财政政策、货币政策与国外经济援助

本文通过把国外经济援助分成直接对私人的经济援助和直接对政府的经济援助来讨论这两类经济援助对政府财政政策和货币政策的影响。我们发现对私人的经济援助的增加可以使得私人消费水平和政府公共消费水平增加 ,但是它也导致政府收入税税率和通货膨胀率的提高 ;另一方面 ,对政府的经济援助增加可以使得均衡时的私人资本存量、私人消费水平和政府公共消费水平增加 ,同时可以使得均衡时的收入税税率和通货膨胀率下降。     

INSTABILITY AND THE INCENTIVES FOR CORRUPTION

We investigate the relationship between corruption and political stability, from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. We propose a model of incumbent behavior that features the interplay of two effects: a horizon effect , whereby greater instability leads the incumbent to embezzle more during his short window of opportunity, and a demand effect , by which the private sector is more willing to bribe stable incumbents. The horizon effect dominates at low levels of stability, because firms are unwilling to pay high bribes and unstable incumbents have strong incentives to embezzle, whereas the demand effect gains salience in more stable regimes. Together, these two effects generate a non-monotonic, U-shaped relationship between total corruption and stability. On the empirical side, we find a robust U-shaped pattern between country indices of corruption perception and various measures of incumbent stability, including historically observed average tenures of chief executives and governing parties: regimes that are very stable or very unstable display higher levels of corruption when compared with those in an intermediate range of stability. These results suggest that minimizing corruption may require an electoral system that features some re-election incentives, but with an eventual term limit.     

Why volunteer? Evidence on the role of altruism,image, and incentives

We examine motivations for prosocial behavior using new data on volunteer firefighters that contain a dictator game based measure of altruism, surveyed measures of other behavioral factors, and call records that provide an objective measure of time spent volunteering. Controlling for a variety of other explanations, we find that the decision to volunteer is positively correlated with altruism as well as with concern for social reputation or “image.” Moreover, by utilizing variation in the presence and level of small stipends paid to the firefighters, we find that the positive effect of monetary incentives declines with image concerns, supporting a prediction that extrinsic incentives can crowd out image motivation for prosocial behavior.     

Regulation,reputation, and environmental risk

This paper examines how preferences for social reputation affect the design of monetary incentives in an efficient mechanism for environmental risk. Our results are a high reputation firm receives less than optimal transfer; the low reputation firm sacrifices information rent.     

Democracy,Rule of Law,Corruption Incentives,and Growth

We bridge the gap between the standard theory of growth and the mostly static theory of corruption. Some public investment can be diverted from its purpose by corrupt individuals. Voters determine the level of public investment subject to an incentive constraint equalizing the returns from productive and corrupt activities. We concentrate on two exogenous institutional parameters: the “technology of corruption” is the ease with which rent‐seekers can capture a proportion of public spending. The “concentration of political power” is the extent to which rent‐seekers have more political influence than other people. One theoretical prediction is that the effects of the two institutional parameters on income growth and equilibrium corruption are different according to the constraints that are binding at equilibrium. In particular, the effect of judicial quality on growth should be stronger when political power is concentrated. We estimate a system of equations where both corruption and income growth are determined simultaneously and show that income growth is more affected by our proxies for legal and political institutions in countries where political rights and judicial institutions, respectively, are limited.     

The wage effects of training in Portugal: differences across skill groups,genders, sectors and training types

This article investigates the determinants and wage effects of training in Portugal. In a first stage, we show that there are considerable differences in training participation across groups of workers, with elder and low educated individuals participating substantially less. In a second stage, we show that training has a positive and significant impact on wages. The estimated wage return is about 30% for men and 38% for women. Discriminating between levels of education and working experience and the public and private sector reveals important differences across categories of workers. We find that women, low educated workers and workers with long working experience earn larger returns from training. The average effect of training is similar in the private sector and the public sector. However, differences across experience groups are larger in the private sector, while differences across education groups are larger in the public sector. We use three alternative classifications of training activities and find that training in the firm, training aimed to improve skills needed at the current job and training with duration less than a year are associated to larger wage gains.     

Public sector motivation and development failures

This paper provides a theoretical analysis of the relationship between public sector motivation and development. In the model the public sector produces a public good and workers are heterogeneous in terms of public sector motivation (PSM). Wages in the private sector increase with the quality of the public good. In this context, public sector wage premia (PSWP) have two opposite effects: low PSWP helps screen workers with PSM into the public sector, while high PSWP helps motivate workers to be honest. Raising PSWP may not improve the quality of governance and multiple equilibria might arise. The model highlights that the relative importance of workers selection and provision of ”on the job” incentives in the public sector varies in systematic ways with wages in the private sector. We provide anecdotal and original empirical evidence consistent with the theoretical predictions and discuss some policy implications for public sector reforms in developing countries.     

