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Social ties at work and effort choice: experimental evidence from Tanzania
Chegere, M. ; Falco, P. ; Menzel, Andreas
Many firms hire workers via social networks. Whether workers who are socially connected to their employers exert more effort on the job is an unsettled debate. We address this question through a novel experiment with small-business owners in Tanzania. Participants are paired with a worker who conducts a real-effort task, and receive a payoff that depends on the worker’s effort. Some business owners are randomly paired with workers they are socially connected with, while others are paired with strangers. With a design that is sufficiently powered to detect economically meaningful effects, we find that being socially connected to one’s employer does not affect workers’ effort.\n
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Sexual-orientation discrimination and biological attributions: experimental evidence from Russia
Baghumyan, Gayane
Understanding what drives discriminatory behavior is important in order to identify the best strategy to combat it. In this study, I exogenously manipulate participants’ beliefs about the origins of sexual orientation by providing evidence that supports biological causes of homosexuality. I employ money allocation tasks to measure discrimination. This allows me to causally identify the impact of information on discriminatory behavior. I first document the prevalence of discrimination against individuals with same-sex partners in Russia. On average, roughly 54% of participants exhibit discriminatory behavior against profiles with same-sex partners by allocating 16 percentage points less money to them. Further, the results suggest that exposure to evidence on the biological causes of homosexuality negatively affects discriminatory behavior. Participants in the treatment group allocate less money to profiles with same-sex partners, relative to participants in the baseline group. Potential rationales for this behavior could include the following: (i) the provision of information that contradicts existing beliefs might cause cognitive dissonance, triggering irritation and intensifying discriminatory tendencies, (ii) the information might foster beliefs that individuals in same-sex partnerships are fundamentally ’other’ - even at a biological level - thereby widening the perceived social gap between participants and these sexual minority groups and fostering discrimination further.
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The long-term impact of energy poverty and its mitigation on educational attainment: evidence from China
Martirosyan, Yervand
Existing studies demonstrate the short-run connection between environmental conditions and academic performance. However, the long-term effects of exposure to adverse living conditions on academic achievement remain underexplored. This study investigates the long-term impact of energy poverty, and policy interventions aimed at alleviating it, on the academic performance of Chinese schoolchildren starting from infancy. It specifically utilizes the Huai River Policy, which provides free winter heating exclusively to northern regions in China but not to adjacent southern regions. My findings suggest a significant positive influence of winter heating on schoolchildren’s academic performance, with a more pronounced effect for children born during winter months. The insights gained from this research could inform policy debates to enhance educational outcomes and human well-being.\n
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Quantitative easing in the euro area: implications for income and wealth inequality
Stojanović, Dušan
This study examines how and to what extent quantitative easing of the ECB affects household income and wealth inequality in the euro area. Previous theoretical models have investigated the dynamics of inequality measures through differential access of households to financial/capital market (the portfolio rebalancing channel), neglecting the labor market differential (the earnings heterogeneity channel). Although the portfolio rebalancing channel may provide insight into wealth inequality and non-labor income inequality, this is not the case with labor (and thus total) income inequality. To be in line with the empirical evidence on labor income inequality, this study also considers segmented labor market on the basis of capital-skill complementarity in production and asymmetric real wage rigidities. When only financial market segmentation is considered, the quantitative results indicate a drop in total income inequality that is diminished over time, while wealth inequality experiences a rise that gradually becomes weaker. The introduction of the segmented labor market significantly mitigates the observed drop in total income inequality, while a rise in wealth inequality is largely amplified. Given the possible broadening of the ECB’s mandate towards distributional issues in the future, the analysis of segmented labor and financial markets can be more beneficial to the ECB as it provides a clearer picture of the inequality effects.
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The effects of government spending in segmented labor and financial markets
Stojanović, Dušan
This paper develops a model with high-skilled and low-skilled workers to show the expansionary effects of government spending despite large training costs for new hires. The main idea is that a fiscal stimulus induces changes in the composition of the labor force conditional on the extent of aggregate demand pressure. A period of high aggregate demand pressure is followed by a high value of forgone output as training activity causes production disruption. In this period firms decide to hire more low-skilled workers, who constitute a cheaper part of the labor force. When aggregate demand pressure is diminished, firms switch to hiring more high-skilled workers. However, the current literature considers only high-skilled workers, who tend to increase saving in government bonds to protect against poor employment prospects. In this case, the combination of weak employment prospects and the crowding-out effects of higher lump-sum taxes and government debt on private consumption and capital investment gives rise to recessionary effects. In contrast, this paper provides a model with a more realistic labor and financial market structure and suggests that countercyclical government spending in the form of government consumption and especially government investment can be used to deal with recessions.\n
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The price of war: macroeconomic and cross-sectional effects of sanctions on Russia
Mamonov, Mikhail ; Pestova, Anna
How much do sanctions harm the sanctioned economy? We examine the case of Russia, which has faced three major waves of international sanctions over the last decade (in 2014, 2017, and 2022). In a VAR model of the Russian economy, we first apply sign restrictions to isolate shocks to international credit supply to proxy for the financial sanctions shocks. We provide a microeconomic foundation for the sign restriction approach by exploiting the syndicated loan deals in Russia. We then explore the effects of the overall sanctions shocks (financial, trade, technological, etc.) by employing a high-frequency identification (HFI) approach. Our HFI is based on each OFAC/EU sanction announcement and the associated daily changes in the yield-to-maturity of Russia’s US dollar-denominated sovereign bonds. Our macroeconomic estimates indicate that Russia’s GDP may have lost no more than 0.8% due to the financial sanctions shock, and up to 3.2% due to the overall sanctions shock cumulatively over the 2014–2015 period. In 2017, the respective effects are 0 and 0.5%, and in 2022, they are 8 and 12%. Our cross-sectional estimates show that the real income of richer households declines by 1.5–2.0% during the first year after the sanctions shock, whereas the real income of poorer households rises by 1.2% over the same period. Finally, we find that the real total revenue of large firms with high (low) TFPs declines by 2.2 (4.0)% during the first year after the sanctions shock, whereas the effects on small firms are close to zero. Overall, our results indicate heterogeneous effects of sanctions with richer households residing in big cities and larger firms with high TFPs being affected the most.
