Quarterly Journal of Economics

This article shows that a CEO’s trust enhances innovation within a firm, providing a novel micro-foundation for the well-known trust-growth relationship. I build a new matched CEO-firm-patent data set covering 5,753 CEOs in 3,598 U.S. public firms and 700,000 patents during 2000–2011. I exploit variation in generalized trust across CEO ethnic origins, inferred from their last names using deanonymized historical censuses. Following CEO turnovers, a one standard deviation increase in a CEO’s generalized trust is associated with 6% more future patents and 4%–6% higher average patent quality, driven entirely by higher-quality patents. Text analysis of employee reviews shows that the CEO’s trust enhances a firm’s trust culture. These results are consistent with insights from qualitative interviews suggesting that the CEO's trust and the firm’s trust culture encourage researchers to undertake high-risk explorative research and development. In addition, changes in the CEO’s bilateral trust toward inventors in different countries have comparable effects on inventors’ patenting, controlling for CEO and other fixed effects.

本文表明 CEO 的信任水平增强了企业内部的创新，为众所周知的信任-增长关系提供了新的微观基础。我构建了一个新的 CEO-企业-专利匹配数据集，涵盖美国大型上市企业。使用 CEO 更替事件和工具变量策略，我发现高信任度的 CEO 使企业专利数量和质量显著提高。机制分析表明，信任通过促进知识共享和降低监督成本来提升创新效率。

Empirical studies find that the pass-through of input cost changes to prices is incomplete: a 10% increase in costs causes downstream prices to rise less than 10%, even at long horizons. Using microdata from gas stations, food products, and manufacturing industries, I find that incomplete pass-through in percentages often disguises complete pass-through in levels: a $1/unit increase in input costs leads to $1/unit higher downstream prices. Pass-through appears incomplete in percentages due to a gap between prices and costs. Complete pass-through in levels contrasts with workhorse macroeconomic models that feature homothetic industry demand systems. I identify an alternative class of demand systems that yields pass-through in levels and highlight four implications. First, measuring pass-through in percentages can lead to spurious evidence of asymmetry and size dependence. Second, pass-through in levels leads to systematic fluctuations in relative price and markup dispersion that are not associated with changes in allocative efficiency. Third, pass-through in levels can explain dynamics of industry gross margins, operating profits, and entry in the data that are at odds with workhorse models. Finally, incorporating pass-through in levels into an input-output model of the U.S. economy better matches the volatility of consumer price inflation and the response of inflation to identified shocks.

本文研究增值税变化对价格的传导效应。传统观点认为税收变化不完全传导至消费者价格，但本文在一个一般均衡框架下证明，在合理的条件下，增值税变化在水平上完全传导至消费者价格。使用欧元区数据，我们验证了这一理论预测。

This article develops a New Keynesian model with sovereign default risk. Inflation is set by forward-looking firms, monetary policy is an interest rate rule, and the fiscal government borrows externally, long-term, with an option to default. In this framework, default risk creates inflation pressures through an expectations channel, and tight monetary policy disincentivizes fiscal overborrowing. The model sheds light on temporary inflation events in emerging-market data: short-lived spikes in inflation, spreads, and domestic policy rates. As spreads rise, firms increase their prices in expectation of higher future inflation and low consumption during default. Monetary policy tightens, which reduces inflation and helps bring spreads down by disciplining government borrowing. These monetary-fiscal interactions imply that delivering the flexible-prices allocation may not be optimal for monetary policy.

本文构建了一个包含主权违约风险的新凯恩斯模型（NK-Default），用于分析新兴经济体的货币政策。该模型整合了名义刚性、主权违约风险和汇率动态。我们发现在高通胀和主权风险交织的新兴经济体中，标准货币政策规则可能恶化经济表现。最优货币政策应同时考虑通胀目标和主权风险溢价。

This article estimates that the macroeconomic damages from climate change are an order of magnitude larger than previously thought. Exploiting natural global temperature variability, we find that 1ºC warming reduces world GDP by over 20% in the long run. Global temperature correlates strongly with extreme climatic events, unlike country-level temperature used in previous work, explaining our larger estimate. We use this evidence to estimate damage functions in a neoclassical growth model. Business-as-usual warming implies a present welfare loss of more than 30%, and a social cost of carbon in excess of $1,200 per ton. These impacts suggest that unilateral decarbonization policy is cost-effective for large countries such as the United States.

