Econometrica

This paper studies the labor market impacts of firm accommodation decisions after workplace disability and assesses implications for the design of firm subsidies. We leverage a workers' compensation (WC) program in Oregon that provides wage subsidies to firms for accommodating workers with workplace disabilities. Leveraging rich administrative data and a policy change to the wage subsidy, we show…

Studies on agricultural technology adoption often focus on one input, practice, or package, which is analytically useful, but may overlook the complexities involved with multidimensional learning needed for a lot of agricultural decisions. In Kenya, we study farmers' dynamic learning (from oneself and others) and adoption decisions over six seasons after randomly inviting them to participate in a…

Consider a repeated interaction where it is unknown which of various stage games will be played each period. This framework separates the basic logic of intertemporal incentives from the requirement that any given strategy profile yields a well‐defined payoff vector. A natural solution concept is ex post perfect equilibrium: strategies must form a subgame‐perfect equilibrium for any realization o…

We propose a novel optimal transport‐based version of the Generalized Method of Moment (GMM). Instead of handling overidentification by reweighting the data to satisfy the moment conditions (as in Generalized Empirical Likelihood methods), this method proceeds by allowing for errors in the variables of the least mean‐square magnitude necessary to simultaneously satisfy all moment conditions. This…

In sequential games, the set of paths consistent with rationality and forward‐induction reasoning may change nonmonotonically when adding transparent restrictions on players' beliefs. Yet, we prove that—in an incomplete‐information environment—predictions become sharper when the restrictions only concern initial beliefs about types. Thus, strong rationalizability for games with payoff uncertainty…

Macroeconomic outcomes depend on the distribution of markups across firms and over time, making firm‐level markup estimates key for macroeconomic analysis. Methods to obtain these estimates require data on the prices that firms charge. Firm‐level data with wide coverage, however, primarily come from financial statements, which lack information on prices. We use an analytical framework to show tha…

We provide sufficient conditions for equilibrium existence in first‐price auctions with private values that accommodate non quasi‐linear utilities and value‐distributions that contain atoms and exhibit positive or negative correlation. These conditions show that equilibrium existence often turns on properties of a single statistic of the joint distribution of values, namely, the minimum value in …

Weak environmental regulation has global consequences. When domestic regulation fails, the international community can target emitters with trade policy. I develop a dynamic empirical framework for evaluating trade policy as a substitute for domestic regulation, and I apply the framework to the market for palm oil, a major driver of deforestation and global CO 2 emissions. Relative to business as…

We derive a novel decomposition of the Gini coefficient into within‐ and between‐group inequality terms that sum to the aggregate Gini coefficient. This decomposition is derived from a set of axioms that ensure desirable behavior for the within‐ and between‐group inequality terms. The decomposition of the Gini coefficient is unique given our axioms, easy to compute, and can be interpreted geometr…

A multi‐product monopolist faces a buyer who is privately informed about his valuations for the goods. As is well known, optimal mechanisms are in general complicated, while simple mechanisms—such as pure bundling or separate sales—can be far from optimal and do not admit clear‐cut comparisons. We show that this changes if the monopolist has sufficiently precise information about the buyer's valu…

New technologies have recently led to a boom in real‐time pricing. I study the most salient example, surge pricing in ride hailing. Using data from Uber, I develop an empirical model of spatial equilibrium to measure the welfare effects of surge pricing. The model is composed of demand, supply, and a matching technology. It allows for temporal and spatial heterogeneity as well as randomness in su…

Policymakers often test expensive new programs on relatively small samples. Formally incorporating informative Bayesian priors into impact evaluation offers the promise to learn more from these experiments. We evaluate a Colombian program for 200 firms which aimed to increase exporting. Priors were elicited from academics, policymakers, and firms. Contrary to these priors, frequentist estimation …

Econometric analysis typically focuses on the statistical properties of fixed estimators and ignores researcher choices. In this article, I instead approach the analysis of experimental data as a mechanism‐design problem that acknowledges that researchers choose between estimators, sometimes based on the data and often according to their own preferences. Specifically, I focus on covariate adjustm…

Government debt can be rolled over forever without primary surpluses in some stochastic economies, including some economies that are dynamically efficient. In an overlapping‐generations model with constant growth rate, g , of labor‐augmenting productivity, and with shocks to the durability of capital, we show that along a balanced growth path, the maximum sustainable ratio of bonds to capital is …

This paper investigates how children affect women in science, using biographies in the American Men of Science (MoS 1956), linked with publications. First, we show that mothers have a unique life cycle pattern of productivity: While other scientists peak in their mid‐30s, mothers become less productive at that age and reach peak productivity in their early‐40s. Next, we estimate event studies of …

This paper studies assortative matching in a non‐stationary search‐and‐matching model with non‐transferable payoffs. Non‐stationarity entails that the number and characteristics of agents searching evolve endogenously over time. Assortative matching can fail in non‐stationary environments under conditions for which Morgan (1995) and Smith (2006) show that it occurs in the steady state. This is du…

Public disability insurance (DI) programs in many countries face growing fiscal pressures, prompting efforts to reduce spending. In this paper, we investigate the welfare effects of expanding the role of private insurance markets in the face of public DI cuts. We exploit a reform that abolished one part of German public DI and use unique data from a large insurer. We document modest crowding‐out …

Trade policy is often cast as a solution to the free‐riding problem in international climate agreements. This paper examines the extent to which trade policy can deliver on this promise. We incorporate global supply chains of carbon and climate externalities into a multi‐country, multi‐industry general equilibrium trade model. By deriving theoretical formulas for optimal carbon and border taxes, …

Structural measures of higher order risk attitudes have well‐developed foundations in Expected Utility Theory (EUT), but little is known about their empirical magnitudes. We introduce a novel experimental design and a companion econometric model that allows us to structurally estimate indices of risk aversion, prudence, and temperance under EUT without imposing restrictions on their interdependen…

We exploit the implementation of a rural pension policy in China to estimate the average rural‐to‐urban migration cost for workers affected by the policy and the average underlying sectoral productivity difference. Our estimates, based on a large panel data set, reveal significant migration costs and substantial sectoral productivity differences, with sorting playing a minor role in accounting fo…