The Review of Economic Studies is one of the core journals in economics. It is essential reading for economists, consistently ranking among the top five journals.

A collective choice problem specifies a finite set of alternatives from which a group of expected utility maximizers must choose. We associate a collective pseudo market with every collective choice problem and establish the existence and efficiency of pseudo Lindahl equilibrium (PLE) allocations. We also associate a cooperative bargaining problem with every collective choice problem and define a set-valued solution concept, the ω-weighted Nash bargaining set where ω is a vector of welfare weights. We provide axioms that characterize the ω-weighted Nash bargaining set.

This paper studies the effects of the court-ordered removal of children from home on health, crime, and education. To isolate causal effects, I exploit quasi-random variation in judge assignment together with across-judge variation in the tendency to favor removal in an instrumental variable (IV) design. Using a novel data set (N=26,579) based on Swedish court documents that I transcribe and link with detailed register data, I find that court-ordered out-of-home placement has large adverse effects on the mortality of the marginal child.

We document that most dispersion in marginal revenue products of inputs occurs across plants within firms rather than between firms. This is commonly thought to reflect misallocation: dispersion is “bad.” However, we show that eliminating frictions hampering internal capital markets in a multi-plant firm model may in fact increase productivity dispersion and raise output: dispersion can be “good.” This arises as firms optimally stagger investment activity across their plants over time to avoid raising costly external finance, instead relying on reallocating internal funds.

How much does firm intangibility amplify CEOs’ persistent private information and reduce firms’ public listing propensity? We develop a model of competing public and private investors financing firms heterogeneously exposed to persistent private cash flows. Equilibrium financing is driven by information rent differentials in CEO compensation. We validate and structurally estimate the model using firm listing and CEO compensation data.

This paper views hiring as a contextual bandit problem: to find the best workers over time, firms must balance “exploitation” (selecting from groups with proven track records) with “exploration” (selecting from under-represented groups to learn about quality). Yet modern hiring algorithms, based on supervised learning approaches, are designed solely for exploitation. Instead, we build a resume screening algorithm that values exploration by evaluating candidates according to their statistical upside potential.

We develop a satisficing model of choice in which the available alternatives differ in their inherent complexity. We assume—and experimentally validate—that complexity leads to errors in the perception of alternatives’ values. The model yields sharp predictions about the effect of complexity on choice probabilities, some of which qualitatively contrast with those of maximization-based choice models.