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Quo vadis? Evidence on new firm-bank matching and firm performance following “sin” bank closures
Goncharenko, R. ; Mamonov, Mikhail ; Ongena, S. ; Popova, S. ; Turdyeva, N.
In this paper, we analyze how firms search for new lenders after a financial regulator forcibly closes their prior banks, and what happens to the firms’ performance during this transition period. In 2013, the Central Bank of Russia launched a large-scale bank closure policy and started detecting fraudulent (sin) banks and revoking their licenses. By 2020, two-thirds of all operating banks had been shuttered. We analyze this unique period in history using credit register data. First, we establish that before sin bank closures, there was no informational leakage and the borrowing firms remain unaffected. After the closures, there is a clear sorting pattern: poorly-performing firms rush to other (not-yet-detected) sin banks, while profitable firms transfer to financially solid banks. We find that the coupling of poorly-performing firms and not-yet-detected sin banks occurs more frequently when the two sin banks (the prior and the next lender) are commonly owned or when the local banking market is unconcentrated. Finally, we show that during the transition period (i.e., after the sin bank closures and before matching to new banks), poorly-performing firms shrink in size and experience a sharp decline in borrowings and market sales, whereas profitable firms strengthen in terms of employment, investment, and market sales. A potential mechanism involves credit risk underpricing by sin banks: we find that poorly-performing firms (especially commonly owned) received loans at lower interest rates than profitable firms prior to sin bank closures.
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“Crime and punishment”? How banks anticipate and propagate global financial sanctions
Mamonov, Mikhail ; Pestova, Anna ; Ongena, S.
We study the impacts of global financial sanctions on banks and their corporate borrowers in Russia. Financial sanctions were imposed consecutively between 2014 and 2019, allowing targeted (but not-yet-sanctioned) banks to adapt their international and domestic exposures in advance. Using a staggered difference-in-differences approach with in-advance adaptation to anticipated treatment, we establish that targeted banks immediately reduced their foreign assets and actually increased their international borrowings after the first sanction announcement compared to other similar banks. We reveal that the added value of the next sanction announcements was rather limited. Despite considerable outflow of domestic private deposits, the government support prevented disorderly bank failures and resulted in credit reshuffling: the banks contracted corporate lending by 4% of GDP and increased household lending by almost the same magnitude, which mostly offset the total economic loss. Further, we introduce a two-stage treatment diffusion approach that flexibly addresses potential spillovers of the sanctions to private banks with political connections. Employing unique hand-collected board membership and bank location data, our approach shows that throughout this period, politically-connected banks were not all equally recognized as potential sanction targets. Finally, using syndicated loan data, we establish that the real negative effects of sanctions materialized only when sanctioned firms were borrowing from sanctioned banks. When borrowing from unsanctioned banks, sanctioned firms even gained in terms of employment and investment but still lost in terms of market sales pointing to a misallocation of government support.
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Extrapolative income expectations and retirement savings
Cota, Marta
Why do employees’ retirement contributions gradually increase throughout their careers? This paper uses a structural life-cycle model based on household expectations data to explain workers’ retirement contribution decisions. The Michigan Survey of Consumers data shows that young households extrapolate from their recent income realizations and overstate the persistence and volatility of their future income. The structural life-cycle model with extrapolative expectations quantifies the difference in retirement contribution rates compared to rational expectations. Contrary to rational workers, extrapolative workers’ contributions match the data on retirement contributions over the life cycle. Consequently, mandating automatic enrollment yields negligible effects on retirement savings.
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Racial discrimination and lost innovation: evidence from US inventors, 1895–1925
Coluccia, D. M. ; Dossi, G. ; Ottinger, Sebastian
How can racial discrimination harm innovation? We study this question using data on US inventors linked to population censuses in 1895-1925. Our novel identification strategy leverages plausibly exogenous variation in the timing of lynchings and the name of the victims. We find an immediate and persistent decrease in patents granted to inventors who share their names with the victims of lynchings, but only when victims are Black. We hypothesize that lynchings accentuate the racial content of the victim’s name to patent examiners, who do not observe inventor race from patent applications. We interpret these findings as evidence of discrimination by patent examiners and provide evidence against alternative mechanisms.
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