GARP for Kids: On the Development of Rational Choice Behavior by William T. Harbaugh, Kate Krause and Timothy R. Berry. Published in volume 91, issue 5, pages 1539-1545 of American Economic Review, December 2001

An important characteristic of many environmental programs is that their benefits extend far into the future. The primary purpose of cleanups at hazardous-waste disposal sites, for example, is often to prevent the contamination of groundwater that could pose risks to future residents at these sites. Such cleanups typically involve considerable capital and other costs, which are incurred at the front end of the project, and yield a stream of health benefits, often in the form of cancer cases avoided, that may not be recognized for many years. This would not pose unusual problems for program evaluation if everyone were comfortable with the assignment of dollar values to these reductions in future risk (see Cropper and Portney, 1990). However, regulatory agencies are sometimes reluctant to make such monetary valuations, preferring instead to evaluate programs on a cost-per-life-saved (CPLS) basis (Office of Management and Budget, 1991). This raises an interesting question. Should lives saved in the future be discounted for the purpose of calculating CPLS, or should they be counted the same as those saved tomorrow? To shed light on this, over the last year we have asked members of the public hypothetical questions that enable us to infer the rate at which they implicitly discount future lives saved (John K. Horowitz and Richard T. Carson [1990] asked similar questions of students). In the remainder of this paper, we summarize the results of this research, details of which can be found elsewhere (Cropper et al., 1991, 1992).

We show that labor market transaction costs explain why the smallest farms are more efficient than slightly larger farms in most low-income countries and that increases in machine capacity with operational scale result in the globally observed rising upper tail of productivity. We find evidence consistent with these mechanisms using Indian data, and we show that if all Indian farms were at the minimum scale required to maximize the return on land, the number of farms would be reduced by 82% and income per farm worker would rise by 68%.

This study explores the tension between the standard economic theory of preference and nonstandard theories of preference that are motivated by an underlying theory of framing. A simple experiment fails to measure a known preference. The divergence of the measured preference from the known preference reflects a mistake, arising from some subjects’ misconception of the game form. We conclude that choice data should not be granted an unqualified interpretation of preference revelation. Mistakes in choices obscured by a possible error at the foundation of the theory of framing can masquerade as having been produced by nonstandard preferences.

Electronic medical records (EMRs) facilitate fast and accurate access to patient records, which could improve diagnosis and patient monitoring. Using a 12-year county-level panel, we find that a 10 percent increase in births that occur in hospitals with EMRs reduces neonatal mortality by 16 deaths per 100,000 live births. This is driven by a reduction of deaths from conditions requiring careful monitoring. We also find a strong decrease in mortality when we instrument for EMR adoption using variation in state medical privacy laws. Rough cost-effectiveness calculations suggest that EMRs are associated with a cost of $531,000 per baby’s life saved.

Despite the centrality of the median voter prediction in political economy models, overwhelming empirical evidence shows that legislators regularly take positions that diverge significantly from the preferences of the median voter in their districts. However, all these empirical studies to date lack the necessary data to directly measure the preferences of the median voter. We utilize a unique data set consisting of individual‐level voting data that allows us to construct direct measures of voter preferences. We find that legislators are most constrained by the preferences of the median voter in homogeneous districts.

This paper describes aspects of the French Revolution from the perspective of theories about money and government budget constraints. We describe how unpleasant fiscal arithmetic gripped the Old Regime, how the Estates General responded to reorganize France's fiscal affairs, and how fiscal exigencies impelled the Revolution into a procession of monetary experiments ending in hyper-inflation.

Household-level panel data from a nationally representative sample of rural Indian households describing the adoption and profitability of high-yielding seed varieties (HYVs) associated with the Green Revolution are used to test the implications of a model incorporating learning by doing and learning spillovers. The estimates indicate that imperfect knowledge about the management of the new seeds was a significant barrier to adoption; this barrier diminished as farmer experience with the new technologies increased; own experience and neighbors' experience with HYVs significantly increased HYV profitability; and farmers do not fully incorporate the village returns to learning in making adoption decisions.

This paper provides an analysis of the predictable components of monthly common stock and bond portfolio return. Most of the predictability is associated with sensitivity to economic variables in a rational asset pricing model with multiple betas. The stock market risk premium is the most important for capturing predictable variation of the stock portfolios, while premiums associated with interest rate risks capture predictability of the bond returns. Time variation in the premium for beta risk is more important than changes in the betas.