Knowledge that Transforms

How should a survey-based measure of well-being be implemented? How could it be constructed in a systematic and politically neutral way? These questions should be approached by economists with the same level of care that has been taken in the theoretical and practical development of GDP. We focus on two essential requirements for implementation: formulating a list of different aspects of well-being that is theoretically valid and can be measured accurately via surveys, and choosing and interpreting the survey response scales. We discuss progress to date on these issues, remaining challenges, and some possible approaches to overcoming them.

We provide a real-life application of a large scale affirmative action policy in school choice in the context of engineering school admissions in India where students not only care about what program they are matched to but also what type of seat category they are admitted under. We explain the market and the mechanism currently in use. Two significant shortcomings of the current mechanism are explained. The affirmative action policy in use leaves many seats vacant even though there are students who would take these seats. We provide the insight of a potential matching-theoretical solution to these problems.

Moralistic punishment enables human cooperation, but an outstanding question is why people voluntarily sanction when they can obtain the benefits of punishment without being enforcers themselves. To address how decentralized societies solve this second-order free rider issue, I examine why people punish among the Turkana, a population in Kenya in which informal peer sanctioning sustains participation in high-stakes interethnic warfare. Using vignette experiments I show that Turkana subjects express punitive sentiments toward second-order free riders and those who sanction irresponsibly. The prevalence of such meta norms regulating punishment reveal a possible pathway by which moralistic punishment could have evolved.

We assess the rate of replication for empirical papers in the 2010 American Economic Review. Across 70 empirical papers, we find that 29 percent have 1 or more citation that partially replicates the original result. While only a minority of papers has a published replication, a majority (60 percent) have either a replication, robustness test, or an extension. Surveying authors within the literature, we find substantial uncertainty over the number of extant replications.

To understand altruistic behavior, we must understand the process through which altruism develops and is shaped by the agents' own choices and exogenous factors. We introduce the concept of altruistic capital, which grows with effort devoted to altruistic acts and facilitates future altruism. We illustrate its potential use in the context of banking and conclude by showing that returns to altruistic effort shape the agent's choices and are shaped by external events such as the financial crisis.

China's gradualistic approach allowed the government to learn how the economy reacts to small policy changes, and to adjust its reforms before implementing them in full. With fully developed financial markets, however, private actors may front-run future policy changes, making it impossible to implement policies gradually. With financial markets, the government faces a time-inconsistency problem. The government would like to commit to a gradualistic approach, but after it observes the economy's quick reaction, it has no incentive to implement its policies in small steps.

This paper replicates results that some people, when allocating income, are “groupy” and discriminate between in and out groups, but many show no such bias. The paper explores psychometric, demographic, and political correlates. In an M-Turk experiment, no “Big Five” personality trait relates to this individual difference. Gender, education, and political party are not predictive. Political independents, however, are more likely to be non-groupy, and participants in deindustrialized counties or Deep South Republicans are more likely to be groupy. The results indicate (i) psychological notions of personality do not capture this heterogeneity and (ii) groupiness might relate to political and social contestation.

There is a large literature on semiparametric estimation of average treatment effects under unconfounded treatment assignment in settings with a fixed number of covariates. More recently attention has focused on settings with a large number of covariates. In this paper we extend lessons from the earlier literature to this new setting. We propose that in addition to reporting point estimates and standard errors, researchers report results from a number of supplementary analyses to assist in assessing the credibility of their estimates.

We attempted to replicate 67 macroeconomic papers using author-provided data and code files by following a preanalysis plan. Excluding 6 papers that used confidential data, we obtained data and code replication files for 29 of 35 papers (83 percent) that were required to provide such files as a condition of publication, compared to 11 of 26 papers (42 percent) that were not required to provide such files. Also excluding the 2 papers that used software we did not possess, we replicated 29 of 59 papers (49 percent) with assistance from the authors. We conclude with recommendations on improving replication of economics research.

I review the role of a new behavioral trait, competitiveness, on the gender agenda. I first describe how to measure competitiveness in the laboratory and show that gender differences in competitiveness are robust. I then establish the external economic relevance of the experimental measure of competitiveness: competitiveness correlates with education and labor market outcomes and can help account for gender differences therein. Finally, institutions can differ in the importance they place on competitiveness and hence can affect gender differences in economic outcomes. Exploring these institutional differences and their effects remains an open area of behavioral market design.