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- 2022
- Working Paper
When Do Individuals Give Up Agency? The Role of Decision Avoidance
By: Holly Dykstra, Christine L. Exley and Muriel Niederle
A common policy problem is that individuals reject recommended options and insist on making their own choices. Via a large-scale experiment, we document and investigate what factors contribute to this preference for agency. Our main results show that individuals’...
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- April 2022
- Article
Going Out or Opting Out? Capital, Political Vulnerability, and the State in China's Outward Investment
By: Meg Rithmire
How do state-business relations interact with outward investment in authoritarian regimes? This paper examines this question in the context of China’s rapid transformation into a major capital exporter. While most political economy scholarship focuses on firms’...
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- 2022
- Chapter
Prioritarianism and Optimal Taxation
By: Matti Tuomala and Matthew Weinzierl
Prioritarianism has been at the center of the formal approach to optimal tax theory since its modern starting point in Mirrlees (1971), but most theorists’ use of it is motivated by tractability rather than explicit normative reasoning. We characterize analytically and...
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Keywords:
Prioritarianism;
Optimal Taxation;
Utilitarianism;
Redistribution;
Inverse-optimum;
Taxation;
Theory;
Policy
- 2022
- Working Paper
Can Evidence-Based Information Shift Preferences Towards Trade Policy?
By: Laura Alfaro, Maggie X. Chen and Davin Chor
We investigate the role of evidence-based information in shaping individuals' preferences for trade policies, through a series of survey experiments that contain randomized information treatments. Each treatment provides a concise statement of economics research...
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- December 2021
- Case
The Instant Payment Mandate: The Central Bank of Brazil and Pix
By: Lauren Cohen and Spencer C. N. Hagist
João M. P. De Mello and his team at the Central Bank of Brazil are preparing a move that would seek to tilt the scales in favor of financial inclusion for the entire country. The innovation at hand is the unprecedented nation-wide instant payment scheme: Pix. The fruit...
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- October 2021
- Article
Overcoming the Cold Start Problem of CRM Using a Probabilistic Machine Learning Approach
By: Nicolas Padilla and Eva Ascarza
The success of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) programs ultimately depends on the firm's ability to understand consumers' preferences and precisely capture how these preferences may differ across customers. Only by understanding customer heterogeneity, firms can...
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- 2021
- Chapter
The Economic and Political Effects of Immigration: Evidence from the Age of Mass Migration
By: Marco Tabellini
Between 1850 and 1920, during the Age of Mass Migration, more than 30 million Europeans moved to the United States. European immigrants provided ample supply of cheap labor as well as specific skills and know-how, contributing to American economic growth. These...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Most Individuals Prefer to Compromise among Competing Normative Principles of Taxation
By: Itai Sher and Matthew C. Weinzierl
We use a novel survey to gather direct and indirect evidence on how individuals reconcile their simultaneous support for opposing normative principles when forming their policy preferences. Our evidence suggests that, when choosing policy, a minority (approximately...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
How to Fix ESG Reporting
By: Robert S. Kaplan and Karthik Ramanna
Investors, advocacy groups, academics, and the 200 CEOs of the US Business Roundtable have asked corporations to take on an added purpose beyond a narrow pursuit of shareholder value. In response, many companies now issue ESG (Environmental, Societal, and Governance)...
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Keywords:
ESG Reporting;
Sustainability;
Corporate Purpose;
Greenhouse Gas;
Activity-Based Costing;
Environmental Sustainability;
Environmental Management;
Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact;
Measurement and Metrics;
Goals and Objectives;
Agreements and Arrangements;
Corporate Accountability
- July 2021
- Article
Do Interactions with Candidates Increase Voter Support and Participation? Experimental Evidence from Italy
By: Enrico Cantoni and Vincent Pons
We test whether politicians can use direct contact to reconnect with citizens, increase turnout, and win votes. During the 2014 Italian municipal elections, we randomly assigned 26,000 voters to receive visits from city council candidates, from canvassers supporting...
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- July 2021
- Article
Invisible Inequality Leads to Punishing the Poor and Rewarding the Rich
By: Oliver P. Hauser, Gordon T. Kraft-Todd, David Rand, Martin A. Nowak and Michael I. Norton
Four experiments examine how the lack of awareness of inequality affects behaviour towards the rich and poor. In Experiment 1, participants who became aware that wealthy individuals donated a smaller percentage of their income switched from rewarding the wealthy to...
