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作者:Agan, Amanda; Doleac, Jennifer L.; Harvey, Anna
作者单位:Rutgers University System; Rutgers University New Brunswick; National Bureau of Economic Research; Texas A&M University System; Texas A&M University College Station; New York University
摘要:Communities across the United States are reconsidering the public safety benefits of prosecuting nonviolent misdemeanor offenses, yet there is little empirical evidence to inform policy in this area. We report the first estimates of the causal effects of misdemeanor prosecution on defendants' subsequent criminal justice involvement. We leverage the as-if random assignment of nonviolent misdemeanor cases to assistant district attorneys (ADAs) who decide whether a case should be prosecuted in th...
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作者:Enke, Benjamin; Graeber, Thomas
作者单位:Harvard University
摘要:This article documents the economic relevance of measuring cognitive uncertainty: people's subjective uncertainty over their ex ante utility-maximizing decision. In a series of experiments on choice under risk, the formation of beliefs, and forecasts of economic variables, we show that cognitive uncertainty predicts various systematic biases in economic decisions. When people are cognitively uncertain-either endogenously or because the problem is designed to be complex-their decisions are heav...
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作者:Chatterjee, Shoumitro
作者单位:Johns Hopkins University
摘要:Market power of intermediaries contributes to the low incomes of farmers in India. I study the role of spatial competition between intermediaries in determining the prices that farmers receive in India by focusing on a law that restricts farmers to selling their goods to intermediaries in their own state. I show that the discontinuities in market power generated by the law translate into discontinuities in prices. Increasing spatial competition by one standard deviation causes prices received ...
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作者:Philippon, Thomas; Wang, Olivier
作者单位:New York University; Centre for Economic Policy Research - UK
摘要:We study time-consistent bank resolution mechanisms. The key constraint is that governments cannot avoid bailouts that are ex post efficient. Contrary to common wisdom, we show that the government may still avoid moral hazard and implement the first-best allocation by using the distribution of bailouts across banks to provide incentives. We analyze properties of credible tournament mechanisms that provide support to the best-performing banks and resolve the worst-performing ones. We extend our...
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作者:Baqaee, David R.; Burstein, Ariel
作者单位:University of California System; University of California Los Angeles
摘要:We present a unified treatment of how welfare responds to changes in budget sets or technologies with taste shocks and nonhomothetic preferences. We propose a welfare metric that ranks production possibility frontiers that differs from one that ranks budget sets and characterize it using a general equilibrium generalization of Hicksian demand. This extends Hulten's theorem, the basis for constructing aggregate quantity indices, to environments with nonhomothetic and unstable preferences. We il...
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作者:Esponda, Ignacio; Oprea, Ryan; Yuksel, Sevgi
作者单位:University of California System; University of California Santa Barbara
摘要:We provide evidence for a bias that we call representative signal distortion (RSD), which is particularly relevant to settings of statistical discrimination. Experimental subjects distort their evaluation of new evidence on individual group members and interpret such information to be more representative of the group to which the individual belongs (relative to a reference group) than it really is. This produces a discriminatory gap in the evaluation of members of the two groups. Because it is...
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作者:Babina, Tania; He, Alex Xi; Howell, Sabrina T.; Perlman, Elisabeth Ruth; Staudt, Joseph
作者单位:Columbia University; University System of Maryland; University of Maryland College Park; New York University; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要:This article studies how federal funding affects the innovation outputs of university researchers. We link person-level research grants from 22 universities to patents, publications, and career outcomes from the U.S. Census Bureau. We focus on the effects of large, idiosyncratic, and temporary cuts to federal funding in a researcher's preexisting narrow field of study. Using an event study design, we document that these negative federal funding shocks reduce high-tech entrepreneurship and publ...
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作者:Afrouzi, Hassan; Kwon, Spencer Y.; Landier, Augustin; Ma, Yueran; Thesmar, David
作者单位:Harvard University; Hautes Etudes Commerciales (HEC) Paris; University of Chicago; Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
摘要:We investigate biases in expectations across different settings through a large-scale randomized experiment where participants forecast stable stochastic processes. The experiment allows us to control forecasters' information sets as well as the data-generating process, so we can cleanly measure biases in beliefs. We report three facts. First, forecasts display significant overreaction to the most recent observation. Second, overreaction is stronger for less persistent processes. Third, overre...
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作者:Ghosh, Arkadev; Hwang, Sam Il Myoung; Squires, Munir
作者单位:Duke University; University of British Columbia
摘要:Close-kin marriage, by sustaining tightly knit family structures, may impede development. We find support for this hypothesis using U.S. state bans on cousin marriage. Our measure of cousin marriage comes from the excess frequency of same-surname marriages, a method borrowed from population genetics that we apply to millions of marriage records from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Using census data, we first show that married cousins are more rural and have lower-paying occupations. W...
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作者:Besley, Timothy; Persson, Torsten
作者单位:University of London; London School Economics & Political Science; Stockholm University
摘要:Reducing the emissions of greenhouse gases may be almost impossible without a green transition-a substantial transformation of consumption and production patterns. To study such transitions, we propose a dynamic model, which differs from the common approach in economics in two ways. First, consumption patterns reflect not just changing prices and taxes, but changing values. Transitions of values and technologies create a dynamic complementarity that can help or hinder a green transition. Secon...