Economics

□ 블록체인의 진화: AI 에이전트 경제 인프라 □ AI 에이전트 경제 □ AI 경제 접근 방식 비교: 카드 vs. 블록체인 □ 전망 및 시사점

■ 주택시장 동향 ㅇ 주택 매매시장 동향 ㅇ 주택 전월세시장 동향 ㅇ 주택 분양 ㅇ 주택 금융

We examine how prenatal exposure to air pollution interacts with gender-biased parental investments to shape long-run cognitive performance. Using nationally representative survey data from China, we show that fetal PM2.5 exposure significantly reduces cognitive ability for women, particularly among those with brothers. Our evidence suggests that the family investment channel operates primarily through education rather than health, with gender-biased educational resource allocation compounding negative outcomes for females. Specifically, conditional on the same level of fetal PM2.5 exposure, females receive less homework assistance from their families and attain lower levels of education.

We explore the welfare costs of the loss of animal life in a consequentialist total utilitarian framework that incorporates the intrinsic value of living beings through their sentience. Moral philosophy and neuroscience define sentience as the capacity for valenced experience. Observable performance on cognitive tests represents a conservative lower bound on sentience under plausible neuroscientific assumptions. We estimate the relationship between cognition and neuron counts to cardinalize sentience. We collect population and neuron data for a wide range of animal species, and aggregate them into a single welfare measure. Across a wide range of parameters, the aggregate sentience losses of ..

This paper revisits the empirical evidence on capital structure adjustment and the prevalence of financing “inaction.” We show that the conclusion of infrequent leverage adjustment is sensitive to two methodological choices: high adjustment thresholds and reliance on net balance-sheet changes. Using lower thresholds and gross flows from cash-flow statements, we find adjustment is far more frequent than previously documented, and the pattern reveals pronounced size-based heterogeneity. Smaller firms exhibit considerable inertia consistent with fixed costs; the largest firms (e.g., top 1% by assets) behave as if frictions are negligible. Frictionless recapitalization models thus better des..

Which firms drive aggregate productivity growth? We document that firms with high price-earnings ratios tend to see increases in their subsequent earnings relative to sales, which we interpret as rents from ideas (innovation). We construct an endogenous growth model with shocks to firm innovation step-sizes and R&D efficiency and calibrate it to match patterns in the data. The model implies that growth would be much lower, even with the same innovative effort, if firms had the same step sizes. The model can be used to infer expected growth contributions of individual firms (such as members of the Magnificent Seven). We find that the share of growth coming from smaller listed firms substantia..

The existence of aggregate welfare gains from trade is one of the classic insights from international economics. However, these conventional welfare gains are static, in the sense that they take existing factor supplies and production technologies at a point in time as given. Recent research has highlighted dynamic effects of trade through endogenous factor accumulation and technological innovation over time, although there remains less consensus about the quantitative magnitude of these dynamic effects than about their static counterparts. Key insights from this research are that short-run and long-run responses to trade liberalization differ; capital accumulation amplifies the impact of in..

We study how in-store display ads communicate information about a product’s price and quality, both directly through ad content and indirectly through inferences consumers draw from the presence and content of the ad. We run an incentivized experiment in a simulated online store, randomizing ad exposure, ad content, and the advertised product’s price, while also eliciting participants’ beliefs and choices. Display ads shift beliefs about price and quality, even when the ad copy does not directly reveal either attribute. We provide evidence that these belief shifts have a causal effect on searches and purchases of the advertised product. Using a stylized search model, we show that while..

We link two global trends—AI and geoeconomic fragmentation—asking how fragmentation affects the international diffusion of AI, the magnitude of gains, and their distribution across economies. We ask these questions in general but also with a focus on the MENAP economies. While the effects of AI are potentially far-reaching, the benefits are neither guaranteed nor even. Frontier AI innovation is concentrated in a small number of economies, while countries benefiting through supply-chain participation or AI adoption—with outcomes shaped by their position in global trade and production networks and their AI preparedness. Geoeconomic fragmentation slows AI diffusion and reshapes its distri..

We study how extended stockholder liability shaped bank resolution during and after the Panic of 1893, comparing California state banks (unlimited liability) with national banks (double liability). Using newly assembled data linking California state bank presidents to census records and national bank stock ownership data from Examination Reports, we measure managers’ personal exposures to extended liability. For California state banks, traditional fundamentals predict involuntary liquidations but do not explain voluntary exits. Instead, voluntary exits are driven by managers’ liability exposure, local economic risk, and personal wealth, consistent with managers responding to unlimited li..

How do we evaluate the welfare gains from transport infrastructure investment? We present a quantitative spatial framework that integrates traffic and economic responses to infrastructure improvements and derives the elasticity of aggregate welfare to changes in the transportation network. The resulting formula extends the traditional ``social savings'' method to incorporate route and mode choice, agglomeration and dispersion externalities, and traffic congestion. We apply the formula to the U.S. freight network and assess the benefits of reducing costs on each segment of the U.S. Interstate Highway System. The traditional and extended measures are closely related overall, but they differ in..

The US Health and Retirement Study collects data on participants’ recall fluency (RF), their ability to recall words from a list, a standard measure of memory used by psychologists. Controlling for multiple demographic characteristics as well as IQ, people with a higher RF are more optimistic about stock returns, the price of their homes, and their life expectancy. We derive the predictions of a standard memory model and find that, consistent with them, the beliefs of higher RF people about each target domain are more sensitive to cues, to experiences in that domain, but also to irrelevant experiences in other domains, especially those similar to the target. These effects, in turn, carry t..

