Quarterly Journal of Economics

We present a theory of choice in which attention to the features of options is determined by the decision maker’s categorization of the current problem in a set of problems she solved in the past. Categorization depends on goal-relevant and contextual problem-level features. The model yields heterogeneity in attention and choice in a given problem based on different past experiences and instability when changes in irrelevant context cause re-categorization. We show that heterogeneous and unstable representations of a choice problem unify major biases in judgment and decision making.

我们提出一种选择理论，其中对选项特征的注意力由特征的显著性和目标相关性决定。决策者有选择性地关注某些特征维度，基于这些关注的特征做出选择。该理论统一了选择文献中的多个异象，并为理解框架效应和偏好逆转提供了认知基础。我们通过一系列实验检验了理论的核心预测。

Stock markets play a dual role: they provide information about firms’ fundamentals, which improves resource allocations, and they provide liquidity. We propose a setting in which these two roles interact: if stocks are used more intensively for liquidity, then prices reveal less information about fundamentals. We structurally estimate stock price informativeness for several countries and show that it declines when alternative liquidity sources, such as banks, are in distress. To study the real effects of this mechanism, we devise a strategy to integrate our stock-trading module into a dynamic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous firms. We calibrate the model to the US and simulate recessions with and without banking distress. In a stand-alone recession, prices become more informative, and allocation improves, mitigating output losses by 4.4%. If the recession coincides with banking distress, agents rely more on stock markets to obtain liquidity, prices become less informative, and allocation deteriorates, magnifying output losses by 22%.

股票市场发挥双重作用：提供企业基本面的信息，以及为投资者提供流动性。本文研究这两个功能之间的相互作用如何产生经济周期。我们构建了一个理论模型，其中资产价格包含关于生产率的信息，但流动性冲击可能导致价格偏离基本面，进而通过信息渠道影响实际投资和产出。

Theory predicts that outsourcing public services to the private sector can reduce costs and improve efficiency, but can also induce cost-cutting and compromise quality. We assess the Brazilian “Organizações Sociais de Saude” model (OSS), which outsources management of public hospital services to the private sector while the state remains the residual claimant. We show that this enhances hospital production and operational efficiency without adverse effects on hospital quality and equity. Increased inpatient production addresses previously unmet demand, expanding local access to hospital care and reducing population mortality. Performance gains arise from improved operational efficiency achieved through increased hospital management capacity. This facilitates staffing adjustments, favoring higher-skilled personnel, dismissing lower-productivity staff, and adopting flexible, performance-tied employment contracts. Effects are larger among private organizations with more management experience, underscoring returns to managerial capacity. Our findings show that incentive-ownership structures can address the quantity-quality trade-off in public service delivery, even when contracts are incomplete and quality is hard to measure.

理论预测将公共服务外包给私营部门可以降低成本，但也可能降低质量。我们利用一项将公共服务随机分配给公私混合提供的大型政策改革来检验这一权衡。结果表明私人管理确实降低了成本，但对服务质量的影响取决于合约设计的细节和市场的竞争程度。

How does proximity to coworkers affect training and productivity? We study software engineers at a Fortune 500 firm from 2019 to 2024, leveraging two shocks to proximity: (i) the office closures in 2020 and (ii) the subsequent return-to-office mandates in 2022 and 2023. In both cases, co-located teams experienced bigger changes in proximity than distributed ones, facilitating difference-in-differences designs. We find that sitting near teammates increases coding feedback by 18.3% and improves code quality. Gains are concentrated among less-tenured and younger employees, who are building human capital. However, there is a tradeoff: experienced engineers write less code when sitting near teammates. In national US data, we find evidence that the rise of remote work has had scarring effects on young college graduates. In remotable jobs, young graduates’ unemployment rate increased relative to older graduates’ post-pandemic (2022−2024) compared to pre-pandemic (2017−2019), a pattern we do not observe in non-remotable jobs.

