Economics

□ 기다림과 외주화가 공존하는 소비 □ 기다림에 열광하는 사회 □ 번거로움으로 돈 버는 사회 □ 두 현상은 왜 공존하는가 □ 시사점

We study the supply of political communication highlighting perceived threats, using the 2014 Ebola scare as a natural experiment. Analyzing Twitter posts and congressional newsletters from US House and Senate candidates, we find Republicans increased Ebola-related communication, emphasizing negative sentiment and links to immigration. This response was strongest in safe Republican seats, consistent with base signaling. The supply side was active, not reactive: the Republican response did not vary with proximity to diagnosed cases despite concentrated voter anxiety, politician tweets predicted public Ebola activity but not vice-versa, and more intensive messaging correlated with better elect..

This paper studies the joint behavior over time of the mean and dispersion of U.S. import tariff rates across goods at the HTS 6-digit level, as well as the macroeconomic consequences of the shocks that drive these two moments. We document that the cross-sectional mean and the cross-sectional dispersion of import tariffs move closely together over time. Using a state-space model, we find that both are driven primarily by common shocks, while mean- and dispersion-specific tariff shocks play a negligible role. Thus, effectively, there are no separate mean-tariff shocks or tariff-dispersion shocks; there are only mean-dispersion tariff shocks. These common shocks account for a sizable share of ..

One of the most comprehensive fiscal policies to improve diet was adopted by the Navajo Nation; the Healthy Diné Nation Act (HDNA) of 2014-15 consists of two parts: 1) an exemption from sales tax for healthy foods and beverages; and 2) a tax increase on unhealthy foods and beverages. Together, they create a price wedge of 7-8% between healthy and unhealthy foods. We estimate difference-in-difference models and event studies that estimate the effect of the HDNA on a variety of health conditions relating to diet and weight for newborns and mothers which are recorded in birth certificate data. We find no evidence that the HDNA improved these outcomes; our estimates are precise enough to rule o..

Most LLM benchmarks rank models on their ability to automate work tasks. In practice, however, models are often used to assist other (human or LLM) agents. The question that drives model selection is therefore not only which model produces the best output, but which model most improves the work of another (weaker) agent. We introduce a unified framework that evaluates the capability of models to automate and augment another agent's performance. Across seven economically grounded real-world tasks, an assistant model writes assistance text for a standardized lower-capacity worker model, which produces the deliverable. In automation mode, the assistant produces the output directly. Outputs are ..

Amid renewed policy interest, the academic literature on place-based programs has expanded dramatically in recent years. In this essay, we review recent theoretical and empirical work in an effort to assess when and why place-based job creation policies succeed or fail. Drawing on theory, we describe key dimensions on which place-based programs vary and discuss evidence on the consequences of different design choices. We conclude with several lessons for the next generation of place-based programs.

Liquidity savings mechanisms (LSMs) reduce the quantity of reserve balances that banks need to process payments. An LSM can mitigate coordination failures in which banks delay their payments to each other because they expect that other banks will do the same. We provide the design and properties of a maximally efficient new form of LSM.

We document an increase in U.S. income risk from 1969 to 2019 using newly digitized IRS tax returns, distinguishing permanent from transitory risk. Since the 1970s, permanent income risk increased across the distribution, but most sharply among high earners, rising nearly 70% among the top 5%. We show that, even among top earners, large negative income shocks strongly predict financial distress and higher income risk is linked with higher savings. In a quantitative life-cycle model, rising income risk concentrated at the top lowers the risk-free rate by 0.7pp, increases wealth inequality, and contributes to the "savings glut of the rich."

We study how opening private markets to retail investors affects investors and firms. Calibrating a production-based asset-pricing model, we find that democratization raises retail investors' welfare, but barely. Retail investors benefit little from democratization even if they face no extra cost or other disadvantage relative to institutional investors. The private market is simply too small for improved risk sharing to matter much. Whether or not private-market retail investing is costly, democratization substantially reshapes private firms' ownership and materially reduces their cost of capital, leading them to grow. Private equity earns a positive CAPM alpha, which shrinks after democrat..

Health technology assessment bodies and policymakers have grappled with the issue of whose preferences – the general healthy population or the patient population – should be incorporated into traditional cost-effectiveness analysis. This debate arises because healthy individuals and patients often value the same health state differently, and cost-effectiveness will undervalue health-related quality of life (HRQoL) for individuals with chronic illness or disability because it cannot account for adaptation. Prospect theory (PT) provides a framework that permits adaptation since it assumes individuals evaluate outcomes relative to a reference point. We estimate utility over HRQoL in a PT fr..

Official lending is large, senior, and countercyclical, continuing after sovereigns fall into arrears on private debt. We ask why sovereign finance exhibits this division of labor across creditors. In a production economy where a risk-averse sovereign privately allocates imported inputs, commitment is limited on both sides, and monitoring generates a noisy signal, the constrained-optimal allocation is decentralized by defaultable private debt, senior non-defaultable multilateral debt, and concessional bilateral debt whose relief is tied to the signal. Production remains distorted, but the sovereign is never excluded: official lending is monitored liquidity provision. A calibration reproduces..

