The End of Free College in England: Implications for Quality, Enrolments, and...
Despite increasing financial pressures on higher education systems throughout the world, many governments remain resolutely opposed to the introduction of tuition fees, and some countries and states...
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The Many Virtues of Simplicity
Photo Credit: Christopher || Maintaining a marriage is simple… if you do it right…read more...
View ArticleSparse Portfolio Selection via the sorted $\ell_{1}$-Norm....
We introduce a financial portfolio optimization framework that allows us to automatically select the relevant assets and estimate their weights by relying on a sorted $\ell_1$-Norm penalization,...
View ArticleFiscal Rules and Discretion under Self-Enforcement -- by Marina Halac, Pierre...
We study a fiscal policy model in which the government is present-biased towards public spending. Society chooses a fiscal rule to trade off the benefit of committing the government to not overspend...
View ArticleLong-Term Care Insurance: Knowledge Barriers, Risk Perception and Adverse...
We conduct a stated-choice experiment where respondents are asked to rate various insurance products aimed to protect against financial risks associated with long-term care needs. Using exogenous...
View ArticleDirected Attention and Nonparametric Learning -- by Ian Dew-Becker, Charles...
We study an ambiguity-averse agent with uncertainty about income dynamics who chooses what aspects of the income process to learn about. The agent chooses to learn most about income dynamics at the...
View ArticleIn Search of a Spatial Equilibrium in the Developing World -- by Douglas...
In most developing countries, there is a large gap in average consumption per capita between urban and rural areas. One appealing interpretation of this gap is that it reflects a spatial equilibrium,...
View ArticleImproving Clinical Guidelines and Decisions under Uncertainty -- by Charles...
This paper discusses how limited ability to assess patient risk of illness and predict treatment response may affect the welfare achieved by adherence to clinical practice guidelines and by...
View ArticleGentrification and the Amenity Value of Crime Reductions: Evidence from Rent...
Gentrification involves large-scale neighborhood change whereby new residents and improved amenities increase property values. In this paper, we study whether and how much public safety improvements...
View ArticlePatent Examiner Specialization -- by Cesare Righi, Timothy Simcoe
We study the matching of patent applications to examiners at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Using test statistics originally developed to identify industry agglomeration, we find strong evidence...
View ArticleDo Parents Value School Effectiveness? -- by Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Parag A....
School choice may lead to improvements in school productivity if parents' choices reward effective schools and punish ineffective ones. This mechanism requires parents to choose schools based on causal...
View ArticleThe Children of the Missed Pill -- by Tomas Rau, Miguel Sarzosa, Sergio S. Urzua
We use sharp, massive and unexpected price increases of oral contraceptives--product of a documented case of collusion among pharmaceutical retailers in Chile--as a natural experiment to estimate the...
View ArticleDoes the Investment Model Explain Value and Momentum Simultaneously? -- by...
Two innovations in the structural investment model go a long way in explaining value and momentum jointly. Firm-level investment returns are constructed from firm-level accounting variables, and are...
View ArticleAre There Too Many Farms in the World? Labor-Market Transaction Costs,...
This paper seeks to explain the U-shaped relationship between farm productivity and farm scale - the initial fall in productivity as farm size increases from its lowest levels and the continuous upward...
View ArticleMachine Learning from Schools about Energy Efficiency -- by Fiona Burlig,...
In the United States, consumers invest billions of dollars annually in energy efficiency, often on the assumption that these investments will pay for themselves via future energy cost reductions. We...
View ArticleDo Americans Want to Tax Capital? Evidence from Online Surveys -- by Raymond...
A vast theoretical literature in public finance has studied the question of the desirability of capital taxation. Distinct from questions of the optimality of taxing wealth is whether it is politically...
View ArticleLabor Supply and the Value of Non-Work Time: Experimental Estimates from the...
We use a field experiment to estimate the marginal value of non-work time (MVT). During a national application process for phone survey and data entry positions, we randomly offered applicants...
View ArticleAll Together Now: Leveraging Firms to Increase Worker Productivity Growth --...
I describe a new policy that endows firms with limited-duration, virtual shares in their own workers' future realized earnings growth. The policy seeks to leverage employers to address a key challenge...
View ArticleNo Kin In The Game: Moral Hazard and War in the U.S. Congress -- by Eoin...
Why do wars occur? We exploit a natural experiment to test the longstanding hypothesis that leaders declare war because they fail to internalize the associated costs. We test this moral hazard theory...
View ArticleHow Taxing Is Tax Filing? Using Revealed Preferences to Estimate Compliance...
This paper uses a quasi-experimental design and a novel identification strategy to estimate the cost of filing income taxes. First, using US income tax returns, I observe how taxpayers choose between...
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