This article models R&D competition as a multi-effort asymmetric contest in which two firms invest costly effort to improve two components of product quality. Component quality depends on firms' effort, competencies, and efficiencies, while overall quality is aggregated using a Cobb-Douglas technology with parameters governing the responsiveness of overall quality to component qualities. Effort costs are convex and separable, and firms' market shares are determined through a micro-founded contest success function based on relative quality. The framework links optimal multicomponent effort decisions to both firm-specific and technological parameters, enabling comparative statics analysis. The results show that changes in structural parameters affect equilibrium effort in both components by altering competitive strength and competition intensity. Improvements in the weaker firm's competency or efficiency increase effort by both firms, whereas improvements in the stronger firm in one component reduce effort across components when differences in competitive strength are large.
The COVID-19 pandemic disproportionately affected mothers' employment in New Zealand, despite a generous wage subsidy scheme that preserved jobs for those employed pre-pandemic. Using administrative tax records, we document a 1-2 percentage point decline in mothers' likelihood of being employed following the lockdown, while fathers experienced no significant change. This gender gap was driven primarily by delayed workforce re-entry among non-employed mothers rather than job losses among employed mothers. Critically, we observe similar employment declines among future mothers-women without children during our study period-suggesting the pandemic's differential impact extended beyond childcare demands. These patterns indicate that additional factors such as household bargaining dynamics and individual choices likely contributed to widening the employment gap between men and women during the pandemic.
We examine whether more schooling causally increases the cognitive skills of adults. Using education reforms in twenty-one European countries as natural experiments, we link cohorts' exposure to reforms to internationally comparable numeracy and literacy scores from Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development-Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies. An extra year of schooling increases adult skills by about 0.2-0.25 standard deviations. The gains are non-linear: completing high school and, especially, college delivers larger skill improvements than the average additional year. Across reform types, expansions of pre-primary and secondary education generate the largest increases in skills. Using information on how individuals use skills at work and at home, we provide evidence consistent with a mechanism whereby education improves access to skill-intensive jobs that sustain and further develop skills over the life cycle. Overall, raising educational attainment can deliver lasting skill gains, particularly when followed by opportunities to use and build skills in the labour market.
This study investigates the role of government-supported e-commerce promotion in fostering entrepreneurship in rural regions, with a focus on a policy intervention in China. Using a novel administrative dataset, we exploit the staggered rollout of the Rural E-commerce Pilot County policy in a difference-in-differences design and find a 21.8 percentage point increase in newly registered firms and a 21.4 percentage point increase in their initial employment in pilot counties. Notably, this growth is concentrated among small enterprises with four or fewer employees. The policy's effects were observed across both traditional and knowledge-intensive industries, suggesting that e-commerce services and infrastructure stimulate broad-based economic activity. Our findings further reveal that these benefits are more pronounced in counties with limited fiscal capacity, and the effects are largely independent of traditional capital investments. These results provide critical insights for policymakers aiming to stimulate entrepreneurship through targeted e-commerce promotion, particularly in resource-constrained regions.
In this paper, we study the role cultural practices play in determining the impact of development interventions. Focusing on India's patrilocal and patrilineal context, we examine a government policy that introduced doorstep delivery of contraceptives. This intervention replaced the existing system in treated areas, where contraceptives were previously available free of charge at village health centres. Using a quasi-experimental difference-in-differences design, we find that exposure to the policy reduced women's reported uptake of home-delivered methods such as condoms and oral pills, while increasing substitution toward more concealable modern and traditional methods. We find that this response is driven by increased visibility and reduced privacy associated with doorstep delivery, particularly in patrilocal joint family settings where parents-in-law are likely to exert significant influence on women's contraceptive decisions. Our results, particularly for oral contraceptives, which are concealable and therefore face the greatest visibility burden, are robust to a variety of sensitivity checks.