This paper examines the impact of the National Suicide Hotline Designation Act, which introduced the universal 988 calling code and earmarked federal funding to suicide crisis call centers in July 2022. We use a difference-in-differences design that leverages pre-existing cross-state variation in crisis line capacity gaps, measured by the number of pre-988 calls routed to a state but not answered in-state. The rollout substantially improved crisis line operations in states with larger baseline capacity gaps: these states answered more calls in-state and increased their in-state answer rates. However, these operational gains did not translate into detectable reductions in suicide mortality. T..

We use newly digitized records for 1.2 million students at 60 co-educational U.S. colleges, 1915–1943, linked to enrollment records for their children through 1963, to study how colleges shape marital matching and the intergenerational transmission of educational advantage. About 6% of men and 9% of women marry someone from their own college. This homogamy is largely causal: within colleges, more different-sex classmates and longer campus overlap both raise same-college marriage. Same-college spouses are more educated, and this advantage persists across generations. Children of same-college couples more often attend selective colleges, with spousal education explaining a third of the gap.

By age 17, a quarter of U.S. students have experienced a peer suicide. Using linked administrative data from South Carolina and a matched difference-in-differences design, we find that exposure to a peer's self-harm death increases the probability of a self-harm diagnosis by nearly 50% and both the incidence and frequency of mental health visits. Effects on care use and criminal behavior are concentrated among white boys, and responses diverge by prior mental health history: students without a prior diagnosis increase felony offending rather than care-seeking. Deaths from assault and transportation accidents produce no comparable rise in self-harm, consistent with contagion.

Every SVAR result is conditional on two choices: the restrictions that identify the shock and the variables on which they operate. The literature disciplines the first; the second is chosen by hand. We develop a Bayesian methodology that constructs information sets, uses an out-of-sample criterion, and retains the largest system it admits. Under recursive identification, output rises with housing production rather than household credit alone. For monetary policy, an anchor-free joint Bayesian proxy SVAR with multiple instruments strengthens the credit spread channel. A core system augmented with the selected corporate spread identifies expected default risk as a potent transmission margin.

How do biased beliefs about the interest rate distribution affect search, negotiation, and loan terms in consumer credit markets? In collaboration with Chile's financial regulator, we conducted a randomized controlled trial with 112,063 loan seekers. Randomly eliciting beliefs about interest rates led participants to search more and obtain lower rates. Most participants underestimated both interest rate levels and dispersion. Showing them a price comparison tool we built using administrative data on the universe of consumer loans caused them to update their beliefs, negotiate more, obtain lower rates without searching more, and be more likely to take out a loan.

In this paper, we compare supplemental Medicare insurance coverage among people with probable dementia (PWPD) and matched controls, before and after onset. This retrospective secondary data analysis of insurance coverage changes using propensity score weights and the 2000-2016 Health and Retirement Study (HRS). The sample consists of 3,001 Medicare-enrolled adults age 65 and older with PWPD, and 14,055 controls. Probable dementia is assessed with the Langa-Weir approach and interviewer assessments for proxy interviews. Four years before onset, PWPD become more likely to have Medicare without supplemental coverage (2.97 percentage points; p=0.0016) than matched controls. This reflects the net..

Credit card interest rates currently average 22%, an 18% spread over the short rate. This spread far exceeds that on any other loan or bond, yet nearly half of households are credit card borrowers. Why are credit card rates so high? To understand this, and the economics of credit card banking, we use regulatory account-level data to analyze the lifetime cash flows of 550 million monthly accounts, representing 90% of the US credit card market. While charge-off rates are comparatively high, averaging around 6%, they explain only a fraction of cards' spread. Reward payments and non-interest expenses are more than offset by interchange and non-interest income. Operating expenses, particularly ma..

The literature on imperfect competition in labor markets has expanded rapidly in recent years. This article provides a guide to the field, focusing on the firm-specific ("residual") labor supply elasticity as the definition of a firm's labor market power. We present a general framework showing how this elasticity nests the three widely studied sources of monopsony power: search frictions, preference heterogeneity, and employer concentration. We summarize the empirical estimates of the elasticity of labor supply, highlighting sources of possible heterogeneity. We emphasize that it is difficult to infer elasticities from markdowns (and vice versa) due to the diversity of firm wage-setting prac..

Macroeconomics tends to view exchange rate movements as transitory. However, persistent exchange rate realignments and the associated capital flows can have long-run implications for structural change and productivity growth. We provide empirical evidence that policies of reserve accumulation and currency undervaluation have had significant effects on manufacturing productivity, as well as on manufacturing share, product varieties, and domestic orientation of production chains. We develop a dynamic two-country model with two sectors, firm dynamics, and trade hysteresis to demonstrate a novel mechanism by which exchange rate policy reorients global supply chains and industrial structure. The ..

Theories of outsourcing often presume that private firms are more efficient producers of goods and services, but that contracting frictions mean that firms do not internalize the government's objective function. But perhaps, for some tasks, the government can actually be more productively efficient? We study this question through an experiment in Chennai, India, where the government randomly selected neighborhoods to have property tax assessments determined by private firms contracted by the government, rather than government tax inspectors. We show that inspections by government tax inspectors yielded almost double the increase in tax revenue as those done by private firms. They were also m..

Elites maintain disproportionate political power even in formally inclusive political systems, yet the institutions through which they coordinate and reproduce this advantage remain poorly understood. We study membership in the Buenos Aires Jockey Club—Argentina's most prominent elite social club—exploiting staggered variation in family entry. Using difference-in-differences techniques, we find that Jockey Club membership increased the probability of holding legislative office by approximately four percentage points—more than twice the control-group mean. Consistent with a network-based mechanism, membership also increased families' centrality in elite marriage networks—a resource th..