Knowledge that Transforms

We propose a model of optimal decision making subject to a memory constraint. The constraint is a limit on the complexity of memory measured using Shannon's mutual information, as in models of rational inattention; but our theory differs from that of Sims (2003) in not assuming costless memory of past cognitive states. We show that the model implies that both forecasts and actions will exhibit idiosyncratic random variation; that average beliefs will also differ from rational-expectations beliefs, with a bias that fluctuates forever with a variance that does not fall to zero even in the long run; and that more recent news will be given disproportionate weight in forecasts. We solve the model under a variety of assumptions about the degree of persistence of the variable to be forecasted and the horizon over which it must be forecasted, and examine how the nature of forecast biases depends on these parameters. The model provides a simple explanation for a number of features of reported expectations in laboratory and field settings, notably the evidence of over-reaction in elicited forecasts documented by Afrouzi et al. (2020) and Bordalo et al. (2020a).Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

Do coordination failures constrain financial technology adoption? Exploiting the Mexican government’s rollout of 1 million debit cards to poor households from 2009 to 2012, I examine responses on both sides of the market and find important spillovers and distributional impacts. On the supply side, small retail firms adopted point-of-sale terminals to accept card payments. On the demand side, this led to a 21 percent increase in other consumers’ card adoption. The supply-side technology adoption response had positive effects on both richer consumers and small retail firms: richer consumers shifted 13 percent of their supermarket consumption to small retailers, whose sales and profits increased. (JEL E42, L25, L81, O14, O33)

We study how misperceptions of others’ tastes influence beliefs, demand, and prices in markets with observational learning. Consumers infer a good’s quality from the quantity demanded and price paid by others. When consumers exaggerate the similarity between their and others’ tastes, such “taste projection” generates discrepant quality perceptions, which are decreasing in a projector’s taste and increasing in the observed price. These biased inferences produce an excessively elastic market demand. We also analyze dynamic monopoly pricing with short-lived taste-projecting consumers. Optimal pricing follows a declining path: a high initial price inflates future buyers’ perceptions, and lower subsequent prices induce overadoption. (JEL D42, D83, D91, L15)

We propose a parsimonious mechanism for generating premature deindustrialization (PD). In the baseline model, the Baumol effect drives the hump-shaped path of the manufacturing share. Countries follow different paths due to the difference in the sector-specific adoption lags. The condition for PD under which countries differ only in technology gap implies that the cross-country productivity dispersion is the largest in agriculture. Moreover, when calibrated to match Rodrik’s (2016) findings, it is the smallest in manufacturing. In three extensions, we add the Engel effect, international trade, and catching up by late industrializers, to demonstrate the robustness of the mechanism. (JEL F11, L16, L60, O14, O33)

There is increasing interest in allocating treatments based on observed individual characteristics: examples include targeted marketing, individualized credit offers, and heterogeneous pricing. Treatment personalization introduces incentives for individuals to modify their behavior to obtain a better treatment. Strategic behavior shifts the joint distribution of covariates and potential outcomes. The optimal rule without strategic behavior allocates treatments only to those with a positive conditional average treatment effect. With strategic behavior, we show that the optimal rule can involve randomization, allocating treatments with less than 100% probability even to those who respond positively on average to the treatment. We propose a sequential experiment based on Bayesian optimization that converges to the optimal treatment rule without parametric assumptions on individual strategic behavior. This paper was accepted by Vivek Farias, data science. Supplemental Material: The data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.01629 .

We document large gender disparities within a government program that entitles 46 million poor individuals to free hospital care. We show that care is not free in practice and higher costs are associated with larger disparities. Lowering care costs increases female utilization but does not reduce gender disparities because marginal beneficiaries are as likely to be male as inframarginals. Long-term exposure to local female leaders reduces disparities by addressing factors lowering female care. In the presence of gender bias, subsidizing social services may fail to address gender inequalities without actions that specifically target females. (JEL H51, I12, I13, I14, J16, O15)

We investigate the causal impact of public discourse on socially responsible market behavior. Across three laboratory experiments, having market participants engage in public discourse generally increases market social responsibility. These positive impacts are robust to variation in several characteristics of the discourse. We provide evidence that discourse strengthens beliefs that others support socially responsible exchange. However, relaxing requirements to engage in discourse sharply reduces its effectiveness. Our findings suggest that campaigns encouraging discussion of appropriate market behavior can have sizable impacts on addressing inefficiencies due to market failures but that policies encouraging broad public engagement may be important. (JEL C92, D62, D83, D91, P36, M14, Z13)

This study examines the link between credit supply and hospital health outcomes. We use bank stress tests as exogenous shocks to credit access for hospitals that have lending relationships with tested banks. We find that affected hospitals shift their operations to increase resource utilization following a negative credit shock but reduce the quality of their care to patients across a variety of measures, including a significant increase in risk-adjusted readmission and mortality rates. The results indicate that access to credit can affect the quality of health care hospitals deliver, pointing to important spillover effects of credit market frictions on health outcomes. (JEL G21, G32, I11, I18)

We study regressions with multiple treatments and a set of controls that is flexible enough to purge omitted variable bias. We show these regressions generally fail to estimate convex averages of heterogeneous treatment effects—instead, estimates of each treatment’s effect are contaminated by nonconvex averages of the effects of other treatments. We discuss three estimation approaches that avoid such contamination bias, including the targeting of easiest-to-estimate weighted average effects. A reanalysis of nine empirical applications finds economically and statistically meaningful contamination bias in observational studies; contamination bias in experimental studies is more limited due to smaller variability in propensity scores. (JEL C21, C31, C51, H75, I21, I28)

How do radical reforms shape economic development over time? In 1790, the French Constituent Assembly overhauled the kingdom’s organization to establish new local capitals. In some departments, the choice of local capitals over rival candidate cities was plausibly exogenous. We study how changes in administrative presence affect state capacity and development in the ensuing decades. In the short run, administrative proximity increases taxation and investments in law enforcement. In the long run, capitals obtain more public goods and grow faster. Our results shed light on the dynamic impacts of state building following one of history’s most ambitious administrative reforms. (JEL D70, H41, H71, O18, O43)