Economics

□ 최근 북한산 맥주의 해외 수출 동향 □ 맥주 수출 확대 배경 □ 맥주로 살펴보는 북한 경제정책의 변화 □ 평가 및 향후 전망

We analyze the association between cognitive impairments and long-term care use in the 65+ population in the Netherlands. For this, we use data from the Lifelines Cohort Study that are linked to administrative records available through Statistics Netherlands. We find that, among those with cognitive impairments, long-term care use is concentrated in a subgroup: 42% of those with cognitive impairments do not use any long-term care. At the same time, individuals with cognitive impairments who use long-term care have high expenditures, in particular when living in nursing homes. Further analyses reveal that many individuals with cognitive impairments report functional limitations and that cogni..

Using text-as-data methods, we quantify the U.S. discourse on China, place it in historical perspective, and compare its evolution across different sources of public narrative. Our analysis is based on a large corpus of materials drawn from public records (presidential and congressional records, newspaper articles, social media, think tank reports). We develop two measures of narrative discourse: an indicator of the frequency with which China is covered and a proxy for how positively or negatively China is presented. We document a sustained decline in net sentiment towards China in presidential sources since the early 2000s, predating Donald Trump’s first term in office. In contrast to pre..

Many public-sector decisions require allocating scarce attention under uncertainty. We examine whether algorithmic risk assessments improve child-protection decisions, where supervisors decide which cases need closer scrutiny. In a randomized evaluation of 4,752 child referrals over 14 months in Northampton County, supervisors received an algorithmic risk score alongside standard case records. Access to the score increased foster-care placements and services for children at highest predicted risk, with little change for lower-risk cases, and it reduced subsequent maltreatment referrals. We find no evidence that the score widened racial disparities in decisions or outcomes, suggesting algorit..

Does financial opening necessarily lead to currency internationalization? To study the competition between incumbent and rising powers under financial interdependence, we develop a model of asset demand with microfounded network effects. Search frictions with currency-specialized intermediaries generate distinct notions of liquidity at asset-market and currency-area levels, which jointly shape the trajectory of currency competition. In the U.S.-China context, China at early stages of financial development benefits from pooling its assets with the dollar area, which reinforces the status quo. As China's financial markets deepen, RMB issuance allows China to internalize network effects and ero..

Using U.S. administrative data, we find that technology-driven creative destruction in the product market passes through to worker earnings. The passthrough to incumbent worker earnings is both asymmetric and concentrated: profit drops from rival innovations lead to proportionally greater earnings declines and changes in the likelihood of job destruction than profit gains from their own firm’s innovations, while top workers are significantly more exposed than the average worker. We develop an endogenous-growth model with monopsonistic labor markets and worker heterogeneity that replicates this asymmetry and the distribution of earnings risk. In the model, creative destruction exposes high-..

Unnecessary treatment reflects a gap between what patients believe about their health and their true condition; people often seek and consume care for diseases they suspect, but do not know that actually have. The value a patient places on testing therefore depends on their priors about being sick, and when those beliefs are biased, the resulting testing rate might be sub-optimal and leave welfare on the table. We study diagnosis-contingent incentive contracts, which tie treatment incentives to diagnostic results. For malaria, the contract subsidizes rapid diagnostic tests (RDTs) and antimalarials (ACTs) only for patients who test positive. In a cluster-randomized experiment across 140 Kenya..

Consider a referee report containing the sentence: “Assignment to treatment was voluntary, though the authors acknowledge this as a limitation in the conclusion.” The Editor would summarily reject. Now replace “assignment to treatment” with “entry into the experimental sample,” and the sentence describes the modal published experiment. This study shows that both biases are the same mathematical object. The bias from non-random sample entry is the sorting-on-gains term from the classic selection decomposition. Interestingly, they both admit an isomorphic Roy micro-foundation and inverse-Mills characterization. A simple calibration reveals that for the typical experiment, the obser..

Explaining why some countries grow rich while others remain poor requires knowing how — and when — institutions change. A large body of research argues that institutional change often occurs at critical junctures: moments when multiple institutional futures are possible, including a return to the status quo. Yet most empirical work examines critical junctures only in retrospect, risking the omission of pivotal moments when institutions were in flux but ultimately remained unchanged. We develop a new empirical approach to detect critical junctures as they unfold. Our key insight is to understand critical junctures as moments of uncertainty about institutions, which provides a text classif..

Economists increasingly use professional profile data to reconstruct employment histories and measure skill supply. We show that these records are not fixed historical snapshots, but mutable accounts that workers revise over time. Using monthly vintages of Revelio Labs data from 2020–2026, we document that 19.7 percent of established U.S. LinkedIn users retroactively edit the title or description of a job they have already left. These “time-travel” edits are closely tied to labor market transitions: around such edits, workers are much more likely to change employers as compared to later-editing users. This mutability can bias historical measures of skills, but it also reveals workers..

