Economics

□ AI를 바라보는 시각이 왜 중요한가 □ 탄생 배경과 창업 DNA □ AI 철학과 지향점 차이 □ 철학의 차이가 드러나는 구체적 사례들 □ AI 전선의 변수와 에이전트 전쟁의 승자 □ 시사점

The Rent of Primary Residence (RoPR) series constructed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) implies that nominal rental prices increased by just 2.6% per year from 1914 to 2006 while overall prices grew by 3.3%. We show that this “falling real rents” puzzle can be explained by the evolving treatment of shelter in the Consumer Price Index (CPI). In this paper we construct a new, methodologically consistent shelter price series using the Historical Housing Prices (HHP) Project rental index. We also construct a revised set of shelter weights going back to 1914 and combine them with the price series to create an alternate CPI that applies the owners’ equivalent rent (OER) concept of sh..

This chapter reviews the growing literature on the origin, persistence and evolution of cultural norms. I begin by examining the deep historical forces that shape the formation of cultural norms, with particular attention to the role of geography, pre-industrial societal characteristics, political institutions, and historical shocks. I then analyze the mechanisms through which cultural norms persist and evolve, emphasizing the roles of vertical, horizontal, and oblique transmission. Next, I examine the complex interaction between culture and institutions, and discuss the conditions under which cultural norms change. Several conclusions emerge. Cultural norms tend to persist over remarkably l..

We study time-consistent optimal policy when undiversified owner-operators face financial frictions and a planner with limited instruments. We apply it to fertilizer subsidies, one of the largest sector-specific policy instruments in the developing world and whose price is becoming increasingly volatile. We collect household-level data from 444 rural Rwandan villages from 2020 - 2024 and exploit the doubling of fertilizer prices after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Relative to less fertilizer-intensive villages, more fertilizer-intensive villages experience 30 percent lower fertilizer spending, 21 percent lower harvests, and 11 percent higher output prices. These patterns discipline key mod..

This paper studies how households perceive the transmission of monetary policy and how these perceptions affect their decisions. Using a large-scale survey of over 25,000 U.S. households combined with randomized information treatments, we measure how households expect changes in the federal funds rate to affect economic conditions and their own behavior. Households report that higher interest rates lead them to reduce their spending, particularly on durable goods. However, the mechanisms underlying this response differ markedly from those in standard macroeconomic models. Respondents expect monetary tightening to raise borrowing costs and inflation. In turn, consumption function estimates id..

The traditional approach to climate policy is to regulate the demand side, for example through an emissions fee. Supply-side regulation has received less attention. The two instruments are perfect substitutes in the first best but we show that they are complements in a second-best setting with free-riding incentives. Demand-side policies alone lower the market price of fossil fuels and raise the gains from trade for a country that defects. For a treaty to be maximally robust, strong, and self-enforcing, it must properly balance supply- and demand-side instruments. The results hold with homogeneous countries and are strengthened by heterogeneity.

We provide the first causal, national empirical analysis of the labor market impacts of heightened immigration enforcement during the second Trump administration. Enforcement increased everywhere, but, we take advantage of the fact that the increases have been uneven across geographic areas to classify areas as treated or control and then implement an event study and difference-in-differences design. Areas that experienced particularly large increases in the number of arrests also experienced a decrease in work among likely undocumented immigrants who remain in the U.S., compared to areas with smaller increases in arrests. We find no evidence of positive spillover effects to U.S.-born worker..

Many states exhibit high degrees of capacity without the fiscal resources necessary to fund a modern bureaucracy. We argue that they achieve this by exploiting features of the social structure of the societies they govern to motivate individuals to engage in bureaucratic and governance tasks without pay. We develop and illustrate the concept of the “Embedded State” using a unique survey of British urban government from 1835. Since British local authorities had few resources, only two-thirds of positions were paid. We first show that unpaid positions were significantly more productive than paid ones. We then show that unpaid positions conveyed prestige and were ‘stepping stone’ positi..

Rapid growth of wind energy plays a key role in global efforts to reduce carbon emissions, yet public concerns persist about its potential health effects, particularly through noise exposure. While some studies and media reports suggest that wind turbines may contribute to sleep disturbances, anxiety, and even suicide, existing evidence remains limited and inconclusive. This study combines geolocated data on turbines from the U.S. Wind Turbine Database with longitudinal survey data on over 120,000 households (2011–2023) and consumer purchasing records to assess whether proximity to wind turbines affects mental and physical health. We examine a wide range of outcomes, including depression, ..

Schools across the U.S. have sharply restricted student use of phones during the school day. We evaluate one type of restriction—lockable phone pouches—using nationwide data combining large-scale surveys, GPS pings, standardized test scores, and school administrative records, along with sales records from the largest pouch provider. Using a staggered difference-in-differences design, we find that pouch adoption substantially reduces phone use as measured by GPS pings and teacher reports. In the first year after adoption, disciplinary incidents increase and student subjective well-being falls, consistent with short-term disruption. However, effects on well-being become positive in later y..

We study optimal policy in a dynamic general equilibrium model where heterogeneous monopolistic competitive firms pay a fixed cost to adopt a frontier technology that grows exogenously. Using Mean Field Games tools, we show that the optimal policy consists of exactly two time-invariant subsidies: one correcting the static misallocation from market power, and one correcting the dynamic under-incentive to adopt. This holds outside of balanced growth paths, for any initial distribution of technology gaps. We analyze a simplified version of the model that aggregates to a Neoclassical Growth Model with an S-shaped production function whenever complementarities are strong, and fully characterize w..

We use establishment-level data to examine the relation between corporate taxes and financial distress. Using a border discontinuity design, we document that higher corporate income tax rates significantly increase financial distress, particularly for geographically concentrated firms, with sizable spillovers across establishments. We further investigate how taxes affect establishment-level financial distress by exploiting the interest limitation rule introduced by the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Using a difference-in-differences design, we find that affected firms experience a decline in financial distress. This occurs because the reduced tax advantage of debt induces firms to deleverage, r..