AbstractDoes low trust in workers discourage firms from hiring? We conduct an experiment in Ghana with real entrepreneurs who have the option to hire anonymous workers for a trivial but tedious task. Shirking attracts no penalty and completion of the t…
AbstractThis paper studies how better access to public health insurance affects infant mortality during pandemics. The analysis combines cross-state variation in mandated eligibility for Medicaid with two influenza pandemics that arrived shortly before…
AbstractWe run an experiment to elicit preferences over state-contingent timed payouts. We analyze the data using a new revealed preference method (building on Nishimura et al., 2017) that can test for consistency with utility functions that increase w…
AbstractWe estimate the effect of money supply changes on the real economy by exploiting a recurring natural experiment: maritime disasters in the Spanish Empire (1531–1810) that resulted in the loss of substantial amounts of silver money. We find that…
AbstractUsing unique data from Pakistan, we estimate a model of demand for differentiated products in 112 rural education markets with significant choice among public and private schools. Families are willing to pay substantially for reductions in dist…
AbstractWe examine the effect of forest loss around the time of birth on infant mortality and the early childhood health of children in rural Nigeria. We find that forest loss leads to an increase in neonatal mortality—one standard deviation of forest …
AbstractWhy do freeways affect spatial structure? We identify and quantify the local disamenity effects of freeways. Freeways cause slower growth in central neighborhoods (where local disamenities exceed regional accessibility benefits) compared with o…
AbstractThe COVID-19 pandemic has led to enormous data movements that strongly affect parameters and forecasts from standard Bayesian vector autoregressions (BVARs). To address these issues, we propose BVAR models with outlier-augmented stochastic vola…
AbstractThe revealed preference methodology allows an observer to infer preferences from choices. This paper extends this fundamental idea by experimentally identifying the preference for basing choices on simple decision rules. Subjects not only make …
AbstractExperimental research in behavioral economics focuses on consumer behaviors. Similar experimental research on profit-maximizing producers is rare. In three field experiments involving commercial agricultural producers in the United States, we d…