Unemployment rates are substantially higher and more volatile in the euro area relative to the United States. We ask to what extent the lack of cross-country labor mobility can account for unemployment dynamics in Europe. Our analytical model incorporates downward nominal wage rigidity and an endogenous migration decision. Firms are unable to freely adjust wages during economic contractions, generating an asymmetric distribution of unemployment over the business cycle. The model is calibrated to the dynamics of unemployment and net migration in a typical euro area country. An increase in labor mobility to that observed in the United States and holding all other parameters fixed would reduce ..

This paper investigates the determinants of international investors’ portfolio choices between gold and sovereign bonds in an environment shaped by economic and geopolitical shocks. We develop an endogenous portfolio choice model where reserve safety has a political dimension — sovereign bonds issued by the dominant reserve country are more liquid but exposed to the issuer’s sanctions authority, while gold offers sanctions protection at the cost of lower liquidity. Our model implies that US convenience yields fall during periods of high sanction risk, as safe-asset demand fragments along geopolitical lines. Empirically, periods of elevated geopolitical risk coincide with higher gold pr..

Private tutoring chains like Kumon and Sylvan have expanded rapidly in recent decades. Combining data on business locations, household spending, and district test scores, we study who uses these centers and how they affect academic skills. Nearly half of tutoring users are from the top income decile, with Asian and White households five and two times as likely to purchase tutoring as Black and Hispanic households. A staggered differences-in-differences design shows the opening of a district's first chain center raises district-wide math and reading scores by 0.02-0.03 standard deviations, at a much lower cost than public spending typically producing similar gains. Math effects are largest fo..

Police in England and Wales are asked to predict the likelihood of serious recidivism in domestic abuse cases, with little support beyond a flawed questionnaire. To analyze their decisions, we first develop methods to deal with a censoring problem that arises because the officer’s prediction may change the outcome she was attempting to predict. Even after adjusting for censoring, we find predictive performance to be low, even lower in some cases than what one would expect by chance. We next ask whether their predictions represent mistakes, and provide several types of confirmatory evidence. We ask how officers formulate their predictions, and we find evidence consistent with representative..

Post-pandemic inflation raised fears that U.S. monetary tightening would trigger a repeat of the 1982 sudden stop in capital flows to emerging economies. Yet as of 2026 no global recession has followed. We establish three stylized facts distinguishing the 1980s from the 2020s, beyond the shift to flexible exchange rates: monetary policy effectiveness, fiscal space, and external vulnerabilities. We rationalize them in a Mundell-Fleming framework with a fiscal space constraint, which predicts a central role for fiscal space in transmitting foreign currency risk-free rate increases. Cross-country evidence confirms that fiscal space shapes economic performance post-tightening.

The economic burden of natural disasters is shaped by who is exposed, who experiences losses, how those losses alter individual economic trajectories, and how affected communities evolve in the aftermath. We link property-level damage data from over 100 U.S. wildfires to administrative tax and Census data to understand individual-level relationships between disaster damage and economic outcomes. Residents of burned areas are wealthier than the U.S. population on average, but within these wildfire perimeters the likelihood that a home burns is negatively correlated with pre-fire income. Home destruction imposes costs beyond rebuilding the property: occupants of destroyed homes experience lowe..

We study how dominant employers can act as *electoral monopsonies*, using local labor market power to shape political preferences and electoral outcomes. We first present original survey evidence showing that workers at major local employers are more likely to experience employer political communication and to report that their employers influence their voting behavior and career expectations. We then develop a model in which a dominant employer can affect voters’ preferences by shaping their expectations about how wages and employment depend on electoral outcomes. We distinguish a passive channel, through which workers internalize firms’ economic interests, from an active channel, throu..

We measure how workers use genAI for their jobs in a nationally representative survey linking genAI adoption to detailed occupations and tasks. Our data provide the first task-level genAI adoption indexes, which we show can inform analyses of genAI’s labor market impact. Exposure scores explain some, but far from all, of the variation in adoption across occupations and tasks. We also distinguish our indexes from measures based on genAI platform chat logs, which differ conceptually and tend to over-classify chats into generic activities spanning many occupations. Finally, we highlight that current adoption is widespread but shallow: genAI is used across many occupations and tasks, yet withi..

With complete-information bilateral bargaining in network settings, holdup is eliminated when contracts across the network are agreed atomically (all or none) via a smart contract. Applications include over-the-counter asset trading, third-party-financed purchase agreements, and land assembly. Under a novel extensive-form bargaining protocol, a firm can give a “greenlight” to the terms of a contract proposed to that firm, and the protocol automatically converts those terms into a binding contract if the terms proposed to all other firms are likewise given greenlights. In any Perfect Bayesian Equilibrium with Markov strategies, firms immediately agree on socially efficient contracts.

Surveys provide much of what we know in social science and are often the only source of information on private behaviors, attitudes and expectations. Strands of the literature document four broad error sources: survey coverage, unit non-response, item non-response, and measurement error. Yet the absence of comparable error measures across sources and over time has left the relative severity of error sources difficult to assess, limiting efforts by survey producers to improve accuracy and users to interpret survey statistics. We unify the fragmented literature by analyzing and decomposing survey error in an empirical Total Survey Error (TSE) framework, quantifying for the first time every err..