Microevidence of Labor Costs on Producer Prices

Microevidence of Labor Costs on Producer Prices

by Benjamin Schoefer (UC Berkeley) & Michael Weber (University of Chicago Booth School of Business)

How do changes in labor costs, including minimum wages, affect producer prices and ultimately inflation? The answer to this core question in macroeconomics and labor economics has proved elusive because of data constraints. This project exploits micro data underlying the Bureau of Labor Statistics Producer Price Index to construct a set of industry- and location-specific producer price indices. Those indices enable us to measure the pass-through of labor costs into producer prices in a series of new double and triple difference identification designs.

Topics

Development

Initiatives

International Trade & Development

Indirect Rule

Indirect Rule

By Raul Sanchez de la Sierra

For a draft of the paper, see here.

To rule populations of newly conquered territories, states have historically faced an institutional design problem. To collect taxes and tributes, for surveillance to avoid tax evasion and attempts to subvert their power, and to control disputes and justice, states often created their own administration – direct rule. Historically, however, a large number of states have ruled instead by delegating power to the traditional political institutions that pre-existed among the newly conquered peoples prior to their conquest – indirect rule (Claessen and Skalnik, 1978, Cohen and Service, 1978). This choice had important consequences for state development: while direct rule implies the creation of persistent administrative state capacity as documented by historians, indirect rule, however, does not. Furthermore, indirect rule has often had profound detrimental effects on the institutions in the long-run (Acemoglu, Chaves, Osafo-Kwaako, and Robinson, 2014). A fundamental challenge with existing cross-country empirical work is that the number of recorded country level episodes of this institutional change is small, and experiences are very context-dependent, so it has proven difficult to systematically understand the sources, or impacts, of indirect rule. We collect a novel dis- aggregated panel data set covering the histories of 1,200 Chiefs in 200 villages, and dozens of armed groups of eastern Congo since 1990, where 80 armed groups are active today, regularly expand their territory, and develop direct and indirect rule in different locations. We exploit variation over time and space of the institutions of rule created by armed groups and changes in the economic and political environment to explain when armed groups are more likely to develop their own administration to substitute for Chiefs (direct rule), the depth and duration of their administration, and when they create indirect rule instead. We further collect implicit association tests on households, and estimate the effect of indirect rule (and of direct rule) in the long-run, on the legitimacy of local authorities, the state, and the ruling military actor.

Topics

Development

Initiatives

International Trade & Development

E-Commerce Integration and Economic Development: Evidence from China

E-Commerce Integration and Economic Development: Evidence from China

by Ben Faber, Victor Couture, Lizhi Li and Yizhen Gu 

For a draft of the paper, see here.

The number of people buying and selling products online in China has grown from practically zero in 2000 to more than 400 million by 2015. Most of this growth has occurred in cities. In this context, the Chinese government recently announced the expansion of e-commerce to the countryside as a policy priority with the aim to close the rural-urban economic divide. As part of this agenda, the government entered a collaboration with one of the largest Chinese e-commerce platforms through which consumers and producers can buy and sell products of all kinds. The program aims to provide the necessary transport logistics to ship products to and sell products from tens of thousands of villages that were largely unconnected to e-commerce. As part of this operation, the firm installs an e-commerce terminal at a central village location where households can buy and sell products through the terminal manager’s account. This paper combines a new collection of survey and transaction microdata with a randomized control trial (RCT) across villages that we implement in collaboration with the Chinese e-commerce firm. We use this empirical setting to provide evidence on the potential of e-commerce integration to foster economic development in the countryside, the underlying channels and the distribution of the gains from e-commerce across households and villages. 

See poster here.

Topics

Development

Initiatives

International Trade & Development

Firm Dynamics and Cities

Firm Dynamics and Cities

by David Sraer & Cecile Gaubert

On average, firms are more productive in larger cities. The typical interpretation of this finding relies on a combination of a selection effect and agglomeration externalities. Empirically, these explanations have been tested in the context of static models (Combes et al. (2012)). This project will dig further into the question of the productivity advantage of large cities by considering the dynamics of firm productivity across cities. The selection effect documented in the literature can materialize both at firm entry (more productive entrepreneurs decide to start firms in larger cities) as well at firm exit (exiting firms have larger productivity in larger cities). Agglomeration externalities can affect the level of firm productivity, as is standard in the literature, but can also affect firm growth. This project builds on a very unique dataset, which consists of the exhaustive firm registry in France that records the location, industry and number of employee at creation of all firms registered in France between 1987 and 2007. The analysis will also rely on a model of firms entry, exit and dynamics a la Hopenhayn (1992), that includes agglomeration externalities, local labor markets as well as local competition for firms operating in the non-tradable sector. The model will highlight how agglomeration economies and firm selection shape the productivity distribution of firms operating in different cities, and in particular should help us derive an estimation strategy to recover the different parameters governing the model, such as the agglomeration externality parameter, the local demand parameters.
The hope is for this project to allow for a better understanding of agglomeration externalities, and in particular how they interact with firm dynamics. This is a novel aspect of this well-studied question. Beyond agglomeration externalities, decomposing more precisely where the productivity advantage of large cities is coming from is important from an urban policy perspective. The optimal design of public transfers to firms located in different cities may well depend on firm age, if cities affect firms differently at different point in their life-cycle. Addressing these questions is the purpose of this research project.

Topics

Development

Initiatives

International Trade & Development

Do Antitakeover Laws Affect Technological Change? International Evidence

Do Antitakeover Laws Affect Technological Change? International Evidence

by Ross Levine

Does removing impediments to corporate takeovers spur, slow, or have no effect on technological innovation? This research will provide the first international evaluation of whether and how antitakeover laws affect innovation. The research will use data on changes in laws governing corporate takeovers over the period from 1976 through 2006 for 97 countries. The research will use data on patents and citations to those patents to measure innovation. Preliminary results suggest that reducing legal and regulatory barriers to takeovers accelerates innovation.

Topics

Capital flows

Initiatives

Financial Globalization