Modelling the dynamics of corruption and unemployment with heterogeneous labour

This paper presents an endogenous growth model with heterogeneous labour, endogenous unemployment, and public sector corruption. Unlike most previous studies, the model does not separate public officials and private individuals into two distinct groups. Instead, taking up bureaucratic appointment as a public servant is modelled as an occupational choice, which then allows for the endogenous determination of the proportion of public officials, the share of corrupt officials among them, and the public investment efficiency of the economy. The dynamics of endogenous corruption and unemployment are studied using numerical policy experiments based on a stylized representation of a middle-income African economy with high corruption and unemployment. The main finding is that, large-scale public infrastructure push has no effect on raising growth in an economy with high corruption. However, if preceded by social and anti-corruption policies that successfully induce a structural change, it will then be effective in raising growth.     

Endogenous supply of fiat money

We consider whether reputation concerns can discipline the behavior of a long-lived self-interested agent who has a monopoly over the provision of fiat money. We obtain that when this agent can commit to a choice of money supply, there is a monetary equilibrium where it never overissues. We show, however, that monetary equilibria with no overissue do not exist when there is no commitment. This happens because the incentives this agent has to maintain a reputation for providing valuable currency disappear once its reputation is high enough. More generally, we prove that in the absence of commitment overissue happens infinitely often in any monetary equilibrium. We conclude by showing that imperfect memory can restore the positive result obtained with commitment.     

Corruption,workforce selection and mismatch in the public sector

We examine the impact of corruption on workforce selection and personnel allocation in the public sector. Using Italian data, we find that the selection of public employees in terms of human capital worsens in comparison to that of their private sector counterparts in areas with higher levels of corruption. Moreover, corruption is associated with educational mismatch in the allocation of human resources and, in particular, with an increase in the rate of under-qualification. These results are robust to several alternative indicators and specifications, including IV estimation using past dependence on public spending and the historical relevance of foreign domination as exogenous sources of variation for current corruption.     

声誉、认同与组织动态

笔者刻画了维系社会经济组织运行的两种机制:集体声誉和个体声誉的互动,与内化的价值和组织认同.第一种机制表明:组织声誉对组织的成员具有激励效应,一个组织的声誉租金越高,这个组织中的成员就会越诚实可靠.第二种机制表明:组织成员对这个组织的认同感越强,那么它自己违规的激励就越小,而且还会有更强的激励来惩治其他违规的成员.笔者最后还讨论了对中国社会转型的含义.     

Managerial compensation and incentives in for-profit and nonprofit hospitals

Differential economic behavior of for-profit and nonprofit institutionscan be manifest in both output and input markets. When behaviorin output markets is difficult to observe, behavior in inputmarkets can be useful proxies. We examine monetary compensationand its composition between base salary and bonus, and the associatedincentive structures, in the U.S. hospital industry. Our datapermit controlling for interinstitutional differences in thescope and complexity of jobs having the same titles, as wellas differences in organization size and other variables. Wefind (1) total monetary compensation for the two top executivejobs is substantially higher in the for-profit sector; and (2)the composition of compensation as between base salary and bonusdiffers materially across forms of organization, bonuses beingabsolutely and relatively greater in the for-profit sector.Particularly noteworthy is the finding that for-profit hospitalsutilize compensation mechanisms that, by involving larger contingentcomponents, provide stronger incentives - greater rewards -as compared with nonprofit hospitals, for performance that ismore easily monitored. While our findings are consistent withmore than one model of comparative organizations differ in theirgoals and, hence, in the kinds of managers they demand and thereward structures they offer. Nonprofit organizations may pursueobjectives that reflect greater concern about collective goodsor other outputs that are more difficult to measure and reward.Alternatively, nonprofits, confronted by a nondistribution constrainton the payout of profit to managers, may lack incentives forefficiency, and so may pursue other goals such as a quiet life.Such differential objective functions, together with the differentialconstraints on the distribution of profit to managers, havetwo kinds of implications. (1) Nonprofit and for-profit organizationsmay attract different kinds of managers, especially at the toplevels, because nonprofits prefer working for a nonprofit organizationand, hence, may offer a lower supply price to them. (2) Thetwo types of organizations can be expected to offer differentialcomposition of compensation as between base salary and performance-basedbonus, providing different incentives for managers. Our analysisis positive in character, the goal being to identify systematicdifferences in organization behavior.     

Informality,public employment and employment protection in developing countries

This paper proposes an equilibrium matching model for developing countries’ labor markets where the interaction between public, formal private and informal private sectors are taken into account. Theoretical analysis shows that gains from reforms aiming at liberalizing formal labor markets can be annulled by shifts in the public sector employment and wage policies. Since the public sector accounts for a substantial share of employment in developing countries, this approach is crucial to understand the main labor market outcomes of such economies. Wages offered by the public sector increase the outside option value of the workers during the bargaining processes in the formal and informal sectors. It becomes more profitable for workers to search on-the-job, in order to move to these more attractive and more stable types of jobs. The public sector therefore acts as an additional tax for the formal private firms. Using data on workers’ flows from Egypt, we show empirically and theoretically that the liberalization of labor markets plays against informal employment by increasing the profitability, and hence job creations, of formal jobs. The latter effect is however dampened or even sometimes nullified by the increase of the offered wages in the public sector observed at the same time.     

