Posts

New

Pareto Improvements in the Contest for College Admissions

Kala Krishna, Sergey Lychagin, Wojciech Olszewski, Ron Siegel, and Chloe Tergiman

Many countries base college admissions on a centrally-administered test. Students invest a great deal of resources to improve their performance on the test, and there is growing concern about the high costs associated with these activities. We consider modifying the test by introducing performance-disclosure policies that pool intervals of performance rankings. Pooling affects the equilibrium allocation of students to colleges, which hurts some students and benefits others, but also affects students’ effort.

New

How Important Is Health Inequality for Lifetime Earnings Inequality?

Roozbeh Hosseini, Karen Kopecky, and Kai Zhao

Using a dynamic panel approach, we provide empirical evidence that negative health shocks significantly reduce earnings. The effect is primarily driven by the participation margin and is concentrated among the less educated and those in poor health. Next, we develop a life cycle model of labor supply featuring risky and heterogeneous frailty profiles that affect individuals’ productivity, likelihood of access to social insurance, disutility from work, mortality, and medical expenses.

New

Efficient Conservation of the Brazilian Amazon: Estimates from a Dynamic Model

Rafael Araujo, Francisco Costa, and Marcelo Sant'Anna

This paper estimates the Brazilian Amazon’s carbon-efficient forest cover – i.e. when farmers internalize the social cost of carbon. We propose a dynamic discrete choice land-use model and estimate it using a panel of land use and carbon stock of 5.7 billion pixels between 2008 and 2017. The business-as-usual scenario implies an inefficient release of 42 billion tons of CO2 in the long run resulting from the deforestation of an area twice the size of France.

New

Barriers to Entry and Regional Economic Growth in China

Loren Brandt, Gueorgui Kambourov, and Kjetil Storesletten

Labor productivity in manufacturing differs starkly across regions in China. We document that productivity, wages, and start-up rates of non-state firms have nevertheless experienced rapid unconditional regional convergence after 1995. To analyze these patterns, we construct a Hopenhayn (1992) model that incorporates location-specific capital wedges, output wedges, and entry barriers. Using Chinese Industry Census data we estimate these wedges and examine their role in explaining differences in performance and growth across prefectures.

New

Retractions: Updating from Complex Information

Duarte Gonçalves, Jonathan Libgober, and Jack Willis

We modify a canonical experimental design to identify the effectiveness of retractions. Comparing beliefs after retractions to beliefs (a) without the retracted information and (b) after equivalent new information, we find that retractions result in diminished belief updating in both cases. We propose this reflects updating from retractions being more complex, and our analysis supports this: we find longer response times, lower accuracy, and higher variability.

New

Attention Utility: Evidence From Individual Investors

Edika Quispe–Torreblanca, John Gathergood, George Loewenstein, and Neil Stewart

We study attention utility, the hedonic pleasure or pain derived purely from paying attention to information, which differs from the news utility that arises from gaining new information. The main, field, study examines brokerage account login data to show that investors pay disproportionate attention to already-known positive information on their stocks. Through its effect on logins, this selective attention affects their trading activity.

New

Trauma at School: The Impacts of Shootings on Students’ Human Capital and Economic Outcomes

Marika Cabral, Bokyung Kim, Maya Rossin-Slater, Molly Schnell, and Hannes Schwandt

We examine how shootings at schools—an increasingly common form of gun violence in the United States—impact the educational and economic trajectories of students. Using linked schooling and labor market data in Texas from 1992 to 2018, we compare within-student and across-cohort changes in outcomes following a shooting to those experienced by students at matched control schools. We find that school shootings increase absenteeism and grade repetition; reduce high school graduation, college enrollment, and college completion; and reduce employment and earnings at ages 24–26.

Follow us

The Review of Economic Studies Follow

The official account of the Review of Economic Studies, one of the world's top economics journals.

RevEconStudies
Retweet on Twitter The Review of Economic Studies Retweeted

This paper started with data. We were convinced that the discrepancy between book and market values of banks was key to understanding the data. We then developed a theory where, with a simple model, only one state variable driving Tobin's Q, you can explain several data moments.

Reply on Twitter 1927901233924165654 Retweet on Twitter 1927901233924165654 18 Like on Twitter 1927901233924165654 164 Twitter 1927901233924165654

"We provide a guide for researchers on how to estimate gene-environment (GxE) interplay, using school-starting age as a case study. We argue that gene-environment (G x E) studies can help

(i) assess treatment effect heterogeneity,
(ii) test theoretical predictions, and 👇

1/

Reply on Twitter 1927806706844668296 Retweet on Twitter 1927806706844668296 11 Like on Twitter 1927806706844668296 43 Twitter 1927806706844668296

"We are thrilled to share that our latest research is now published in @RevEconStudies! 🎉Check it out here:
https://www.restud.com/a-q-theory-of-banks/

We look forward to hearing your thoughts! "

@JulianeBegenau, @SakiBigio, Majerovitz, and Vieyra

Reply on Twitter 1927802836403810588 Retweet on Twitter 1927802836403810588 21 Like on Twitter 1927802836403810588 88 Twitter 1927802836403810588
Load More