本文研究物理接近性对员工生产率和学习的影响。利用大型科技公司办公室分配的准随机变动，我们发现坐得近的员工之间产生了显著的知识溢出效应，特别是从资深员工向初级员工的溢出。这些效应在工作任务复杂性更高时更强。

This paper investigates how a government should manage international reserves when it faces the risk of a rollover crisis. We ask, should the government accumulate reserves or reduce debt to make itself less vulnerable? We show that the optimal policy entails initially reducing debt, followed by a subsequent increase in both debt and reserves as the government approaches a safe zone. Furthermore, we find that issuing additional debt to accumulate reserves can lead to a reduction in sovereign spreads. Evidence from a panel of emerging economies is consistent with these predictions: increases in reserves financed by public external borrowing are associated with lower spreads, and reserve holdings are not systematically drawn down during crisis episodes.

本文研究主权国家如何在面临债务展期风险时管理其国际储备。我们构建了一个动态模型，展期危机可能迫使主权国家以不利条件进行再融资。最优储备政策需要在预防危机的收益与持有储备的机会成本之间权衡。模型解释了新兴经济体储备积累的经验规律。

We study rainmaking as an instrumental religious belief. We present a model in which a religious leader tries to persuade people to believe. Praying for rain can persuade only where the hazard of rainfall during a dry spell is increasing over time, so that prayer is most likely to succeed when people most want rain. We present evidence from prayers for rain in Murcia, Spain, where the hazard rate is increasing, that the church’s prayers for rain predict rainfall over two centuries. To generalize this finding, we gather an original data set of whether ethnic groups around the world traditionally prayed for rain. We find that ethnic groups facing an increasing rainfall hazard are 47% more likely to pray for rain, consistent with our model’s prediction that societies are more likely to pray for rain where prayer is persuasive.

本文研究宗教活动如何作为应对经济不确定性的机制。利用干旱作为外生冲击，我们考察农业社区中宗教参与的变化。结果表明，干旱显著增加了宗教参与和宗教捐赠，表明宗教在提供非正式保险和心理慰藉方面发挥着重要作用。

This study examines how the American Medical Association (AMA) helped shape the development of the U.S. health insurance system in the critical period after World War II. Working with the political public relations firm Campaigns, Inc., the AMA launched a nationwide campaign to weaken support for National Health Insurance by framing it as “socialized medicine,” while simultaneously enrolling people in private health insurance plans to shift demand away from a public alternative. Drawing on newly assembled archival data, we find that greater exposure to the campaign explains about 20% of the rise in private health insurance enrollment and a comparable decline in public support for a national program. The campaign also appears to have influenced policymaking through coordinated messaging, resolutions passed by civic organizations, congressional rhetoric, and political donations. These findings suggest that the rise of private health insurance in the United States was not solely due to macroeconomic forces or collective bargaining; rather it was also enabled by a strategic, interest group-financed effort to shape citizen views and influence policy.

本文探讨美国为何在发达国家中独树一帜缺乏全民健康保险。通过历史分析和政治经济学模型，我们追溯了从罗斯福新政到奥巴马医改的医疗改革尝试。关键因素包括种族政治、分散化的政治制度和利益集团的强大影响。

Since 1967, all French firms with more than 100 employees have been required to share a fraction of their excess profits with their employees. Through this scheme, firms with excess profits distribute, on average, 10.5% of their pre-tax income to workers. In 1990, the eligibility threshold was reduced to 50 employees. We exploit this regulatory change to identify the effects of mandated profit-sharing on firms and their employees. The cost of mandated profit-sharing for firms is evident in the significant bunching at the 100-employee threshold observed prior to the reform, which completely disappears post-reform. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, we find that, at the firm level, mandated profit-sharing (a) increases the labor share by 1.8 percentage points, (b) reduces the profit share by 1.4 percentage points, and (c) has small to non-existent effects on investment and productivity. At the employee level, mandated profit-sharing increases lower-skilled workers’ total compensation and leaves high-skilled workers’ total compensation unchanged. Overall, mandated profit-sharing redistributes excess profits to lower-skilled workers in the firm without generating significant distortions or productivity effects.

