Knowledge that Transforms

Tax evasion, by its very nature, is difficult to observe. We quantify the effects of tax rates on tax evasion by examining the relationship in China between the tariff schedule and the "evasion gap," which we define as the difference between Hong Kong's reported exports to China at the product level and China's reported imports from Hong Kong. Our results imply that a one-percentage-point increase in the tax rate is associated with a 3 percent increase in evasion. Furthermore, the evasion gap is negatively correlated with tax rates on closely related products, suggesting that evasion takes place partly through misclassification of imports from higher-taxed categories to lower-taxed ones, in addition to underreporting the value of imports.

This paper presents an empirical analysis of a choice‐theoretic model of cultural transmission. In particular, we use data from the General Social Survey to estimate the structural parameters of a model of marriage and child socialization along religious lines in the United States. The observed intermarriage and socialization rates are consistent with Protestants, Catholics, and Jews having a strong preference for children who identify with their own religious beliefs and making costly decisions to influence their children’s religious beliefs. Our estimates imply dynamics of the shares of religious traits in the population that are in sharp contrast with the predictions obtained by linear extrapolations from current intermarriage rates.

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.

Managed care organizations rely on incentives that encourage physicians to limit medical expenditures, but little is known about how physicians respond to these incentives. We address this issue by analyzing the physician incentive contracts in use at a health maintenance organization. By combining knowledge of the incentive contracts with internal company records, we examine how medical expenditures vary with the intensity of the incentive to cut costs. Our investigation leads us to a novel explanation for high‐powered group incentives: such incentives can improve efficiency in the allocation of resources when the allocation process is based on the professional judgment of multiple agents. Our empirical work indicates that medical expenditures at the HMO are 5 percent lower than they would have been in the absence of incentives.

We develop a theory of internal commitments or “personal rules” based on self‐reputation over one’s willpower, which transforms lapses into precedents that undermine future self‐restraint. The foundation for this mechanism is the imperfect recall of past motives and feelings, leading people to draw inferences from their past actions. The degree of self‐control an individual can achieve is shown to rise with his self‐confidence and decrease with prior external constraints. On the negative side, individuals may adopt excessively rigid rules that result in compulsive behaviors such as miserliness, workaholism, or anorexia. We also study the cognitive basis of self‐regulation, showing how it is constrained by the extent to which self‐monitoring is subject to opportunistic distortions of memory or attribution, and how rules for information processing can themselves be maintained.

This paper develops a dynamic supply and demand model of occupational choice and applies it to the engineering profession. The model is largely successful in understanding data in the U.S. engineering labor market. The engineering market responds strongly to economic forces. The demand for engineers responds to the price of engineering services and demand shifters. More important, supply and enrollment decisions are remarkably sensitive to career prospects in engineering. Also a rational model, in which students use some forward‐looking elements to forecast future demand for engineers, fits the data reasonably well. These findings suggest that subsidies to build technical talent ahead of demand are misplaced unless public policy makers have better information on future market conditions than the market participants do.

The factor proportions model of international trade is one of the most influential theories in international economics. Its central standing in this field has appropriately prompted, particularly recently, intense empirical scrutiny. A substantial and growing body of empirical work has tested the predictions of the theory on the net factor content of a country’s trade with the rest of the world, usually under the maintained assumptions of factor price equalization and identical homothetic preferences across trading countries (or under quite specific relaxations of these assumptions). In contrast, this paper uses OECD production and trade data to test the restrictions (derived by Helpman) on the factor content of trade flows that hold even under nonequalization of factor prices and in the absence of any assumptions regarding consumer preferences. In a further contrast with most of the existing literature, which has focused on the factor content of a country’s multilateral trade, our tests concern bilateral trade flows, thereby enabling the examination of trade flows between only a subset of countries for which quality data (relatively speaking) are available. We find that restrictions implied by the theory cannot be rejected for the vast majority of country pairs considered in our analysis.

We present a model of delegation with self-interested and privately informed experts. A team of experts with extreme but opposite biases is acceptable to a wide range of decision makers with diverse preferences, but the value of expertise from such a team is low. A decision maker wants to appoint experts who are less partisan than he is in order to facilitate information pooling by the expert team. Selective delegation, either by controlling the decision-making process or by conditioning the delegation decision on his own information, is an effective way for the decision maker to safeguard own interests while making use of expert information. © 2004 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

This paper considers the identification and estimation of hedonic models. We establish that in an additive version of the hedonic model, technology and preferences are generically nonparametrically identified from data on demand and supply in a single hedonic market. The empirical literature that claims that hedonic models estimated on data from a single market are fundamentally underidentified is based on arbitrary linearizations that do not use all the information in the model. The exact economic model that justifies linear approximations is unappealing. Nonlinearities are generic features of equilibrium in hedonic models and a fundamental and economically motivated source of identification.

We propose a dynamic equilibrium model of asset prices and trading volume when agents face fixed transactions costs. We show that even small fixed costs can give rise to large "no‐trade" regions for each agent's optimal trading policy. The inability to trade more frequently reduces the agents' asset demand and in equilibrium gives rise to a significant illiquidity discount in asset prices.