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Feedback and Learning: The Causal Effects of Reversals on Judicial Decision-Making

Manudeep Bhuller and Henrik Sigstad

Do judges respond to reversals of their decisions? Using random assignment of cases across two stages of the criminal justice system in Norway and a novel dataset linking trial court decisions to reversals in appeals courts, we provide causal evidence on feedback effects in judicial decision-making. By exploiting differences in the tendencies of randomly assigned appeal panels to reverse trial court decisions, we show that trial court judges who receive a reversal of a sentence respond by updating the likelihood of imposing a prison sentence in the direction of the reversal in future cases.

Imagining the Future: Memory, Simulation, and Beliefs

Pedro Bordalo, Giovanni Burro, Katherine Cofmann, Nicola Gennaioli, and Andrei Shleifer

How do people form beliefs about novel risks, with which they have little or no experience? Motivated by survey data on beliefs about Covid we collected in 2020, we build a model based on the psychology of selective memory. When a person thinks about an event, different experiences compete for retrieval, and retrieved experiences are used to simulate the event based on how similar they are to it. The model predicts that different experiences interfere with each other in recall and that non domain-specific experiences can bias beliefs based on their similarity to the assessed event.

Convicting Corrupt Officials: Evidence from Randomly Assigned Cases

Sebastian Axbard

Can the judiciary help root out government corruption? This paper exploits the random assignment of court cases to justices who exhibit varying degrees of strictness to examine how convicting corrupt officials affects local government outcomes in the Philippines. I document that convictions improve the management of local public finances and reduce associated corruption. An exploration of mechanisms suggests that legal deterrence effects contribute to these findings.

Stock Market Participation, Inequality, and Monetary Policy

Davide Melcangi and Vincent Sterk

Recent literature has shown that the fraction of liquidity-constrained households in the population critically determines the mix of transmission channels of monetary policy. In this paper, we bring a different but important dimension of heterogeneity to the forefront: stock market participation. We show that the stock market participation rate not only shapes the mix of policy channels, but also heavily affects the aggregate responses.

Monetary Policy and Heterogeneity: An Analytical Framework

Florin O. Bilbiie

THANK is a tractable heterogeneous-agent New-Keynesian model that captures analytically core micro-heterogeneity channels of quantitative-HANK: cyclical inequality and risk; self-insurance, precautionary saving, and realistic intertemporal marginal propensities to consume. I use it to elucidate key transmission mechanisms and dynamic properties of HANK models. Countercyclical inequality yields aggregate-demand amplification and makes determinacy with Taylor rules more stringent; but solving the forward guidance puzzle requires procyclical inequality: a Catch-22.

Job Applications and Labor Market Flows

Serdar Birinci, Kurt See, and Shu Lin Wee

Job applications have risen over time, yet job-finding rates remain unchanged. Meanwhile, separations have declined. We argue that increased applications raise the probability of a good match rather than the probability of job-finding. Using a search model with multiple applications and costly information, we show that when applications increase, firms invest in identifying good matches, reducing separations.

Falling Interest Rates and Credit Reallocation: Lessons from General Equilibrium

Vladimir Asriyan, Luc Laeven, Alberto Martin, Alejandro Van der Ghote, and Victoria Vanasco

We show that in a canonical model with heterogeneous entrepreneurs, financial frictions, and an imperfectly elastic supply of capital, a fall in the interest rate has an ambiguous effect on aggregate economic activity. In partial equilibrium, a lower interest rate raises aggregate investment both by relaxing financial constraints and by prompting relatively less productive entrepreneurs to invest. In general equilibrium, however, this higher demand for capital raises its price and crowds out investment by more productive entrepreneurs.

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Version 2.0 of the National Elections Database is online!
We now cover presidential and parliamentary elections 1789–2023, extending the post-1945 data of Electoral Turnovers @RevEconStudies (https://academic.oup.com/restud/advance-article/doi/10.1093/restud/rdae108/7899604).
w/ @benjaminmarx and @vincent_rollet

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``Many networks naturally form as people come together to form subgraphs, e.g. as coauthors of a paper, or other teams. This is the basis for a new, computationally tractable method of estimating network formation."

From Chandrasekhar & @JacksonmMatt:

https://www.restud.com/a-network-formation-model-based-on-subgraphs/

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Recently accepted to #REStud, ``Simultaneous Search and Adverse Selection," from Auster, Gottardi and Wolthoff @rpwolthoff:

https://www.restud.com/simultaneous-search-and-adverse-selection/

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Recently accepted to #REStud, ``Affiliated Common Value Auctions with Costly Entry," from Murto & Välimäki:

https://www.restud.com/affiliated-common-value-auctions-with-costly-entry/

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