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Policy Diffusion and Polarization across U.S. States

Stefano DellaVigna and Woojin Kim

Economists have studied the impact of numerous state laws, from welfare rules to voting ID requirements. Yet for all this policy evaluation, what do we know about policy diffusion—how these policies are introduced and spread from state to state? We present a series of facts based on a data set of 602 U.S. state policies spanning the past 7 decades. First, proxies of state capacity do not predict a higher likelihood of innovating new policies, but the political leaning of the state does predict a higher likelihood of introducing partisan laws since 1990.

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The value of information in a congested fishery

Gabriel Englander, Larry Karp, and Leo Simon

We model a fishery with potential congestion, in which firms obtain public and private signals about the location of the densest fish stock. We analytically determine the regions of parameter space where greater precision of public and/or private information increases welfare, and we examine the effects of two types of information sharing. Using high-resolution data from the world’s largest fishery, we estimate the structural model. Point estimates imply that more precise private information raises welfare, whereas more precise public information has a negligible effect on welfare.

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Women in the Courtroom: Technology and Justice

Heng Chen, Yuyu Chen, and Qingxu Yang

Our study analyzes 6 million civil judgments in China from 2014 to 2018, documenting gender disparities that disfavor female litigants. We investigate the impact of an open justice reform that mandated courts to broadcast legal proceedings live on a centralized online platform. By exploiting variations in its implementation across courts and over time and employing both difference-in-differences and Bartik IV approaches, we find that gender disparities in chances of winning decrease as broadcast intensity increases.

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The Geography of Business Dynamism and Skill-Biased Technical Change

Hannah Rubinton

This paper shows that the growing disparities between big and small cities in the U.S. since 1980 can be explained by firms endogenously responding to a skill-biased technology shock. With the introduction of a new skill-biased technology that is high fixed cost but low marginal cost, firms endogenously adopt more in big cities, cities that offer abundant amenities for high-skilled workers, and cities that are more productive in using high-skilled labor.

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Reallocative Auctions and Core Selection

Marzena Rostek and Nathan Yoder

When selling goods like wireless spectrum or electricity contracts, designers often opt for core-selecting mechanisms — i.e., those that induce outcomes in the core — in order to balance revenue and efficiency goals. But increasingly, auctions — such as the FCC’s Incentive Auction and those explored for natural resources — seek to reallocate goods, not just sell them. We show that when bidders can both buy and sell, substitutability among goods is no longer sufficient or necessary for core selection.

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Estimating Welfare Effects in a Nonparametric Choice Model: The Case of School Vouchers

Vishal Kamat and Samuel Norris

We develop new robust discrete choice tools to learn about the average willingness to pay for a price subsidy and its effects on demand given exogenous, discrete variation in prices. Our starting point is a nonparametric, nonseparable model of choice. We exploit the insight that our welfare parameters in this model can be expressed as functions of demand for the different alternatives. However, while the variation in the data reveals the value of demand at the observed prices, the parameters generally depend on its values beyond these prices.

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Bewley Banks

Rustam Jamilov and Tommaso Monacelli

How do movements in the distributions of bank size and income affect the macroeconomy? To answer this question we develop a dynamic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous financial intermediaries, incomplete markets, and aggregate uncertainty. We find that market incompleteness and uninsured idiosyncratic bank rate of return risk generate minimal concentration in the bank net worth distribution, leading to an “as-if” result, whereby the economy behaves as if it had a representative bank.

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Chris Cronin's recent Review of Economic Studies (@RevEconStudies) article, "What Good Are Treatment Effects Without Treatment? Mental Health and the Reluctance to Use Talk Therapy," with Forsstrom and Papageorge, is one of their "featured" articles.

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Recently accepted to #REStud, "Overconfidence and Prejudice," from Heidhues, Kőszegi and Strack:

https://www.restud.com/overconfidence-and-prejudice/

#econtwitter

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"Can communities sustain cooperation when players can add or erase signals from their records?
Sufficiently long-lived players can hardly sustain any cooperation, but players w/ intermediate lifespans can sustain some cooperation."

From @harry_toulouse:

https://www.restud.com/community-enforcement-with-endogenous-records/

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Recently accepted to #REStud, "Behavioral Causal Inference," from Ran Spiegler:

https://www.restud.com/behavioral-causal-inference/

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