Asymmetric Incentives in Subsidies: Evidence from a Large-Scale Electricity Rebate Program

By Koichiro Ito

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2015

Many countries use substantial public funds to subsidize reductions in negative externalities. Such policy designs create asymmetric incentives because increases in externalities remain unpriced. I investigate the implications of such policies by using a ...

Evaluating Behaviorally Motivated Policy: Experimental Evidence from the Lightbulb Market

By Hunt Allcott and Dmitry Taubinsky

American Economic Review, August 2015

Imperfect information and inattention to energy costs are important potential motivations for energy efficiency standards and subsidies. We evaluate these motivations in the lightbulb market using a theoretical model and two randomized experiments. We der...

Cooperation, but No Reciprocity: Individual Strategies in the Repeated Prisoner's Dilemma

By Yves Breitmoser

American Economic Review, September 2015

In the repeated prisoner's dilemma, predictions are notoriously difficult. Recently, however, Blonski, Ockenfels, and Spagnolo (2011)—henceforth, BOS‐showed that experimental subjects predictably cooperate when the discount factor exceeds a par...

Happiness and the Persistence of Income Shocks

By Christian Bayer and Falko Juessen

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2015

We reassess the empirical effects of income and employment on self-reported well-being. Our analysis makes use of a two-step estimation procedure that allows us to apply instrumental variable regressions with ordinal observable data. As suggested by the ...

Market Structure, Reputation, and the Value of Quality Certification

By Daniel W. Elfenbein, Raymond Fisman, and Brian McManus

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2015

Quality certification programs help consumers identify high-quality products or sellers in markets with information asymmetries. Using data from eBay UK's online marketplace, we study how certification's impact on demand varies with market- and seller- le...

Inferring Rationales from Choice: Identification for Rational Shortlist Methods

By Rohan Dutta and Sean Horan

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2015

A wide variety of choice behavior inconsistent with preference maximization can be explained by Manzini and Mariotti's Rational Shortlist Methods. Choices are made by sequentially applying a pair of asymmetric binary relations (rationales) to eliminate in...

Overconfident Consumers in the Marketplace

[Symposium: Overconfidence]

By Michael D. Grubb

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2015

The term overconfidence is used broadly in the psychology literature, referring to both overoptimism and overprecision. Overoptimistic individuals overestimate their own abilities or prospects. In contrast, overprecise individuals place overly narro...

Behavioral CEOs: The Role of Managerial Overconfidence

[Symposium: Overconfidence]

By Ulrike Malmendier and Geoffrey Tate

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2015

In this paper, we provide a theoretical and empirical framework that allows us to synthesize and assess the burgeoning literature on CEO overconfidence. We also provide novel empirical evidence that overconfidence matters for corporate investment de...

Household Surveys in Crisis

By Bruce D. Meyer, Wallace K. C. Mok, and James X. Sullivan

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2015

Household surveys, one of the main innovations in social science research of the last century, are threatened by declining accuracy due to reduced cooperation of respondents. While many indicators of survey quality have steadily declined in recent d...

Media Influences on Social Outcomes: The Impact of MTV's 16 and Pregnant on Teen Childbearing

By Melissa S. Kearney and Phillip B. Levine

American Economic Review, December 2015

This paper explores the impact of the introduction of the widely viewed MTV reality show 16 and Pregnant on teen childbearing. Our main analysis relates geographic variation in changes in teen childbearing rates to viewership of the show. We impl...

Intermediaries in Two-Sided Markets: An Empirical Analysis of the US Cable Television Industry

By Andre Boik

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2016

Local television stations are platforms in a two-sided market connecting advertisers and viewers. This paper explicitly examines the effect that important intermediaries (such as cable, telephone, and satellite distributors) may have on a platform's prici...

Up in Smoke: The Influence of Household Behavior on the Long-Run Impact of Improved Cooking Stoves

By Rema Hanna, Esther Duflo, and Michael Greenstone

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2016

Laboratory studies suggest that improved cooking stoves can reduce indoor air pollution, improve health, and decrease greenhouse gas emissions in developing countries. We provide evidence, from a large-scale randomized trial in India, on the benefits of a...

Consumption Inequality and Family Labor Supply

By Richard Blundell, Luigi Pistaferri, and Itay Saporta-Eksten

American Economic Review, February 2016

We examine the link between wage and consumption inequality using a life-cycle model incorporating consumption and family labor supply decisions. We derive analytical expressions for the dynamics of consumption, hours, and earnings of two earners in the p...

Taxpayer Confusion: Evidence from the Child Tax Credit

By Naomi E. Feldman, Peter Katuščák, and Laura Kawano

American Economic Review, March 2016

We develop an empirical test for whether households understand or misperceive their marginal tax rate. Our identifying variation comes from the loss of the Child Tax Credit when a child turns 17. Using this age discontinuity, we find that despite this ...

The Caloric Costs of Culture: Evidence from Indian Migrants

By David Atkin

American Economic Review, April 2016

Anthropologists have documented substantial and persistent differences in food preferences across social groups. My paper asks whether such food cultures can constrain caloric intake? I first document that interstate migrants within India consume fewe...

The Bidder's Curse: Comment

By Henry S. Schneider

American Economic Review, April 2016

The prices of auctions on eBay often exceed eBay's fixed-price "Buy- It-Now" prices. I investigate the causes of this overbidding, focusing on the interpretation in Malmendier and Lee (2011) that the observed overbidding cannot be explained "without al...

The Bidder's Curse: Reply

By Ulrike Malmendier

American Economic Review, April 2016

An important unresolved issue in the search literature is the question to what extent suboptimal search reflects "traditional search frictions," and to what extent it reflects behavioral biases. The distinction is important for assessing welfare, predi...

Separating Bayesian Updating from Non-Probabilistic Reasoning: An Experimental Investigation

By Dan Levin, James Peck, and Asen Ivanov

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2016

Through a series of decision tasks involving colored cards, we provide separate measures of Bayesian updating and non-probabilistic reasoning skills. We apply these measures to (and are the first to study) a common-value Dutch auction. This format is m...

Team versus Individual Play in Finitely Repeated Prisoner Dilemma Games

By John H. Kagel and Peter McGee

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2016

In finitely repeated prisoner dilemma games, two-person teams start with significantly less cooperation than individuals, consistent with results from the psychology literature. This quickly gives way to teams cooperating more than individuals. Team di...

Consumption Inequality

[Symposium: Inequality Beyond Income]

By Orazio P. Attanasio and Luigi Pistaferri

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2016

In this essay, we discuss the importance of consumption inequality in the debate concerning the measurement of disparities in economic well-being. We summarize the advantages and disadvantages of using consumption as opposed to income for measuring trends...