Annual Conference

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Economic Transformation of Asia

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May 2019

Business Cycle during Structural Change: Arthur Lewis' Theory from a Neoclassical Perspective

Kjetil STORESLETTEN, Fabrizio ZILIBOTTI, Bo ZHAO
We document that the nature of business cycles evolves over the process of development and structural change. In countries with large declining agricultural sectors, aggregate employment is uncorrelated with GDP. During booms, employment in agriculture declines while labor productivity increases in ...
Keywords: Business cycle, structural change, neoclassical
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Annual Conference

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Economic Transformation of Asia

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May 2019

Can Partial Commitment Increase Pension Contribution? A Field Experiment in Sri Lanka

Changcheng SONG
We conduct several randomized controlled trials in more than 200 villages in Sri Lanka to study whether incentives and partial commitment pension designs generate higher participation and savings in the micro pension. In Experiment I, individuals are randomly assigned to a control group, a free inst...
Keywords: Pension contribution, partial commitment, randomized control trial, optimal liquidity
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Annual Conference

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Economic Transformation of Asia, Senior Fellows/Fellows

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May 2019

Digital Payments Induce Over-Spending: Evidence from the 2016 Demonetization in India

Sumit AGARWAL, Pulak GHOSH, Jing LI, Tianyue RUAN
We examine the impact of digital payments on consumer spending by exploiting a forced switch to digital payments induced by the 2016 Indian Demonetization. This policy resulted in a 86% decline in the cash that could be used for spending transactions and led cash-dependent consumers to adopt digital...
Keywords: digital payments, overspending, Demonetization, India
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Annual Conference

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Economic Transformation of Asia

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May 2019

International Joint Ventures and Internal vs. External Technology Transfer: Evidence from China

Wolfgang KELLER, Kun JIANG, Larry D. QIU, William RIDLEY
This paper studies international joint ventures, where foreign direct investment is performed by a foreign and a domestic firm that together set up a new firm, the joint venture. Employing administrative data on all international joint ventures in China from 1998 to 2007—roughly a quarter of all i...
Keywords: International joint ventures, partner selection, technology spillovers, foreign direct investment, competition effects
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Annual Conference

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Economic Transformation of Asia

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May 2019

Division of Labor and Productivity Advantage of Cities: Theory and Evidence from Brazil

Lin TIAN
Firms are more productive in larger cities. This paper investigates a potential explanation that was first proposed by Adam Smith: Larger cities facilitate greater division of labor within firms. Using a dataset of Brazilian firms, I first document that division of labor is indeed robustly correlate...
Keywords: Divisdion of labour, productivity, space, cost
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