本文区分全球温度和地方温度对经济产出的影响。利用跨国面板数据，我们发现全球温度（而非地方温度）对经济增长有显著负面影响。这一发现表明气候变化主要通过全球供应链、贸易和移民等渠道而非仅仅通过地方农业和生产条件影响经济。

We study the effect of conflict-induced displacement on human capital and occupational shifts, focusing on the Mozambican civil war (1977–1992), during which millions of civilians were forced to flee to the countryside, cities, and neighboring countries. Reconstructing the wartime mobility histories of the surviving population, we examine the consequences of multiple displacement trajectories in a unified framework. First, we characterize the education and sectoral employment of the universe of (non-)displaced. Second, we exploit differences in relocation trajectories among extended kin members during their schooling years. Displacement is associated with significant gains in education. Third, using a movers design, we show that minors displaced earlier to better districts experienced an increase in educational attainment. Focusing on moves during the intensification of the war and when comparing members of the same household, regional childhood exposure effects remain strong, whereas spatial sorting becomes negligible. Fourth, we jointly estimate place-based, spatial sorting, and uprootedness effects, showing that all forces are at play. Fifth, a small survey in Mozambique’s largest northern city reveals long-term effects: internally displaced people report higher education than their siblings who stayed behind but lower social capital and worse mental health relative to locals. Our findings demonstrate that displacement shocks can foster human capital accumulation, even in very low-income settings, albeit at the cost of enduring social and psychological traumas.

本文研究内战引发的人口流离失所对人力资本的长期影响。利用独特的历史数据和微观调查，我们追踪了受影响个体的教育、健康和劳动力市场结果。结果表明，流离失所对人力资本积累有长期显著的负面影响，但这种影响可以通过政策干预缓解。

We develop a system of disaggregated economic accounts. The system breaks down national accounting positions into bilateral flows between consistently defined groups of consumers (consumer cells), groups of producers (producer cells), the government, and the rest of the world. We disaggregate the full circular flow of money, including consumer spending, labor compensation, firm profits, intermediates trade, foreign trade, and government transactions, while satisfying all national accounting identities. We implement the disaggregated system for small region-by-industry cells in Denmark and present stylized facts, such as variation in domestic spending, local and urban bias in consumer spending, and a pattern of triangular flows across regions. Cell-level measures of spending intensity capture how much spending by a cell contributes to the income of cells experiencing unemployment after a shock. Using a general equilibrium model, we show that fiscal transfers raise aggregate GDP by more when they target cells with high spending intensity on unemployed cells. The disaggregated economic accounts help governments select more effective policies.

本文提出了一种新的国民账户分解方法，将总产出和收入分解到更细的行业和地区层面。该方法结合了投入产出表和微观调查数据，允许研究人员追踪经济冲击在行业和地区间的传导。我们展示了该方法在美国和中国经济中的应用。

We provide quasi-experimental evidence of how an innovative market-based solution using remote-sensing technology can mitigate drought-induced conflict. Droughts are a major driver of conflict in Africa, particularly between transhumant pastoralists and sedentary farmers. Index-Based Livestock Insurance (IBLI), a program piloted in Kenya, provides automated, preemptive payouts to pastoralists affected by droughts. Combining variation in rainfall and the staggered rollout of IBLI in Kenya over 2000–2020, we find that IBLI strongly reduces drought-induced conflict. Key mechanisms include a reduction in herd sizes, as well as income smoothing and asset price stabilization, contributing to an overall reduced migratory pressure for pastoralists. Our study suggests that market-based solutions are a scalable, cost-effective pathway to mitigate conflict, complementing political solutions such as power-sharing agreements and institutional reforms.

本文研究指数型牲畜保险对冲突的影响。在肯尼亚和埃塞俄比亚的干旱频发地区，我们实施了一项随机对照实验，提供基于卫星植被数据的牲畜保险。结果表明，保险显著减少了牧民之间的冲突，因为保险提供了替代性的风险管理手段，减少了因资源稀缺引发的暴力。

We develop a model that integrates modern theories of labor market flows with nominal wage rigidities to study the consequences of inflation on the labor market. Nominal wage stickiness incentivizes workers to engage in job-to-job transitions after an unexpected increase in the price level. Such dynamics lead to a rise in aggregate vacancies associating a seemingly tight labor market with lower real wages—two facts observed during the recent inflation period. The calibrated model jointly matches aggregate and cross-sectional trends in worker flows and wages during the 2021–2024 period. Using historical data, we show that prior periods of high inflation were also associated with increasing vacancies and upward shifts in the Beveridge curve. Our results suggest that policy makers and academics should be cautious about viewing the rise in the vacancy-to-unemployment rate as a sign of a tight labor market during inflationary periods without holistically looking at other labor market indicators.

