Applying a media market boundary approach to individual survey data, I show that political advertising on television increases the probability that viewers who identify with a party will espouse its positions, prefer its candidates, and turn out to vote. This is true no matter which party sponsored the ad, suggesting that an ad consolidates and motivates the sponsor's partisans while simultaneously engendering a countervailing consolidation and mobilization among supporters of the other party. My results are consistent with agents who judge a source's quality by their priors and highlight the importance of targeting supporters.

We derive a new powerful, simple test for mediation. Testing for mediation is empirically important and the no-mediation hypothesis H0:θ1θ2=0 poses a theoretical problem, nonregular at the origin, where standard tests have extremely low rejection probabilities. We prove that a similar test only exists if 1/α∈N. It is unique, but with unfortunate properties. An innovative varying-g method is introduced to derive a nearly similar test, gopt, with power close to the envelope without these undesirable properties, and a second, less similar test, g1.2, with more empirical appeal. Results are illustrated in an educational setting.

This paper quantifies preferences for income equality and mobility by generating statistics that are uncorrelated with beliefs and can be interpreted as marginal rates of substitution (MRS). All things being equal, U.S. residents are willing to reduce average income by $2,744 to reduce the 90/10 income inequality ratio one unit, and $1,228 to increase income mobility from the bottom quintile one percentage point. Democrats and Independents have similar preferences for both social variables, while Republicans have an MRS that is about two-thirds that of Democrats and Independents for both income inequality and mobility.

This paper draws on employer-employee and longitudinal plant data from Mexico to investigate the impact of exports on wage premiums, defined as wages above what workers would receive elsewhere in the labor market. We decompose plant-level average wages into a component reflecting skill composition and a component reflecting wage premiums. Using the late-1994 peso devaluation interacted with initial export propensity as a source of exogenous changes in exports, we find that exports have a significant positive effect on wage premiums and that the effect on wage premiums accounts for essentially all of the medium-term effect of exporting on plant-average wages.

This paper introduces the random discounted expected utility (R-DEU) model, which we have developed as a means to deal with heterogeneous risk and time preferences. The R-DEU model provides an explicit linkage between preference and choice heterogeneity. We prove it has solid comparative statics, discuss its identification, and demonstrate its computational convenience. Finally, we use two distinct experimental datasets to illustrate the advantages of the R-DEU model over common alternatives for estimating heterogeneity in preferences across individuals.

We introduce two empirical strategies harnessing the randomness in school assignment mechanisms to measure school value-added. The first estimator controls for the probability of school assignment, treating take-up as ignorable. We test this assumption using randomness in assignments. The second approach uses assignments as instrumental variables (IVs) for low-dimensional models of value-added and forms empirical Bayes posteriors from these IV estimates. Both strategies solve the underidentification challenge arising from school undersubscription. Models controlling for assignment risk and lagged achievement in Denver and New York City yield reliable value-added estimates. Estimates from models with lower-quality achievement controls are improved by IV.

Does low trust in workers discourage firms from hiring? We conduct an experiment in Ghana with real entrepreneurs who have the option to hire anonymous workers for a trivial but tedious task. Shirking attracts no penalty and completion of the task is an indicator of trustworthiness. We elicit employers’ expectations and study how they change with random signals of workers’ previous behavior. We find that employers underestimate workers’ trustworthiness, which reduces hiring and profits. Negative signals lower employers’ expectations, while positive signals do not affect them. This asymmetry can help to sustain an equilibrium with limited experimentation and biased beliefs.

We use surveys, laboratory experiments and administrative data to study how heterogeneity in the perceived immorality of work and in workers' aversion to acting immorally impact labor market outcomes. Immoral work is associated with higher wages, both in administrative data and in causal experimental evidence. Individuals more willing to engage in immoral conduct find employment in firms and industries perceived as immoral less aversive and have higher employment rates in immoral work in the laboratory. These phenomena appear to be driven by impure social motives, reflecting a desire not to be involved with immoral work, rather than by consequentialist concerns.

Changes in the minimum wage may impact college enrollment and educational attainment. Using institutional data on college enrollment and program completion, we find that enrollment falls markedly among students at public two-year institutions in response to increases in the minimum wage. The largest enrollment effects are seen for those students who are enrolled part-time at community colleges. We find little evidence of negative effects on the attainment of certificates or degrees, suggesting that increases in the minimum wage are unlikely to divert students from degree attainment.

The Lorenz curve and Gini index are standard tools for the evaluation of inequality in one dimension. However, inequality is inherently multi-dimensional. Extending the Lorenz curve and Gini index to a multidimensional context has proved controversial. This paper proposes a new multivariate extension based on multivariate rearrangements of optimal transport theory, which shares many of the desirable properties of their univariate counterparts. In particular, the corresponding multivariate inequality ordering is equivalent to preference by any social planner with inequality averse multivariate rank dependent social evaluation functional.