本文利用法国强制利润分享政策的准实验变化，研究利润分享对工人和企业的影响。结果表明，强制利润分享增加了工人收入，但对就业和投资没有显著负面影响，表明效率工资效应可能抵消了传统的劳动成本顾虑。

Motivated by recent concerns surrounding the use of third-party pricing algorithms by competing firms, we study repeated Bertrand competition where market demand or the cost of serving the market is observed by an intermediary (or “algorithm”) that selectively discloses demand or cost information to maximize firms’ collusive profit. We show that an upper censorship disclosure policy is optimal, which leads to price rigidity and supra-monopoly prices in some states. Improving the algorithm’s accuracy reduces expected consumer surplus whenever it does so under monopoly pricing. When the state is positively correlated over time, the algorithm discloses more information when recent demand was lower or costs were higher. The analysis extends to a generalized model that accommodates product differentiation and capacity constraints. We relate our findings to recent antitrust cases.

本文研究当企业可以最优选择信息公开程度时，合谋的可持续性。我们证明，在重复博弈框架下，最优信息披露可以使企业在更广泛的市场条件下维持合谋。该理论为反垄断政策中关于信息交换的规制提供了新见解。

This paper examines the global adoption of technology in the late nineteenth century. We construct several novel datasets to test the idea that the codification of technical knowledge in the vernacular was necessary for countries to absorb the technologies of the First Industrial Revolution. We find that comparative advantage shifted to industries that could benefit from these technologies in countries and colonies with access to codified technical knowledge, but not in other regions. Using the rapid and unprecedented codification of technical knowledge in Meiji Japan as a natural experiment, we show that this pattern emerged only after the Japanese government codified vast amounts of technical knowledge. Our findings shed new light on the frictions associated with technological diffusion and offer a novel explanation for why Meiji Japan was unique among non-Western countries in successfully industrializing during the first wave of globalization.

本文研究技术知识的编码化（以书面形式记录）如何促进了工业革命从英国向欧洲大陆和世界的传播。我们发现，技术的可编码性越高，跨国传播越快。这一发现对于理解当代技术转移和全球化有重要启示。

We argue that the Democratic Party’s evolution on economic policy helps explain partisan realignment by education. First, we document that educated Americans differentially oppose “predistribution” (e.g., job guarantees, higher minimum wages, protectionism, and stronger unions), while the educational gradient for redistribution (taxes and transfers) is close to zero. These relationships have been largely unchanged since the 1940s. Second, focusing on politicians and donors as key party actors, we show that the Democratic Party has moved away from predistribution since the 1970s. The number of predistribution bills introduced by Democratic House Speakers has declined by half since the 1970s. Unions—the traditional lobbying force for predistribution—see their share of Democratic Party PAC donations decline from ninety to forty percent from 1968 to 1980, following 1970s legislation that facilitated corporate PAC donations. From 1980 onward, the Democrats rely increasingly on individual contributions from educated donors relative to the Republicans. We show the increased reliance on corporate PACs and educated donors is driven by the rise of a self-described “New Democrat’ faction particularly conservative on pre-distribution and social issues. Finally, we trace out the reaction of voters to these changes in the Democratic Party. Less-educated Americans begin to leave the party in the 1970s, after decades of serving as its base. We also show that in the crucial transition period of the 1970s through 1990s, New Democrat candidates out-perform other Democrats among more-educated voters in both survey questions and actual Congressional elections. As the New Democrats are more socially conservative than other Democrats, their success with educated voters suggests that social issues alone cannot explain educational realignment.

