Distributive Justice for Behavioural Welfare Economics
AbstractThe incompleteness of behavioural preferences can lead many or even all allocations to qualify as Pareto optimal. But the incompleteness does not undercut the precision of utilitarian policy...
View ArticleDecoupling the Ces Distribution Circle with Quality and Beyond: Equilibrium...
AbstractWe show for CES demands with heterogeneous productivities that profit, revenue and output distributions lie in the same closed power family as the productivity distribution (e.g., the ‘Pareto...
View ArticleMigrating Extremists
AbstractWe show that migrating extremists can shape political equilibria in the long run. Regions in Austria that witnessed an influx of Nazis fleeing the Soviets after WWII still have significantly...
View ArticleGravity Without Apology: the Science of Elasticities, Distance and Trade
AbstractGravity as both fact and theory is one of the great success stories of recent research on international trade, and has featured prominently in the policy debate over Brexit. We first review the...
View ArticleLearning Spillovers in Conditional Welfare Programmes: Evidence from Brazil
AbstractWe study spillovers in learning about the enforcement of Bolsa Familia, a programme conditioning benefits on children’s school attendance. Using original administrative data, we find that...
View ArticleAgricultural Returns to Labour and the Origins of Work Ethics
AbstractWe examine the historical determinants of differences in preferences for work across societies today. Our hypothesis is that a society’s work ethic depends on the role that labour has played in...
View ArticleElite Identity and Political Accountability: A Tale of Ten Islands
AbstractEmancipation of slaves in the 1830s transformed the political elites of the British Caribbean plantation islands. New elites were more accountable to the citizenry. We develop a theory in which...
View ArticleSecession with Natural Resources
AbstractWe look at the formation of new Indian states in 2001 to uncover the effects of political secession on the comparative economic performance of natural resource rich and natural resource poor...
View ArticleLong Live Keju! The Persistent Effects of China’s Civil Examination System
AbstractChina's civil examination system (keju), an incredibly long-lived institution, has a persistent impact on human capital outcomes today. Using the variation in the density of jinshi—the highest...
View ArticleUnion Density Effects on Productivity and Wages
AbstractWe exploit changes in tax subsidies for union members in Norway to identify the effects of changes in firm-level union density on productivity and wages. Increased deductions in taxable income...
View ArticleThe Impact of Terrorism on Individual Well-Being: Evidence from the Boston...
AbstractA growing literature has concluded that terrorism affects the economy, yet less is known about its impact on individual welfare. This article estimates the impact of the 2013 Boston marathon...
View ArticleStrategic Transmission of Correlated Information
AbstractWe consider a situation in which a decision-maker gathers information from imperfectly informed experts, receiving coarse signals about a uniform state of the world. Private information is...
View ArticleEducation Quality and Teaching Practices
AbstractImproving school quality with limited resources is a key issue of policy. This article uses a randomised controlled trial (RCT) to estimate the effectiveness of guided instruction methods as...
View ArticleIt’S Getting Crowded in Here: Experimental Evidence of Demand Constraints in...
AbstractThis article considers market-level contributors to the well-documented gender profit gap among micro-entrepreneurs. We combine data from a garment-making firm census and market research survey...
View ArticleThe Effects of Children's Gender Composition on Filial Piety and Old-Age...
AbstractDo parents forge children’s preference for old-age support? Becker (1993) conjectures that the inculcation of filial piety increases parents’ investment in children’s human capital. We provide...
View ArticleLandscape Change and Trade in Ancient Greece: Evidence from Pollen Data
AbstractIn this article we use pollen data from six sites in southern Greece to study long-term vegetation change in this region from 1000 BCE to 600 CE. Based on insights from environmental history,...
View ArticleHonesty and Self-Selection into Cheap Talk
ABSTRACTIn many situations, people can lie strategically, for their own benefit. Since individuals differ with respect to their willingness to lie, the credibility of statements will crucially depend...
View ArticleMeasuring the Indirect Effects of Adverse Employer Behaviour on Worker...
AbstractWe conduct a field experiment to study how worker productivity is affected if employers act adversely towards their co-workers. Our employees work for two shifts in a call centre. In our main...
View ArticleNegative Voters? Electoral Competition with Loss-Aversion
AbstractThis paper studies the effect of voter loss aversion in preferences over both candidate policy platforms and candidate valence on electoral competition. Loss-aversion over platforms leads to...
View ArticleAmbiguity, Low Risk-Free Rates and Consumption Inequality
AbstractMacroeconomists failed to predict the Great Recession, suggesting that the existing macroeconomic models may have been misspecified. Bearing in mind this potential misspecification or ‘model...
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