Thinking about Parents: Gender and Field of Study

By Michela Carlana and Lucia Corno

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

Globally, women remain underrepresented in STEM. Our lab-in-the-field study delves into parental influence on adolescents' perceptions of scientific versus humanistic aptitude. We find that thinking about parental recommendation affects students' beliefs ...

Comparative Advantage of Humans versus AI in the Long Tail

By Nikhil Agarwal, Ray Huang, Alex Moehring, Pranav Rajpurkar, Tobias Salz, and Feiyang Yu

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

Machine learning algorithms now exceed human performance on several predictive tasks, generating concerns about widespread job displacement. However, supervised learning approaches rely on large amounts of high-quality labeled data and are designed for sp...

Welfare Comparisons for Biased Learning

By Mira Frick, Ryota Iijima, and Yuhta Ishii

American Economic Review, June 2024

We study robust welfare comparisons of learning biases (misspecified Bayesian and some forms of non-Bayesian updating). Given a true signal distribution, we deem one bias more harmful than another if it yields lower objective expected payoffs in all decis...

Breaking Gender Barriers: Experimental Evidence on Men in Pink-Collar Jobs

By Alexia Delfino

American Economic Review, June 2024

I investigate men's limited entry into female-dominated sectors through a large-scale field experiment. The design exogenously varies recruitment messages by showing photographs of current workers (male or female) and providing information on the share of...

Inflation Expectations and Misallocation of Resources: Evidence from Italy

By Tiziano Ropele, Yuriy Gorodnichenko, and Olivier Coibion

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2024

Using Italian data that include both inflation forecasts of firms and external information on their balance sheets, we study the causal effect of changes in the dispersion of beliefs about future inflation on the misallocation of resources. We find that a...

Central Bank Communication with the General Public: Promise or False Hope?

By Alan S. Blinder, Michael Ehrmann, Jakob de Haan, and David-Jan Jansen

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2024

Central banks are increasingly reaching out to the general public to motivate and explain their monetary policy actions. One major aim of this outreach is to ensure accountability and create trust; another is to guide inflation expectations. This article ...

Data and the Aggregate Economy

By Laura Veldkamp and Cindy Chung

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2024

Recent data technology innovations, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, have transformed the production of knowledge and increased the importance of data. This review explores how data—digitized information—has been modeled within cl...

The Political Economics of Non-democracy

By Georgy Egorov and Konstantin Sonin

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2024

We survey recent theoretical and empirical literature on political economics of non-democracies. Nondemocratic regimes face multiple challenges to their rule, both internal, such as palace coups or breakdown of their support coalition, and external, such ...

Racial Disparities in the Criminal Legal System: Shadows of Doubt and Beyond

By Amanda Y. Agan

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2024

Racial disparities permeate every single stage of the criminal legal process. In Shadows of Doubt: Stereotypes, Crime, and the Pursuit of Justice, Brendan O'Flaherty and Rajiv Sethi shed light on the stereotype-driven biases that contribute to th...

Child Abuse and Abortion Availability

By Marianne Bitler and Madeline Zavodny

American Economic Review, May 2002

Activated History: The Case of the Turkish Sieges of Vienna

By Christian Ochsner and Felix Roesel

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2024

We show that history stored in collective memories and activated by political campaigns can create xenophobia and radicalization. Turkish troops besieged Vienna in 1529 and 1683 and pillaged individual Austrian villages, killing and kidnapping in the proc...

Public Information Is an Incentive for Politicians: Experimental Evidence from Delhi Elections

By Abhijit Banerjee, Nils Enevoldsen, Rohini Pande, and Michael Walton

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2024

Two years prior to elections, two-thirds of Delhi municipal councillors learned they had been randomly chosen for a preelection newspaper report card. Treated councillors in high-slum areas increased pro-poor spending, relative both to control counterpart...

Information Choice in Auctions

By Nina Bobkova

American Economic Review, July 2024

The choice of an auction mechanism influences which object characteristics bidders learn about and whether the object is allocated efficiently. Some object characteristics are valued equally by all bidders and thus are inconsequential for the efficient al...

Opportunity Unraveled: Private Information and the Missing Markets for Financing Human Capital

By Daniel Herbst and Nathaniel Hendren

American Economic Review, July 2024

We examine whether adverse selection has unraveled private markets for equity and state-contingent debt contracts for financing higher education. Using survey data on beliefs, we show a typical college-goer would have to repay $1.64 in present value for e...

Delayed Overshooting: The Case for Information Rigidities

By Gernot J. Müller, Martin Wolf, and Thomas Hettig

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2024

We provide evidence that the delayed overshooting puzzle reflects a slow adjustment of exchange rate expectations to monetary policy shocks rather than a failure of uncovered interest parity. Consistent with this evidence, we put forward a New Keynesian m...

Communicating about Confidence: Cheap Talk with an Ambiguity-Averse Receiver

By Philippe Colo

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2024

An expert, who is only informed of the probability of possible states, communicates with a decision-maker through cheap talk. The decision-maker considers different probability distributions over states as possible and is ambiguity averse. I show that all...

Everyday Econometricians: Selection Neglect and Overoptimism When Learning from Others

By Kai Barron, Steffen Huck, and Philippe Jehiel

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2024

This study explores selection neglect in an experimental investment game where individuals can learn from others' outcomes. Experiment 1 examines aggregate-level equilibrium behavior. We find strong evidence of selection neglect and corroborate several co...

Intelligence Disclosure and Cooperation in Repeated Interactions

By Marco Lambrecht, Eugenio Proto, Aldo Rustichini, and Andis Sofianos

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2024

How does information about players' intelligence affect strategic behavior? Game theory, based on the assumption of common knowledge of rationality, does not provide useful predictions. We experimentally show that, in the Prisoner's Dilemma, disclosure ha...

Negotiating Cooperation under Uncertainty: Communication in Noisy, Indefinitely Repeated Interactions

By Fabian Dvorak and Sebastian Fehrler

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2024

Case studies of cartels and recent theory suggest that communication is a key factor for cooperation under imperfect monitoring, where actions can only be observed with noise. We conduct a laboratory experiment to study how communication affects cooperati...

Beliefs, Learning, and Personality in the Indefinitely Repeated Prisoner's Dilemma

By David Gill and Yaroslav Rosokha

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2024

We aim to understand the role and evolution of beliefs in the indefinitely repeated prisoner's dilemma (IRPD). To do so, we elicit beliefs about the supergame strategies chosen by others. We find heterogeneity in beliefs and changes in beliefs with experi...