本文研究经济政策如何塑造了美国政治版图的党派重组。利用 20 世纪中期以来的历史数据，我们发现贸易自由化和去工业化在不同地区产生的差异化经济冲击，是导致当前党派地理格局形成的关键因素。

Do men negatively respond when women first enter an occupation? We answer this question by studying the end of one of the final explicit occupational barriers to women in the U.S.: in 2016, the U.S. military opened all positions to women, including historically male-only combat occupations. We exploit the staggered integration of women into combat units to estimate the causal effects of the introduction of female colleagues on men’s job performance, behavior, and perceptions of workplace quality, using monthly administrative personnel records and rich survey responses. We find that integrating women into previously all-male units does not negatively affect men’s performance or behavioral outcomes, including retention, promotions, demotions, separations for misconduct, criminal investigations, and medical conditions. Most of our results are precise enough to rule out small detrimental effects. However, there is a wedge between men’s perceptions and performance. The integration of women causes a negative shift in male soldiers’ perceptions of workplace quality. The decline is driven by units integrated with female officers, likely arising from female officers increasing men’s awareness of workplace problems or from men’s dissatisfaction from working with women in positions of authority—even though men in such units show some performance gains. If male-dominated workplaces are reluctant to incorporate women due to expectations that men will become less productive, our paper provides evidence to weigh against that notion.

本文利用美国军队中女性逐步进入作战岗位的政策变化，研究性别融合对男性同事的影响。结果表明，性别融合改善了团队协作和任务执行，并未对男性士兵的士气和表现产生负面影响。

We study technology sophistication using a novel approach that measures the sophistication of the most advanced (MAX) and the most widely used (MOST) technologies in key business functions within establishments. Using data from over 21,000 establishments across 15 countries, we find that establishments generally underutilize the most sophisticated technologies available in a business function. These MAX-MOST gaps are persistent and strongly associated with productivity both across establishments and countries. At the establishment level, there is substantial variation in both MAX and MOST, with MOST showing a more skewed distribution. MAX and MOST follow different life cycle patterns in low-income countries and among small establishments, and they exhibit different associations with several establishment characteristics and performance indicators. This evidence underscores the different nature of the technology upgrading processes that drive MAX and MOST.

本文研究不同企业间技术复杂度的差异及其原因。利用详细的微观数据，我们测量了企业使用的技术类型和复杂度。结果表明，管理能力、市场规模和要素价格是技术复杂度差异的主要决定因素。

Why do managers matter for firm performance? This article provides evidence of the critical role of managers in matching workers to jobs within the firm using the universe of personnel records from a large multinational firm. The data cover 200,000 white-collar workers and 30,000 managers over 11 years in 100 countries. I identify good managers by their speed of promotion and leverage exogenous variation induced by the rotation of managers across teams. I find that good managers cause workers to reallocate within the firm through lateral and vertical transfers and generate large and persistent gains in workers’ career progression and productivity. My results imply that the visible hands of managers match workers’ specific skills to specialized jobs, leading to an improvement in the productivity of existing workers that outlasts the managers’ time at the firm.

本文研究管理者如何将工人分配到不同任务中，以及这种分配效率如何影响企业绩效。利用详细的员工-任务匹配数据，我们发现管理者的分配能力存在显著差异，优秀管理者能够更好地匹配工人能力与任务需求，从而显著提升企业产出。

Women continue to be underrepresented in corporate leadership positions. This article studies the role of social connections in women’s career advancement. We investigate whether access to a larger share of female peers in business school affects the gender gap in senior managerial positions. Merging administrative data from a top 10 U.S. business school with public LinkedIn profiles, we first document that female MBAs are 24% less likely than male MBAs to enter senior management within 15 years of graduation. Next we use the exogenous assignment of students into sections to show that a larger proportion of female MBA section peers increases the likelihood of entering senior management for women but not for men. This effect is driven by female-friendly firms, such as those with more generous maternity leave policies and greater work-schedule flexibility. A larger proportion of female MBA peers induces women to transition to these firms where they attain senior management roles. A survey of female MBA alumnae reveals three key mechanisms: (i) information sharing, especially related to gender-specific advice, (ii) higher ambitions and self-confidence, and (iii) increasing support from male MBA peers. These findings highlight the role of social connections in reducing the gender gap in senior management positions.

本文利用 MBA 项目的随机分组研究同伴效应对女性职业发展的影响。我们发现，在商学院期间与更多有抱负的女性同组学习，显著增加了女性 MBA 毕业生进入公司高管层的概率。效应通过职业抱负和社交网络的传导机制发挥作用。