AbstractWe connect two large bodies of scientific inquiry. First, important theories in the social sciences establish that human preferences are reference-dependent. Second, a separate field of research documents substantial differences in preferences …
AbstractWe study how news coverage of immigrant criminality impacts voting in one of the most controversial referendums in recent years—the 2009 Swiss minaret ban. We combine a comprehensive crime detection data set with detailed information on newspap…
AbstractDuring the early 1990s, Germany offered temporary protection to 700,000 Yugoslavian refugees fleeing war. By 2000, many had been repatriated. We exploit this natural experiment to investigate the role of returning migrants in boosting export pe…
AbstractWe provide a novel decomposition of changing gaps in life expectancy between rich and poor into differential changes in age-specific mortality rates and differences in “survivability.” Declining age-specific mortality rates increases life expec…
AbstractThis paper examines methods of inference concerning quantile treatment effects (QTEs) in randomized experiments with matched-pairs designs (MPDs). Standard multiplier bootstrap inference fails to capture the negative dependence of observations …
AbstractI use temporal discontinuities in choice sets to identify history dependence in drug demand, finding large and long-term effects. Quasi-randomly assigning a patient to a drug today increases the probability she is taking the same drug four year…
AbstractThis paper draws on employer-employee and longitudinal plant data from Mexico to investigate the impact of exports on wage premiums, defined as wages above what workers would receive elsewhere in the labor market. We decompose plant-level avera…
AbstractWe study how increases in the U.S. Social Security full retirement age (FRA) affect benefit-claiming behavior and retirement behavior separately. Using long panels of Social Security administrative data, we implement complementary research desi…
AbstractThis paper provides a nonparametric test for deciding the dimensionality of a policy shock as manifest in the abnormal change in asset returns’ stochastic covariance matrix, following the release of a macroeconomic announcement. We use high-fre…
AbstractThis paper examines the effects of high school curriculum reforms on infant health by exploiting sharp and staggered changes across states in core course requirements for graduation. Our results suggest that curriculum reforms significantly red…