Posts

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Assessing racial and educational segmentation in large marriage markets

Edoardo Ciscato

Complementarities 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.

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

"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...

Reply on Twitter 1937205478775312793 Retweet on Twitter 1937205478775312793 5 Like on Twitter 1937205478775312793 10 Twitter 1937205478775312793
Load More