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Melons as Lemons: Asymmetric Information, Consumer Learning and Seller Reputation

15 January 2025

Jie Bai

Quality provision is often low in many developing markets, and firms commonly lack a reputation for quality. This paper examines this issue both theoretically and empirically in the context of retail watermelon markets in China. I first demonstrate the existence of significant asymmetric information on quality between sellers and buyers, as well as the absence of a quality premium at baseline. To explain this, I develop a theoretical model that highlights the role of consumer beliefs and costly signaling in influencing sellers’ reputation incentives.

Job Displacement, Unemployment Benefits and Domestic Violence

10 January 2025

Sonia Bhalotra, Diogo Britto, Paolo Pinotti, and Breno Sampaio

We estimate impacts of male job loss, female job loss, and male unemployment benefits on domestic violence (DV) in Brazil. We merge individual-level employment and welfare registers with different measures of domestic violence: judicial cases brought to criminal courts, the use of public shelters by victims, and mandatory DV notifications by health providers. Leveraging mass layoffs for identification, we first show that both male and female job loss, independently, lead to large and pervasive increases in DV.

Voting on a Trade Agreement: Firm Networks and Attitudes Toward Openness

9 January 2025

Esteban Méndez and Diana Van Patten

We 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 Hagemann

I 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 Snowberg

People’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.

Finite Sample Inference for the Maximum Score Estimand

30 December 2024

Adam M. Rosen and Takuya Ura

We 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-Kwaako

Diversity 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.