Economics

Using data on applicants to Dutch medical schools and their older relatives (i.e., parents, aunts, and uncles ages 60+), we estimate the effect of personal access to medical expertise on vaccine hesitancy. Leveraging variation in lottery outcomes that determine admission to medical schools, we find that having a physician in the family increases the likelihood of complying with government recommendations that anyone over the age of 59 receive a second booster dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. Our estimated effects are strongest for having a female physician in the family, suggesting important gender-based differences in how medical expertise is communicated.

In the 1990s, Americans used to work much more than non-Americans. Nowadays, about half of the gap in hours worked has reversed. To evaluate the convergence of working hours, we develop a tractable model of labor supply enriched with multiple sources of heterogeneity across individuals, an extensive margin of participation, multi-member households, and an elaborate system of taxes and benefits upon non-employment. Using detailed measurements from micro-level and aggregate datasets, we identify model parameters and sources of heterogeneity across individuals for various countries. We run a horse race between competing explanations and find that U.S. hours per person declined after 2000 owing ..

We develop a high-precision classifier to measure artificial intelligence (AI) patents by fine-tuning PatentSBERTa on manually labeled data from the USPTO’s AI Patent Dataset. Our classifier substantially improves the existing USPTO approach, achieving 97.0% precision, 91.3% recall, and a 94.0% F1 score, and it generalizes well to Chinese patents based on citation and lexical validation. Applying it to granted U.S. patents (1976–2023) and Chinese patents (2010–2023), we document rapid growth in AI patenting in both countries and broad convergence in AI patenting intensity and subfield composition, even as China surpasses the United States in recent annual patent counts. The organizatio..

In many modern industries, firms compete in differentiated-product markets while relying on complex global value chains for intermediate inputs. In such settings, trade policies such as tariffs on vehicles and parts operate not only through consumer substitution and firm pricing, but also through firms’ cost structures and sourcing decisions. We develop a structural model of the U.S. automobile market that integrates random-coefficients demand, multiproduct firm pricing, and a flexible supply-side framework in which shocks to the cost of imported parts transmit imperfectly into manufacturers’ marginal costs. The model is disciplined by novel model-level data on imported-parts exposure an..

Online loan marketplaces are changing consumer lending. Here we investigate consumer behavior in these markets with near-zero search costs. Using administrative data on 730,000 applications, 750,000 offers, and 200,000 individuals, together with credit registry records, we document four facts. First, substantial within-applicant dispersion in offered terms makes search highly valuable. Second, marketplace nudges mitigate choice complexity. Third, applicants search significantly, applying repeatedly, asking for different terms, and rejecting offers, in ways consistent with their creditworthiness. Fourth, dynamic adverse selection constrains search, as lenders penalize repeat applicants. Our f..

Direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) of prescription drugs may expand treatment access but also risks promoting overuse and business stealing without generating welfare gains. Among developed nations, only the United States and New Zealand permit DTCA, whereas detailing - promotion aimed at prescribers - is widely practiced. This paper analyzes the impact of DTCA on profits by modeling a counterfactual environment in which DTCA is banned. This is implemented through a dynamic equilibrium framework that adapts the Experience-Based Equilibrium (Fershtman and Pakes, 2012) for empirical analysis. EBE incorporates constraints on the cognitive abilities of decision-makers and mitigates researcher..

We estimate how expenditures on durable goods respond to transitory income shocks using variation from the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008. The estimated responses are large: Households spent about 80 percent of their stimulus payment within three months of receiving the income transfer on durables alone. Most of this spending was on motor vehicles, either financed, used, or both, and about 20 percent of the total durables response was on smaller items. To purchase motor vehicles the average household levered up by 40 cents on the dollar using vehicle loans. Our findings suggest that durable goods and their financing are key to understanding the link between current income and spending.

We develop a new approach to estimating earnings, job, and employment dynamics using subjective expectations data from the NY Fed Survey of Consumer Expectations. These data provide beliefs about future earnings offers and acceptance probabilities, offering direct information on counterfactual outcomes and enabling identification under weaker assumptions. Our framework avoids biases from selection and unobserved heterogeneity that affect models using realized outcomes. First-step fixed-effects regressions identify risk, persistence, and transition effects; second-step GMM recovers the covariance structure of unobserved heterogeneities such as ability, mobility, and match quality. We find low..

Aggregate real U.S. GDP fell by roughly 26 percent between 1929 and 1932, yet the severity of the Great Depression varied dramatically across states: CPI-deflated income per capita declined by 15 percent in Maryland but by 48 percent in South Dakota. To analyze this heterogeneity, we digitize Slaughter’s (1937) panel of state-by-sector production income for all 48 U.S. states and construct a novel set of sector- and state-specific deflators, allowing us to separate movements in physical quantities produced from the large relative price changes that occurred during the Great Depression. We then discipline a three-sector, 48-region dynamic spatial stochastic general equilibrium model and rec..

This paper studies how global warming affects deforestation and agricultural land use. Using high-resolution satellite data on global temperature, deforestation, and land cover from 2001 to 2019, we find that extreme heat shocks to agricultural productivity cause large and persistent forest loss on the world’s agricultural frontier. This effect is strongest in the tropics, in areas growing the most temperature-sensitive crops, and in regions with the most inelastic demand for agricultural products, and it does not seem to be offset by international spillovers. Moreover, we show that deforestation in response to extreme heat can be explained almost entirely by cropland expansion. We corrobo..

We study Germany’s landmark quota requiring major public companies to include at least one woman on their top executive teams. The quota increased female representation among top executives by about two-thirds. Firms largely recruited women from outside their networks and without prior public-company top-executive experience, choosing them over male candidates with similar profiles. Most were appointed to HR or niche roles, and there was no increase in female CEOs. We find no significant effects on the female share of managers in lower ranks, policies promoting gender equality, firm value, or performance. Overall, the quota boosted diversity without causing much disruption.

In many institutional settings, k items are selected with the goal of representing the underlying distribution of claims, opinions, or characteristics in a large population. We study environments with two adversarial parties whose preferences over the selected items are commonly known and opposed. We propose the Quantile Mechanism: one party partitions the population into k disjoint subsets, and the other selects one item from each subset. We show that this procedure is optimally representative among all feasible mechanisms, and illustrate its use in jury selection, multi-district litigation, and committee formation.

We examine how the World War I agricultural commodity price boom affected human capital accumulation during the early decades of the high school movement in the United States. First, based on newly collected county-level enrollment data, we show that enrollment and average daily attendance fell sharply at the peak of the boom. Second, using linked census data between 1910 and 1940, we find that greater exposure during teenage years reduced completed schooling by 0.27 to 0.47 years, with the largest effects concentrated in high school. For younger children, the net effect of increased household resources depends on local child labor intensity: the positive effect of higher parental income on ..