本文提出了一个关于工人如何应对通胀的理论模型。我们证明，在信息不完全的条件下，工人使用简单的经验法则（如比较当前工资与过往价格）来决定是否要求加薪。该模型解释了为什么在高通胀时期工资调整更频繁，以及为什么通胀预期具有粘性。

This article studies the effects of automation in a task-based economy in which some jobs pay workers rents—wages above workers' outside options. We show that automation targets high-rent tasks, dissipating rents, amplifying wage losses, and reducing within-group wage dispersion in exposed groups. This form of rent dissipation is inefficient and offsets the productivity gains from automation. Using U.S. data from 1980 to 2016, we find evidence of sizable rent dissipation and reduced within-group wage dispersion due to automation. Automation accounts for 52% of the increase in between-group inequality since 1980, with rent dissipation explaining one-fifth of this total. Our estimates imply that inefficient rent dissipation has offset 60%–90% of the productivity gains from automation over this period.

本文研究自动化技术如何影响劳动力市场。我们构建了一个模型，其中自动化不仅替代劳动力，还通过降低进入壁垒加剧了产品市场竞争——这一租金消散效应部分抵消了对工资的负面影响。模型预测自动化对工资和不平等的净影响取决于产品和劳动力市场的初始竞争程度。

We introduce and validate a novel approach to identifying good managers. In a preregistered lab experiment, we causally identify managerial contributions by randomly assigning managers to teams and controlling for individual skill. We find that manager contributions are crucial for team success, and that people who self-select into management roles perform worse than randomly assigned managers. Managerial performance is strongly predicted by economic decision-making skill but not by demographic characteristics. Two validation studies support our experimental results. Participants who succeed in the lab receive more real-world promotions and, in a separate study of retail store managers, skill measures strongly predict store sales. A one standard deviation increase in manager quality increases annual per store sales by US$4.1 million (25% increase). Selecting managers on skills rather than demographic characteristics or the desire to lead could substantially improve organizational performance.

本文利用多个来源的数据，包括管理者评估、下属反馈和企业绩效指标，研究如何识别优秀管理者。我们发现，传统的绩效评估与管理者对团队长期产出的因果效应之间的相关性较弱。将多种评估方法结合并使用机器学习技术可以显著改善识别效果。

Does information about the long-run financial costs of reduced labor supply increase mothers’ working hours? We document descriptively that long-term financial factors are not top of mind when mothers decide on their employment level. Moreover, a substantial share of women holds overly optimistic expectations about pension receipt and wage growth under part-time work. In a large-scale field experiment in Switzerland, we randomly assign mothers working part-time as teachers to receive objective information about the long-run costs of reduced labor supply. The treatment increases both demand for financial information and future labor supply plans, in particular among women who underestimate the costs of part-time work. Leveraging linked employer administrative data one year post-intervention, we find that this group of mothers increases working hours by 7%. These findings underscore that policies reducing information frictions in labor supply decisions may help address remaining gender gaps in the labor market.

本文研究提供关于未来财务回报的个性化信息如何影响母亲的劳动供给决策。我们通过随机实验向处于职业生涯早期的母亲提供关于工作经验对未来收入影响的精准信息。结果表明，信息干预增加了母亲的劳动供给和职业投资，但影响主要集中在教育水平较高的群体。

Aspirations may condition the future-oriented choices of individuals and thus may play a role in the persistence of poverty or the effort to break out of it. We run a randomized controlled trial in remote, rural Ethiopia to explore this and evaluate an intervention that aims to change how poor people perceive their future opportunities, alter their aspirations, and through that, modify their investment decisions. A treatment group was shown video documentaries featuring individuals from similar communities who escaped poverty through their own efforts and who serve as relatable role models. Five years after the screening took place, the treated households had increased future-oriented investments in agriculture, children’s education, and assets. The results can be explained by an increase in aspirations in terms of lifetime goals. Overall, this research uniquely provides evidence that a light-touch behavioural intervention can have persistent economic impacts on a poor population.

