Voting on a Trade Agreement: Firm Networks and Attitudes Toward Openness 9 January 2025 Esteban Méndez and Diana Van PattenWe exploit a unique event to study the extent to which popular attitudes toward trade are driven by economic fundamentals. In 2007, Costa Rica put a free trade agreement (FTA) to a national referendum. With a single question on the ballot, 59% of Costa Rican adult citizens cast a vote on whether they wanted an FTA with the United States to be ratified or not. We merge disaggregated referendum results, which break new ground on anonymity-compatible voting data, with employer-employee, customs, and firm-to-firm transactions data, and data on household composition and expenditures.
Inference with a single treated cluster 3 January 2025 Andreas HagemannI introduce a generic method for inference about a scalar parameter in research designs with a finite number of heterogeneous clusters where only a single cluster received treatment. This situation is commonplace in difference-in-differences estimation but the test developed here applies more broadly. I show that the test controls size and has power under asymptotics where the number of observations within each cluster is large but the number of clusters is fixed. The test combines weighted, approximately Gaussian parameter estimates with a rearrangement procedure to obtain its critical values.
Valuing the Time of the Self-Employed 3 January 2025 Daniel Agness, Travis Baseler, Sylvain Chassang, Pascaline Dupas, and Erik SnowbergPeople’s value of their own time is a key input in public policy evaluations – these evaluations should account for time taken away from work or leisure as a result of policy. Measuring this value for the self-employed is challenging, as, by definition, it is not priced by the market. Using rich choice data collected from farming households in western Kenya, we show that households exhibit non-transitive preferences. As a result, neither market wages nor standard valuation techniques correctly measure participants’ value of time.
Editorial Board changes 31 December 2024 We thank Board Members and Foreign Editors who stepped down during 2024 and welcome new Board Members and Foreign Editors. Jan De Loecker and Antonio Penta have been appointed new Joint Managing Editors from January 2025.
Finite Sample Inference for the Maximum Score Estimand 30 December 2024 Adam M. Rosen and Takuya UraWe provide a finite sample inference method for the structural parameters of the semiparametric binary response model under a conditional median restriction originally studied by Manski (1975, 1985). This is achieved by exploiting distributional properties of observable outcomes conditional on the observed sequence of exogenous variables. Moment inequalities conditional on the size n sequence of exogenous covariates are constructed, and the proposed test statistic is a monotone function of violations of the corresponding sample moment inequalities.
State Building in a Diverse Society 15 December 2024 Ruth Carlitz, Ameet Morjaria, Joris Mueller, and Philip Osafo-KwaakoDiversity can pose fundamental challenges to state building and development. The Tanzanian Ujamaa policy— one of post-colonial Africa’s largest state-building experiments — addressed these challenges by resettling a diverse population in planned villages, where children received political education. We combine differences in exposure to Ujamaa across space and age to identify long-term impacts of the policy. Analysis of contemporary surveys shows persistent, positive effects on national identity and perceived state legitimacy.
Worker Mobility in Production Networks 5 December 2024 Marvin Cardoza, Francesco Grigoli, Nicola Pierri, and Cian RuaneThis paper documents that production networks play an essential role in the job search and matching process. We document five facts about worker mobility in production networks using employer-employee data matched with the universe of firm-to-firm transactions for the Dominican Republic.
Assessing racial and educational segmentation in large marriage markets 5 December 2024 Edoardo CiscatoComplementarities between partners’ characteristics are often held responsible for the patterns of assortative mating observed in marriage markets along different dimensions, such as race and education. However, when the marriage market is segmented into racially and educationally homogeneous clusters, people naturally have more match opportunities with their likes. In this paper, we build an empirically tractable dynamic matching model with endogenous separation and remarriage. In every period, agents participate in a competitive assignment game in the vein of Choo and Siow (2006), where mating strategies depend on both the expected match gains and search frictions in the form of meeting costs.
