Knowledge that Transforms

We analyze the existence of policy reversal, the phenomenon sometimes observed that a certain policy (say extreme left-wing) is implemented by the “unlikely” (right-wing) party. We formulate a Downsian signaling model where the incumbent government, through its choice of policy, reveals information both regarding own preferences and external circumstances that may call for a particular policy. We show that policy reversal may indeed exist as an equilibrium phenomenon. This is partly because the incumbent party has superior opportunities to reveal information, and partly because its reputation protects a left-wing incumbent when advertising a right-wing policy.

We investigate the impact of reputation in a laboratory experiment. We do so by varying whether the past choices of a long-run player are observable by the short-run players. Our framework allows for reputation to have either a beneficial or a harmful effect on the long-run player. We find that reputation is seldom harmful and its beneficial effects are not as strong as theory suggests. When reputational concerns are at odds with other-regarding preferences, we find the latter overwhelm the former.

A fundamental problem faced by employers is how to elicit effort from employees. Most economic models suggest that employers meet this challenge by monitoring employees carefully to prevent shirking. But there is another option that relies on heterogeneity across employees, and that is to screen job candidates to find workers with a stronger work ethic who require less monitoring. We might therefore expect employers who screen candidates more intensively to monitor them less. Using data from a national sample of US employers, we find that employers who screen applicants more intensively for factors that should predict work ethic also monitor employees less and also make greater use of systems such as teamwork where monitoring by supervisors is more difficult. This screening is also associated with higher wages, higher employee productivity, and lower involuntary turnover rates. Screening for other attributes, such as work experiences and academic performance, does not produce these results. JEL codes: M51, M54, J30.

Economic theory suggests that a natural tool to control medical costs is increased consumer cost sharing for medical care. While such cost sharing reduces “full insurance” (wherein patients are indifferent between falling sick or remaining healthy), a greater reliance on coinsurance and copayments can, in theory, stem patient and provider incentives to engage in moral hazard. These issues are particularly salient for low income populations who are at the center of current efforts to expand coverage (among the uninsured in 2008, 38 percent had incomes below the federal poverty line (FPL), and 52 percent had incomes between 100 and 299 percent of the FPL (Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured 2009)). As insurance is expanded to these groups, it is important to understand how they respond to greater levels of patient cost sharing. On the one hand, smarter plan design could help reduce the fiscal pressures associated with insurance expansion. But on the other, it is also possible that low income recipients are unable to cut back on utilization wisely and, consequently, experience hospitalization “offsets” as a result of greater levels of patient cost sharing. In particular, there remains a concern among many that higher cost sharing on primary care will lead to less effective use of primary care, worse health, and, consequently, higher downstream costs at hospitals (the so-called “offset effects”).

We consider the credibility, persuasiveness, and informativeness of multidimensional cheap talk by an expert to a decision maker. We find that an expert with state-independent preferences can always make credible comparative statements that trade off the expert's incentive to exaggerate on each dimension. Such communication benefits the expert—cheap talk is “persuasive”—if her preferences are quasiconvex. Communication benefits a decision maker by allowing for a more informed decision, but strategic interactions between multiple decision makers can reverse this gain. We apply these results to topics including product recommendations, voting, auction disclosure, and advertising.

Empirical work shows that a large majority of individuals get most of their information from a very small subset of the group, viz., the influencers; moreover, there exist only minor differences between the observable characteristics of the influencers and the others. We refer to these empirical findings as the Law of the Few. This paper develops a model where players personally acquire information and form connections with others to access their information. Every (robust) equilibrium of this model exhibits the law of the few.

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This paper investigates whether there is a link between cognitive ability, risk aversion, and impatience, using a representative sample of roughly 1,000 German adults. Subjects participate in choice experiments with monetary incentives measuring risk aversion, and impatience over an annual horizon, and conduct two different, widely used, tests of cognitive ability. We find that lower cognitive ability is associated with greater risk aversion, and more pronounced impatience. These relationships are significant, and robust to controlling for personal characteristics, education, income, and measures of credit constraints. We perform a series of additional robustness checks, which help rule out other possible confounds.

A major puzzle in international finance is that high interest rate currencies tend to appreciate (forward discount puzzle). Motivated by the fact that only a small fraction of foreign currency holdings is actively managed, we calibrate a two-country model in which agents make infrequent portfolio decisions. We show that the model can account for the forward discount puzzle. It can also account for several related empirical phenomena, including that of “delayed overshooting.” We also show that making infrequent portfolio decisions is optimal as the welfare gain from active currency management is smaller than the corresponding fees.

Research on the impact of teachers on student achievement (e.g., Jonah E. Rockoff 2004; Steven G. Rivkin, Hanushek, and John Kain 2005) has established two stylized facts: (1) teacher effectiveness varies widely, and (2) outside of experience, qualifications that determine a teacher’s certification and salary bear little relation to outcomes. This provides motivation to understand how to identify effective and ineffective teachers, particularly early in their careers. Studies that examine how student achievement data can predict teachers’ impacts on student outcomes in the future (e.g., Robert Gordon, Thomas J. Kane, and Douglas O. Staiger 2006; Dan Goldhaber and Michael Hansen 2010) conclude that using such data to selectively retain teachers could yield large benefits. However, “value-added” measures of effectiveness are noisy and can be biased if some teachers are persistently given students that are difficult to teach in ways that are hard to observe. Thus, using other information may achieve more stability and accuracy in teacher evaluations. There is also a literature on subjective teaching evaluations (i.e., evaluations by the school principal or evaluations based on classroom observation protocols or “rubrics”), which also finds significant relationships between evaluations and achievement gains. However, these studies typically investigate how evaluations predict the exam performance of current, not