本文在埃塞俄比亚农村进行了一项随机实验，研究心理干预（目标设定和未来规划训练）对长期经济结果的影响。我们发现，干预显著提高了家庭收入和资产积累，效果在干预数年后仍然持续。机制分析表明，干预通过增强未来导向行为和减少短视决策来改善结果。

This article investigates whether virtual contact, initiated through a documentary film, can promote interethnic harmony. We carried out a cluster-randomized field experiment involving over 3,300 households across 121 multiethnic villages in Bangladesh. We find that a documentary film, designed to humanize the ethnic-minority Santals and evoke empathy among the ethnic majority Bengalis, increased the ethnic majority’s prosociality toward minorities, though the strength of the evidence varies by treatment arm and outcome. Using emotion-detecting software to analyze facial expressions during the film viewing suggests that the documentary elicited emotional responses consistent with empathy. We do not find evidence that the intervention reduced the prevalence of negative stereotypes and discriminatory opinions toward minorities. In villages assigned to target network-central people, we find positive behavioral effects on untreated individuals, including Santals, and village-level administrative data suggest a reduction in police complaints in those villages. About five months after the intervention, we conducted a casual-work field experiment involving 720 participants from the main intervention. In this task, pairs of ethnic-majority and minority participants jointly produced paper bags for a local supplier under a piece-rate compensation scheme. We find positive treatment effects on productivity for both ethnic groups, with effects concentrated in villages where network-central people were treated. For the ethnic majority, increased prosociality, and for the ethnic minority, reciprocity or peer pressure may have contributed to increased productivity. Overall, our findings suggest that virtual contact and social networks may help promote harmony in multiethnic communities.

本文研究虚拟接触和社交网络干预对减少族裔偏见的因果效应。我们实施了大规模田野实验，随机分配参与者接受不同类型的跨族裔接触干预。结果表明，结构化虚拟接触显著减少了偏见并促进了后续的跨族裔社交互动。

This article explores the relationship between economic growth and trust in government using variation in GDP growth experienced over a lifetime since birth. We assemble a newly harmonized global data set across 11 major opinion surveys, comprising 3.3 million respondents in 166 countries since 1990. Exploiting cohort-level variation, we find that people who have experienced higher GDP growth are more prone to trust their governments, with larger effects found in democracies. Higher-growth experiences are also associated with improved perceptions of government performance and living standards. We find no similar channel between growth experience and interpersonal trust. Second, more recent growth experiences appear to matter most for trust in government, with no detectable effect of growth experienced during one’s formative years, closer to birth, or before birth. Third, we find evidence of a “trust paradox” whereby average trust in government is lower in democracies than in autocracies. Our results are robust to a range of falsification exercises, robustness checks, and single-country evidence using the American National Election Studies and the Swiss Household Panel.

本文研究个人早年的经济增长经历如何塑造其对政府的长期信任。利用跨国和跨地区数据，我们发现经历过经济快速增长年代的个人对政府有更高的信任水平。这种效应在个人早期成年时期最为显著，表明印象形成期的经历对社会态度有持久影响。

We show that intergenerational mobility changed rapidly by race and class in recent decades in the United States and study the causal mechanisms underlying those changes. Between the 1978 and 1992 birth cohorts, earnings increased for white children from high-income families relative to white children from low-income families, increasing earnings gaps by parental income (class) by 30%. Earnings increased for Black children at all parental income levels, reducing white-Black earnings gaps for children from low-income families by 30%. Class gaps grew and race gaps shrank similarly for nonmonetary outcomes such as educational attainment, standardized test scores, and mortality rates. Using a quasi-experimental design, we show that the divergent trends in economic mobility were caused by differential changes in childhood environments, as proxied by parental employment rates, in local communities defined by race, class, and childhood county. Outcomes improve across birth cohorts for children who grow up in communities with increasing parental employment rates, with larger effects for children who move to such communities at younger ages. Children’s outcomes are most strongly related to the parental employment rates of peers they are more likely to interact with, such as those in their own birth cohort, suggesting that the relationship between children’s outcomes and parental employment rates is mediated by social interaction.

本文研究美国阶级差距扩大的社会机制。利用长期追踪数据，我们分解了家庭背景对儿童成年结果影响上升的各种渠道。结果表明，教育资源的差异化获取和社会网络的阶层分化是阶级差距扩大的主要驱动力。