Knowledge that Transforms

Using micro-level data, we construct a credit spread index with considerable predictive power for future economic activity. We decompose the credit spread into a component that captures firm-specific information on expected defaults and a residual component–– the excess bond premium. Shocks to the excess bond premium that are orthogonal to the current state of the economy lead to declines in economic activity and asset prices. An increase in the excess bond premium appears to reflect a reduction in the risk-bearing capacity of the financial sector, which induces a contraction in the supply of credit and a deterioration in macroeconomic conditions.

When asked to name one proposition in the social sciences that is both true and non-trivial, Paul Samuelson famously replied: ‘Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage’. Truth, however, in Samuelson's reply refers to the fact that Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage is mathematically correct, not that it is empirically valid. In this paper we develop and implement an empirical test of Ricardo's ideas. We use novel agricultural data that describe the productivity in 17 crops of 1.6 million parcels of land in 55 countries around the world. We find that a regression of log observed output on log predicted output has a (precisely estimated) slope of 0.84 and an R-squared of 0.93. In our view, these findings offer considerable support for Ricardo's ideas.

We examine empirically the impact of ethnic divisions on conflict, by using a specification based on Esteban and Ray (2011). That theory links conflict intensity to three indices of ethnic distribution: polarization, fractionalization, and the Gini-Greenberg index. The empirical analysis verifies that these distributional measures are significant correlates of conflict. These effects persist as we introduce country-specific measures of group cohesion and of the importance of public goods, and combine them with the distributional measures exactly as described by the theory.

Technological innovation in agriculture was substantial during the 20th century. Is “modern” technological control of the environment replacing a “primitive” dependency on natural advantages and disadvantages, or has agricultural production remained persistently dependent on the environment? This paper estimates how the 20th century modernization of United States Plains' agriculture changed the impact of environmental characteristics on agricultural land values. Despite substantial technological innovation and rising land values from 1945 to 2002, counties' environmental characteristics largely maintained influence on land values. Environmental change has become no less costly, as technological innovation has not reduced the importance of natural advantages or disadvantages.

Would people choose what they think would maximize their subjective well-being (SWB)? We present survey respondents with hypothetical scenarios and elicit both choice and predicted SWB rankings of two alternatives. While choice and predicted SWB rankings usually coincide in our data, we find systematic reversals. We identify factors-such as predicted sense of purpose, control over one's life, family happiness, and social status-that help explain hypothetical choice controlling for predicted SWB. We explore how our findings vary by SWB measure and by scenario. Our results have implications regarding the use of SWB survey questions as a proxy for utility.

Mortgage loans are leading examples of transactions where experts on one side of the market take advantage of consumers' lack of knowledge and experience. We study the compensation that borrowers pay to mortgage brokers for assistance from application to closing. Two findings support the conclusion that confused borrowers overpay for brokers' services: (i) A model of effective shopping shows that borrowers sacrifice at least $1,000 by shopping from too few brokers. (ii) Borrowers who compensate their brokers with both cash and a commission from the lender pay twice as much as similar borrowers who pay no cash.

This paper examines how estimates of the deterrent effect of capital punishment depend on alternate choices of assumptions concerning the homicide process. Specific models of the homicide process represent bundles of these assumptions, which involve the unobserved heterogeneity, the relevant penalty probabilities for homicide choices, possible cross-polity parameter variation, and exchangeability between polity-time pairs that do and do not experience positive numbers of murders. We demonstrate how various assumptions have driven the conflicting findings from studies on capital punishment, and isolate a particular set of assumptions that are required to find a positive deterrent effect.

Bundling is at the forefront of many policy debates as new technologies allow firms to implement more complex bundling arrangements. Realistic analyses of bundling—particularly between suppliers and retailers—require detailed data on both supply arrangements and consumer demand. We analyze firms' use of bundling as a vertical restraint (known as full-line forcing) using extensive supply and demand data from the video rental industry. Our model captures key details of the market that determine firms' contractual choices, and sheds light on the implications of these decisions. The empirical approach provides a model for how to analyze bundling when detailed data are available.

Using data from the United States Sentencing Commission, we examine how judicial biases may have influenced sentences during the era of the Federal criminal sentencing guidelines. Our utility maximization model of judicial sentencing preferences leads to a partially censored ordered probit model that accounts for mass points in the sentencing distribution that occur at the upper and lower guideline limits and at sentences involving no prison time. Our results indicate that racial- and gender-based discrepancies exist, even after controlling for circumstances such as the severity of the offense and past criminal history.

Bayes' rule has two well-known limitations: 1) it does not model the reaction to zero-probability events; 2) a sizable empirical evidence documents systematic violations of it. We characterize axiomatically an alternative updating rule, the Hypothesis Testing model. According to it, the agent follows Bayes' rule if she receives information to which she assigned a probability above a threshold. Otherwise, she looks at a prior over priors, updates it using Bayes' rule for second-order priors, and chooses the prior to which the updated prior over priors assigns the highest likelihood. We also present an application to equilibrium refinement in game theory.