Monopoly of Taxation Without a Monopoly of Violence: The Weak State’s Trade-Offs From Taxation 1 April 2024 Soeren J. Henn, Christian Mastaki Mugaruka, Miguel Ortiz, Raúl Sánchez de la Sierra, and David Qihang WuThis study presents a new economic perspective on state-building based on a case study in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s hinterland. We explore the implications for the state of considering rebels as stationary bandits. When the state, through a military operation, made it impossible for rebels to levy taxes, it inadvertently encouraged them to plunder the assets of the very citizens they previously preferred to tax.
Signaling with Private Monitoring 1 April 2024 Gonzalo Cisternas and Aaron KolbWe study dynamic signaling when the sender does not see the signals that her actions generate. The sender then uses her past play to forecast what a receiver believes, in turn forcing the receiver to forecast the previous forecast, and so forth. We identify a class of linear-quadratic-Gaussian games where this endogenous higher-order uncertainty can be handled. The sender’s second-order belief is key: it is a private state that she controls, and it creates a new channel for information transmission.
The Heterogeneous Effects of Government Spending: It’s All about Taxes 25 March 2024 Axelle Ferriere and Gaston NavarroHistorically, large changes in U.S. government spending induced fiscal efforts that were not all alike, with some using more progressive taxes than others. We develop a heterogeneous-agent New Keynesian model to analyze how the distribution of taxes across households shapes spending multipliers. The model yields empirically realistic distributions in marginal propensities to consume and labor elasticities, which result in lower responsiveness to tax changes for higher-income earners. In turn, multipliers are larger when spending is financed with higher tax progressivity—that is, when the tax burden falls more heavily on higher-income earners.
Dynamic Demand Estimation in Auction Markets 25 March 2024 Matthew Backus and Gregory LewisWe study demand estimation in a large auction market. In our model, a dynamically evolving population of buyers with unit demand and heterogeneous and privately known preferences for a finite set of differentiated products compete in a sequence of auctions that occur in discrete time. We define an empirically tractable equilibrium concept in which bidders behave as though they are competing with the stationary distribution of opposing bids, characterize bidding strategies, and prove existence of equilibrium. Having developed this demand system, we prove that it is non-parametrically identified from panel data.
International Comovement in the Global Production Network 25 March 2024 Zhen Huo, Andrei Levchenko, and Nitya Pandalai-NayarThis paper provides a general framework to study the role of production networks in international GDP comovement. We first derive an additive decomposition of bilateral GDP comovement into components capturing shock transmission and shock correlation. We quantify this decomposition in a parsimonious multi-country, multi-sector dynamic network propagation model, using data for the G7 countries over the period 1978-2007. Our main finding is that while the network transmission of shocks is quantitatively important, it accounts for a minority of observed comovement under the estimated range of structural elasticities.
Transhumant Pastoralism, Climate Change, and Conflict in Africa 6 March 2024 Eoin McGuirk and Nathan NunnWe consider the effects of climate change on seasonally migrant populations that herd livestock—i.e., transhumant pastoralists—in Africa. Traditionally, transhumant pastoralists benefit from a cooperative relationship with sedentary agriculturalists whereby arable land is used for crop farming in the wet season and animal grazing in the dry season. Rainfall scarcity can disrupt this arrangement by inducing pastoral groups to migrate to agricultural lands before the harvest, causing conflict to emerge. We examine this hypothesis by combining ethnographic information on the traditional locations of transhumant pastoralists and sedentary agriculturalists with high-resolution data on the location and timing of rainfall and violent conflict events in Africa from 1989–2018.
Too Domestic To Fail: Liquidity Provision And National Champions 6 March 2024 Emmanuel Farhi and Jean TiroleAuthorities’ support policies shape the location and continuation of industrial and banking activity on their soil. Firms’ locus of activity depends on their prospect of receiving financial assistance in distress and therefore on factors such as countries’ relative resilience. We predict that global firms are global in life and national in death; and that they become less global when competition is more intense, times are turbulent, and international risk sharing (say, through swap lines) weak.
Good Politicians: Experimental Evidence on Motivations for Political Candidacy and Government Performance 6 March 2024 Saad Gulzar and Muhammad Yasir KhanHow can we motivate good politicians – those that will carry out policy that is responsive to citizens’ preferences – to enter politics? In a field experiment in Pakistan, we vary how political office is portrayed to ordinary citizens. Emphasizing prosocial motives for holding political office instead of personal returns – such as the ability to help others versus enhancing one’s own respect and status – raises the likelihood that individuals run for office and that voters elect them.
