National Bureau of Economic Research

About: National Bureau of Economic Research is a nonprofit organization based out in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Monetary policy & Population. The organization has 2626 authors who have published 34177 publications receiving 2818124 citations. The organization is also known as: NBER & The National Bureau of Economic Research.

Manipulation of the Running Variable in the Regression Discontinuity Design: A Density Test

Abstract: Standard sufficient conditions for identification in the regression discontinuity design are continuity of the conditional expectation of counterfactual outcomes in the running variable. These continuity assumptions may not be plausible if agents are able to manipulate the running variable. This paper develops a test of manipulation related to continuity of the running variable density function. The methodology is applied to popular elections to the House of Representatives, where sorting is neither expected nor found, and to roll-call voting in the House, where sorting is both expected and found.

Equipment Investment and Economic Growth

Abstract: Using data from the United Nations Comparison Project and the Penn World Table, we find that machinery and equipment investment has a strong association with growth: over l9&)?l95 each percent of GDP invested in equipment is associated with an increase in GDP growth of 1/3 a percentage point per year. This is a much stronger association than found between growth and any of the other components of investment. A variety of considerations suggest that this association is causal, that higher equipment investment drives faster growth, and that the social return to equipment investment in well functioning market economies is on the order of 30 percent per year.

Globalization, Outsourcing, and Wage Inequality

Abstract: There is considerable debate over whether international trade has contributed to the declining economic fortunes of less skilled workers One issue that has become lost in the current discussion is how firms respond to import competition and how these responses, in turn, are transmitted to the labor market In previous work, we have argued that outsourcing, by which we mean the import of intermediate inputs by domestic firms, has contributed to an increase in the relative demand for skilled labor in the United States If firms respond to import competition from low-wage countries by moving non- skill-intensive activities abroad, then trade will shift employment towards skilled workers within industries In this paper, we extend our previous work by combining new import data from the revised NBER trade database with disaggregated data on input purchases from the Census of Manufactures We construct industry-by-industry estimates of outsourcing for the period 1972-1990 and reexamine whether outsourcing has contributed to an increase in relative demand for skilled labor Our main finding is that outsourcing can account for 31-51% of the increase in the relative demand for skilled labor that occurred in US manufacturing industries during the 1980s, compared to our previous estimate of 15-33%

The Real Effects of Financial Constraints: Evidence from a Financial Crisis

Abstract: We survey 1,050 CFOs in the US, Europe, and Asia to directly assess whether their firms are credit constrained during the global financial crisis of 2008 We study whether corporate spending plans differ conditional on this survey-based measure of financial constraint Our evidence indicates that constrained firms planned deeper cuts in tech spending, employment, and capital spending Constrained firms also burned through more cash, drew more heavily on lines of credit for fear banks would restrict access in the future, and sold more assets to fund their operations We also find that the inability to borrow externally caused many firms to bypass attractive investment opportunities, with 86% of constrained US CFOs saying their investment in attractive projects was restricted during the credit crisis of 2008 More than half of the respondents said they canceled or postponed their planned investments Our results also hold in Europe and Asia, and in many cases are stronger in those economies Our analysis adds to the portfolio of approaches and knowledge about the impact of credit constraints on real firm behavior

Family Migration Decisions

Abstract: This paper joins a few very recent attempts to analyze migration in the awareness of the family context. In contrast to most of them, my focus is exclusively on the family context. The paper defines family ties relevant to migration decisions and explains their effects on the probability of migration, on consequent changes in employment and earnings of family members, as well as on family integrity itself. Hopefully, the paper provides material for a missing chapter on family economics as well as an addition to the economics of labor supply arid of human capital formation.