Corruption and Reputation

This paper examines corruption in a random matching game where past actions are imperfectly observed and players have the option to continue trading with their existing partners. It shows that the effect of individual reputations for honesty may outweigh the effect of a bad collective reputation depending on the expected value of a continued match relative to the corruption gain.     

Individualism–collectivism,governance and economic development

While an individualist society prizes personal control, autonomy and individual accomplishments, a collectivist one puts a premium on loyalty and cohesion and imposes mutual obligations in the context of in-groups. It has been argued that, in contrast to collectivism, individualism will promote economic development directly by sharpening individual incentives to invest, innovate and accumulate wealth. In this article, I argue that the individualist–collectivist dimension can also affect development through its impact on the quality of government. The in-group favoritism inherent to collectivist societies is likely to engender corruption, nepotism and clientelism in the public sphere. In individualist societies, the relative weakness of in-group pressures and an emphasis on personal achievement and worth will contribute towards a more meritocratic and efficient public sector to the benefit of long-run growth. Empirical evidence is provided suggesting that insofar as individualism affects economic development it does so because it promotes good governance.     

科研经费腐败社会网络:属性、类型与结构

由于管理者和使用者分离,集体腐败逐渐演变为科研经费腐败行为的主流形式,越来越多地呈现出社会网络的相关结构及特征,因而可以将嵌入载体和运作路径作为解析科研经费腐败网络的两个重要变量。嵌入载体表达的是腐败网络建构和生成的场域,以此区分科研经费腐败行为中不同个体之间的联结机制究竟是通过公共权力还是私人关系,而运作路径则用于区分行为主体实施腐败的过程是直接或是间接。根据这两项重要变量,可以划分出4种不同结构的科研经费腐败网络类型,即公职人员自体腐败网络、公共组织寻租网络、科研人员自体腐败网络以及科研人员—中介网络,这4类科研经费腐败网络较为全面地概括出了当前我国科研经费腐败的共谋方式,据此提出了科研经费腐败防治的相关对策建议。     

Crowdfunding and social influence: an empirical investigation

The literature so far provides no in-depth investigation of the determinants of decisions to contribute to crowdfunding platforms. The present article draws on work measuring the decisions and prosocial behaviours of individuals in relation to public goods, and uses survey data on crowdfunding behaviour. We surveyed an original sample of individuals in France to explore individual decisions and amounts of funding chosen to support a creative project. We show that in non-equity crowdfunding contributing money is associated with altruism. Our findings suggest that the ‘warm glow’ effect influences the level of the contribution; we show also those monetary incentives could ‘crowd out’ the decisions to contribute of crowdfunders. Our study has some implications for business strategy since understanding why people contribute adds to our knowledge about the incentives that might encourage them to increase their contributions, and allows predictions about how changes to how crowdfunding platforms are managed might affect individual incentives to give.     

Knowledge Market Design: A Field Experiment at Google Answers

In a field experiment at Google Answers, we investigate the performance of price‐based online knowledge markets by systematically manipulating prices. Specifically, we study the effects of price, tip, and a reputation system on both an answerer's effort and answer quality by posting real reference questions from the Internet Public Library on Google Answers under different pricing schemes. We find that a higher price leads to a significantly longer, but not better, answer, while an answerer with a higher reputation provides significantly better answers. Our results highlight the limitation of monetary incentives and the importance of reputation systems in knowledge market design.     

The Demand for, and Impact of, Learning HIV Status

This paper evaluates an experiment in which individuals in rural Malawi were randomly assigned monetary incentives to learn their HIV results after being tested. Distance to the HIV results centers was also randomly assigned. Without any incentive, 34 percent of the participants learned their HIV results. However, even the smallest incentive doubled that share. Using the randomly assigned incentives and distance from results centers as instruments for the knowledge of HIV status, sexually active HIV-positive individuals who learned their results are three times more likely to purchase condoms two months later than sexually active HIV-positive individuals who did not learn their results; however, HIV-positive individuals who learned their results purchase only two additional condoms than those who did not. There is no significant effect of learning HIV-negative status on the purchase of condoms.     

Electoral cycles in perceived corruption: International empirical evidence

I examine whether elections influence perceived corruption in the public sector. Perceived corruption in the public sector is measured by the reversed Transparency International's Perception of Corruption Index (CPI). The dataset includes around 100 democracies over the period 2012–2016, a sample for which the CPI is comparable across countries and over time. The results show that the reversed CPI was about 0.4 points higher in election years than in other years, indicating that perceived corruption in the public sector increased before elections. The effect is especially pronounced before early elections (1.0 points) compared to regular elections (0.4 points). Future research needs to investigate why perceived corruption in the public sector increased before elections.