial composition of a city's local economy affects its municipal borrowing costs. In a panel of 1,177 U.S. cities from 2005 to 2022, greater sectoral concentration magnifies default risk and raises bond spreads, especially for cities dominated by industries associated with low property values. Instrumental variables exploiting national sector-employment trends and regional house-price variation support a causal interpretation. A calibrated model of city default suggests that the observed spread effect understates the gross risk created by concentration, because higher concentration can generate agglomeration benefits that reduce spreads, especially for high-property-value cities.

This paper measures and analyzes management practices in the Kenyan health care sector, drawing on a nationally representative survey and linked administrative data. The paper adapts the World Management Survey to measure management quality in primary health care facilities and hospitals, surveying 429 primary health care facilities and 73 hospitals. Primary health care facilities are the primary point of contact for most patients, providing treatment for common infectious diseases and chronic conditions, as well as services related to maternal and child health. Management quality is low on average, and the distribution is highly compressed. The analysis uses administrative data to test the association between the management quality and performance of primary health care facilities, measured by outpatient attendance, during a period of disruption that included the COVID-19 pandemic and a public health workers’ strike. Overall attendance fell during this period. Private facilities experienced a smaller decline than public facilities, consistent with substitution during the strike. Within the private sector, better-managed facilities showed greater resilience, driven primarily by operations management. These results underscore the role of management quality in strengthening facility-level resilience and the complementarity of public and private sectors in absorbing healthcare shocks.

We study Tennessee Promise, Tennessee’s tuition-free community college program, which preceded similar programs in over twenty states and multiple federal proposals. We examine how Promise affected college enrollment and early adult outcomes as the program expanded from a single-county pilot to statewide eligibility. Promise increased college enrollment by 5.4 percentage points among 19-year-olds, increased transfers from two-year to four-year schools, increased associate’s degree attainment by 2.9 percentage points among 21-year-olds, imprecisely increased bachelor’s degree attainment by age 24, and weakly increased income from age 21. We estimate that the program pays for itself under reasonable assumptions about returns to college.

This paper estimates a learning-by-doing human-capital production function in which hours affect both current productivity and future human capital. We show that the standard Ben-Porath specification is weakly identified: its objective function is nearly flat along a ridge in parameter space, undermining conventional inference. We develop a flexible sieve alternative that is well-identified, and estimate a concave hours technology using PSID data. Embedding this technology in a life-cycle model, we find very small prime-age labor-supply responses to temporary wage shocks. Despite these low elasticities, optimal labor-income taxes are flat because they distort both current labor supply and future human-capital accumulation.

Employer-side wage subsidies are widely used to promote employment among disadvantaged workers. We study how such subsidies translate into firm hiring behavior using the federal Work Opportunity Tax Credit, which subsidizes up to 40% of first-year wages and covers over two million hires annually. Using linked administrative data from Wisconsin and multiple quasi-experimental designs, we find consistent and precise null effects on hiring, earnings, retention, and related outcomes across designs and firm types. Original data on firm hiring practices suggest two mechanisms that can limit employer-side subsidy efficacy: perceived legal risks discourage eligibility screening and organizational frictions attenuate decision-makers’ responsiveness.

We propose a novel empirical strategy to infer the extent to which firm-worker matches are inspection or experience goods. We argue that the informative content of the signals that firms and workers receive about the productivity of their match before entering an employment relationship can be inferred from the gaps between the separation rates of workers hired from unemployment, employment at low-tenure jobs, and employment at high-tenure jobs. We implement the strategy using German administrative data. We find that, before entering an employment relationship, a firm and a worker receive a signal that reduces the variance of their beliefs about the productivity of the match by 67%. The informative content of the signal varies according to the gender and the education of the worker, and it has increased over time. If matches were pure inspection goods, labor productivity would be 1.5% higher, and output 2% higher. If matches were pure experience goods, labor productivity would be 2% lower, and output 4% lower.

We show that the optimal monetary policy and exchange rate framework depend critically on the economy’s commodity exposure. We develop a flexible but tractable model economy with commodity exports and imports, in which international financial conditions may vary with the commodity cycle, and we compute the welfare-optimal policy in the presence of price and wage rigidities. Stabilizing domestic prices is welfare-optimal for commodity exporters, in line with standard open-economy policy prescriptions. But for economies that use commodities as inputs in production, optimal policy largely ‘looks through’ the direct and indirect effects of commodity shocks on domestic prices; this contrasts with some earlier findings and policy practice (which only ‘looks through’ the direct effect). Exchange-rate pegs increase welfare for commodity importers because they stabilize wages and employment, though it is not a robustly optimal policy. In emerging and developing economies, where financial conditions are more tied to the commodity cycle, trade-offs are starker and implementing the optimal policy may be challenging, since it requires enough credibility to keep inflation expectations anchored amidst greater volatility in some nominal variables.