REStud Tour 2025 - Tourists announcedREStud Tour 2025 – Tourists announced and website live 21 April 2025
Creating Cohesive Communities: A Youth Camp Experiment in India 12 April 2025 Arkadev Ghosh, Prerna Kundu, Matt Lowe, and Gareth NellisNon-family-based institutions for socializing young people may play a vital role in creating close-knit, inclusive communities. We study the potential for youth camps—integrating rituals, sports, and civics training—to strengthen intergroup cohesion. We randomly assigned Hindu and Muslim adolescent boys, from West Bengal, India, to two-week camps or to a pure control arm. To isolate mechanisms, we cross-randomized collective rituals (such as singing the national anthem, wearing uniforms, chanting support during matches, and synchronous dancing) and the intensity of intergroup contact.
Colluding against Environmental Regulation 9 April 2025 Jorge Alé-Chilet, Cuicui Chen, Jing Li, and Mathias ReynaertWe study collusion among firms against imperfectly monitored environmental regulation. Firms increase variable profits by violating regulation and reduce expected noncompliance penalties by violating jointly. We consider a case of three German automakers colluding to reduce the effectiveness of emissions control technology.
The Value of Privacy in Cartels: An Analysis of the Inner Workings of a Bidding Ring 9 April 2025 Kei Kawai, Jun Nakabayashi, and Juan OrtnerWe study how incentive constraints can be relaxed by randomization in a repeated-game setting. Our study is motivated by the workings of a detected bidding cartel that adopted a protocol of keeping the winning bid secret from the designated losers when defection was a concern. Keeping the winning bid secret makes accurately undercutting the winning bid more difficult and makes defection less attractive as potential defectors risk not winning the auction even if they deviate.
Belief identification by proxy 9 April 2025 Elias TsakasIt is well known that individual beliefs cannot be identified using traditional choice data, unless we exogenously assume state-independent utilities. In this paper, I propose a novel methodology that solves this long-standing identification problem in a simple way. This method relies on extending the state space by introducing a proxy, for which the agent has no stakes conditional on the original state space.
How People Use Statistics 2 April 2025 Pedro Bordalo, John Conlon, Nicola Gennaioli, Spencer Kwon, and Andrei ShleiferFor standard statistical problems, we provide new evidence documenting i) multi-modality and ii) instability in probability estimates, including from irrelevant changes in problem description. The evidence motivates a model in which, when solving a problem, people represent each hypothesis by attending to its salient features while neglecting other, potentially more relevant, ones. Only the statistics associated with salient features are used.
New Joint Managing Editor 31 March 2025 We warmly welcome Jakub Steiner (University of Zurich, CERGE-EI, CTS) to join us as Joint Managing Editors with effect from 1st April 2025. A huge thanks to Bard Harstad who served as Joint Managing Editors until March 2025.
The US, Economic News, and the Global Financial Cycle 31 March 2025 Christoph E. Boehm and T. Niklas KronerWe provide evidence for a causal link between the US economy and the global financial cycle. Using intraday data, we show that US macroeconomic news releases have large and significant effects on global risky asset prices. Stock price indexes of 27 countries, the VIX, and commodity prices all jump instantaneously upon news releases. The responses of stock indexes co-move across countries and are large—often comparable in size to the response of the S&P 500.