We study identification and optimal policy design in a broad class of principal-agent models. We show that the most common empirical framework within the literature is equivalent to an unstructured potential-outcomes model augmented with three specific assumptions: the Law of Demand (LoD), or treatment-effect monotonicity; extrapolative model structure (EMS), which rules out lumpy agent responses to price changes; and rank invariance (RI), which restricts unobserved heterogeneity (UH) to be one-dimensional. This decomposition isolates the identifying content of each assumption and clarifies its economic role. The LoD and MS are empirically testable using exogenous price variation; RI, on the..

We examine the role of central bank reserves and public liquidity when secondary markets may freeze. Central bank reserves help intermediaries purchase assets during stress but crowd out investment. Under laissez-faire, intermediaries hold insufficient reserves, overlooking how aggregate liquidity reduces freeze risk. We propose a "market-backstop principle", akin to Bagehot’s principle for intermediaries. It combines state-contingent buyer-of-last-resort interventions to restore trading with modest liquidity requirements to limit moral hazard. The welfare benefits of restoring market functioning exceed the fiscal costs of interventions. We explore implications for the size and composition..

The U.S. federal government spends roughly $150 billion a year on research and development through mechanisms ranging from grants and contracts to prizes, advance market commitments, and tax credits. These funding mechanisms differ markedly in risk allocation, decision authority, and incentive power, yet policymakers have little systematic guidance for choosing among them. We develop a framework that asks the policymaker three initial questions about the contracting environment: Can they articulate the work to be done? Can they specify what would constitute a successful solution? Can they identify the most capable performers to contract with? The answers considerably narrow the set of viable..

Clarity of responsibility is an essential element of political accountability. We develop a rational model of Bayesian updating in the presence of ambiguous attribution and we test its predictions using an original survey. We show that respondents’ partisanship, assessment of public healthcare quality, and beliefs over which layer of government is responsible for healthcare are correlated as predicted: good-assessment voters attribute responsibility to the layer governed by their preferred party, while bad-assessment voters blame the layer governed by the party they dislike. These partisan patterns of credit and blame, often interpreted as evidence of motivated reasoning or partisan bias, ..

China’s technological progress in recent decades has been viewed with admiration, alarm, and (in some cases) doubt. To better understand the Chinese innovation ecosystem, we compile a dataset of almost 14 million domestic Chinese patent publications. We focus on the subset of critical technologies identified by the U.S. Department of Defense. Several surprising patterns emerge from the data: Chinese patenting is strongly associated with other measures of innovative progress; patents are not concentrated in corporate giants such as Huawei; universities have played a key role in innovation, much greater than state-owned enterprises or government-owned facilities; and fewer than one in ten Ch..

This paper examines the impact of credit frictions arising from firm-level default risk on aggregate economic performance. We build a micro-to-macro model with heterogeneous firms and sector-specific production functions, showing that perceived default risk is a sufficient statistic for credit frictions. Using UK administrative data (2004–2019) matched to S&P risk measures, counterfactual estimates reveal that relaxing frictions raises output by 25% and wages by 23%. Ignoring equilibrium wage adjustments overstates output gains, while fixed-capital misallocation approaches understate them. Most gains reflect aggregate capital accumulation. Credit frictions remain above pre-crisis levels, r..

In the depths of the 2010 financial crisis the Portuguese government enacted a series of reforms in its prescription drug reimbursement system. Over the next three years value added per pharmacist in retail pharmacies fell by a third, reflecting a rise in generic substitution and reductions in the markups allowed for prescription drugs. This massive shock led to pay cuts for incumbent pharmacists and the introduction of a two-tier pay system for new hires, with little or no reduction in the growth of employment. We use detailed longitudinal records from the Quadros de Pessoal data base, merged with information on collective bargaining settlements and firm financial records, to study the impa..

We develop a theory of firm wage dynamics that integrates the canonical wage-posting model à la Burdett and Mortensen (1998) with firm dynamics. Firms offer dynamic wage contracts under an equal-treatment constraint in the presence of search frictions. We provide an analytical characterization of equilibrium wage contracts and firm growth as functions only of the distribution of marginal surplus. Consistent with recent empirical evidence, the model implies that (i) firm wages are strongly linked to firm growth but not to firm size; (ii) firm wages decline over the firm life cycle; and (iii) the pass-through of permanent productivity shocks to wages is higher in the short run than in the lon..

This paper analyzes foreign demand for U.S. assets, with particular emphasis on U.S. Treasury securities. It documents compositional shifts in U.S. bilateral external positions across geographic regions and asset classes, providing estimates of creditor positions closer to a nationality-based concept. While rising U.S. equity prices explain a sizable share of the deterioration in the net external position, foreign purchases of U.S. Treasury securities have been the largest source of U.S. current account financing. The share of these securities held by foreign official investors has declined sharply during the past decade, while the share held by foreign private investors (especially through ..

Institutions that claim to reward merit often also serve as engines that drive the formation of important social networks. We examine this dual role in China’s Imperial Examination, one of history’s longest-lived meritocratic systems. We draw on exam performance data for 24,269 individuals across 112 national examinations in the Qing dynasty (1644–1905) and trace who among them rose to become top officials. Strong exam performance increased the likelihood of attaining high office, but advancement also depended on individuals’ ties to powerful examiners. Because performance and ties to powerful examiners were strongly complementary, individuals’ success appeared to rest on merit eve..