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Keywords:
Income Transparency;
Income;
Wealth;
Equality and Inequality;
Knowledge;
Behavior;
Outcome or Result;
Society;
Policy
- Article
The CMS New Rule on Ambulatory Surgical Centers Earns Only Partial Credit
By: Junaid Nabi and Robert S. Kaplan
The Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) recently announced that it will be removing more...
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- 2021
- Article
Designing, Not Checking, for Policy Robustness: An Example with Optimal Taxation
By: Benjamin B. Lockwood, Afras Sial and Matthew C. Weinzierl
Economists typically check the robustness of their results by comparing them across plausible ranges of parameter values and model structures. A preferable approach to robustness—for the purposes of policymaking and evaluation—is to design policy that takes these...
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- 2021
- Article
To Thine Own Self Be True? Incentive Problems in Personalized Law
By: Jordan M. Barry, John William Hatfield and Scott Duke Kominers
Recent years have seen an explosion of scholarship on “personalized law.” Commentators foresee a world in which regulators armed with big data and machine learning techniques determine the optimal legal rule for every regulated party, then instantaneously disseminate...
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Keywords:
Personalized Law;
Regulation;
Regulatory Avoidance;
Regulatory Arbitrage;
Law And Economics;
Law And Technology;
Law And Artificial Intelligence;
Futurism;
Moral Hazard;
Elicitation;
Signaling;
Privacy;
Law;
Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms;
Information Technology;
AI and Machine Learning
- 2021
- Working Paper
Deregulation, Market Power, and Prices: Evidence from the Electricity Sector
By: Alexander MacKay and Ignacia Mercadal
When deciding whether to introduce market competition in a regulated industry, a regulator faces an important tradeoff. Market-based prices can provide incentives to allocate resources more efficiently and reduce costs, but the presence of market power may lead to...
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- March 2021
- Article
Deliberately Prejudiced Self-driving Vehicles Elicit the Most Outrage
By: Julian De Freitas and Mina Cikara
Should self-driving vehicles be prejudiced, e.g., deliberately harm the elderly over young children? When people make such forced-choices on the vehicle’s behalf, they exhibit systematic preferences (e.g., favor young children), yet when their options are unconstrained...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Bollywood, Skin Color and Sexism: The Role of the Film Industry in Emboldening and Contesting Stereotypes in India after Independence
By: Sudev Sheth, Geoffrey Jones and Morgan Spencer
This working paper examines the social impact of the film industry in India during the first four decades after Indian Independence in 1947. It shows that Bollywood, the mainstream cinema in India and the counterpart in scale to Hollywood in the United States, shared...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
Prioritarianism and Optimal Taxation
By: Matti Tuomala and Matthew C. Weinzierl
Prioritarianism has been at the center of the formal approach to optimal tax theory since its modern starting point in Mirrlees (1971), but most theorists’ use of it is motivated by tractability rather than explicit normative reasoning. We characterize analytically and...
View Details
Keywords:
Prioritarianism;
Optimal Taxation;
Utilitarianism;
Redistribution;
Inverse-optimum;
Taxation;
Theory
- November 2020
- Article
Accelerator or Brake? Cash for Clunkers, Household Liquidity, and Aggregate Demand
By: Daniel Green, Brian Melzer, Jonathan Parker and Arcenis Rojas
This paper evaluates the Car Allowance Rebate System (CARS) by comparing the vehicle purchases and disposals of households with eligible "clunkers" to those of households with similar, but ineligible, vehicles. CARS caused roughly 500,000 purchases during the program...
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Keywords:
Automobiles;
Purchasing;
Government Incentives;
Household;
Financial Liquidity;
Income;
Behavior
- 2020
- Working Paper
Designing, Not Checking, for Policy Robustness: An Example with Optimal Taxation
By: Benjami Lockwood, Afras Y. Sial and Matthew C. Weinzierl
Economists typically check the robustness of their results by comparing them across plausible ranges of parameter values and model structures. A preferable approach to robustness—for the purposes of policymaking and evaluation—is to design policy that takes these...
View Details