Search results

The vast majority of the empirical literature on crime has focused on the effects of "supply-side" shocks such as the severity of laws and enforcement. In this paper we analyze the effects of a large and unexpected "demand-side" shock: the drop in daytime population in Washington, DC caused by the government shutdown of October 1-16, 2013. We derive implications from a simple theoretical model where criminals choose effort and allocate it across different criminal activities. We test these implications using the city of Baltimore as the comparison group, and employing difference-in-differences methods. Consistent with the model's predictions (and inconsistent with alternative explanations), we find a 3% decline in crime in DC during the shutdown period, with the net effect resulting from a 9% decline during the day hours, and a 5% increase in crime during the evening and night hours, indicating reallocation of criminals' effort induced by the shutdown.

Social spending programs are important political issues, and it would be interesting to know how political systems affect the amount spent by the public sector. Much of the cross-country data is difficult to interpret, because richer countries simultaneously have different political systems (they tend to be more democratic) and more generous government budgets for old age, medical, and other social programs. Since South American countries seem to have a much weaker association between economic and political situations, we can mitigate this collinearity by comparing South American countries with each other and with the world. All of our data show that democracies spend the same or somewhat less on social programs as economically and demographically similar nondemocracies. Pension spending has grown relative to nonpension social spending (1960-90), but some of our evidence suggests that this change in the composition of spending has been more pronounced in countries that were initially nondemocratic. ; Los programas de gasto social son políticamente importantes, por lo que es interesante saber la manera en que los sistemas políticos afectan los montos gastados por el sector público. La información de corte transversal es de difícil interpretación porque las naciones más ricas tienden a tener simultáneamente sistemas políticos distintos (tienden a ser más democráticas) y presupuestos fiscales más generosos para programas sociales. Dado que América del Sur parece tener una asociación más débil entre sus situaciones políticas y económicas, es posible mitigar la colinealidad al comparar naciones de este continente entre sí y con otras naciones en el mundo. Nuestros resultados muestran que regímenes democráticos gastan lo mismo o menos en programas sociales que regímenes no democráticos con características económicas y demográficas similares. A pesar de que los gastos en pensiones crecieron respecto a otros gastos sociales entre 1960 y 1990, parte de nuestra evidencia sugiere que este cambio en composición fue más ...

Abstract
This paper estimates the causal relationship between job satisfaction and worker productivity. Using personnel records from a retail bank in South Korea, we show that branch productivity is positively associated to average job satisfaction, but negatively to its standard deviation. We address endogeneity concerns using IV strategies and find that while higher job satisfaction may increase short term productivity through sales to existing customers, excessive sales to existing customers may hurt customer satisfaction and willingness to recommend in the long run. Our findings suggest that average job satisfaction and its dispersion are equally important to understand worker productivity.