Using survey data, we analyze institutional investors’ expectations about the future performance of fund managers and the impact of those expectations on asset allocation decisions. We find that institutional investors allocate funds mainly on the basis of fund managers’ past performance and of investment consultants’ recommendations, but not because they extrapolate their expectations from these. This suggests that institutional investors base their investment decisions on the most defensible variables at their disposal and supports the existence of agency considerations in their decision making.

Toward understanding assortative matching, this is a self-contained introduction to research on search and matching. We first explore the nontransferable and perfectly transferable utility matching paradigms, and then a unifying imperfectly transferable utility matching model. Motivated by some unrealistic predictions of frictionless matching, we flesh out the foundational economics of search theory. We then revisit the original matching paradigms with search frictions. We finally allow informational frictions that often arise, such as in college-student sorting.

We implement a regression discontinuity design using the continuous raw Advanced Placement (AP) exam scores, which are mapped into the observed 1–5 integer scores, for over 4.5 million students. Earning higher AP integer scores positively affects college completion and subsequent exam-taking. Specifically, attaining credit-granting integer scores increases the probability that a student will receive a bachelor’s degree within 4 years by 1–2 percentage points per exam. We also find that receiving a score of 3 over a 2 on junior year AP exams causes students to take between 0.06 and 0.14 more AP exams senior year.

Does access to 4-year colleges affect degree completion for students who would otherwise attend 2-year colleges? Admission to Georgia’s 4-year public sector requires minimum SAT scores. Regression discontinuity estimates show that access to this sector increases 4-year college enrollment and college quality, largely by diverting students from 2-year colleges. Access substantially increases bachelor’s degree completion rates for these relatively low-skilled students. SAT-retaking behavior suggests students value access to 4-year public colleges, though perhaps less than they should. Our results imply that absolute college quality matters more than match quality, and they suggest potential unintended consequences of free community college proposals.

This paper discusses recent trends in the use of replications in economics. We include the results of recent replication studies that have attempted to identify replication rates within the discipline. These studies generally find that replication rates are relatively low. We then consider obstacles to undertaking replication studies and highlight replication initiatives in psychology and political science, behind which economics appears to lag.

In many competitive settings, consumers buy multiple product categories, and some prefer to use a single firm, generating complementary cross-category price effects. To study pricing in supermarkets, an organizational form where these effects are internalized, we develop a multi-category, multi-seller demand model and estimate it using UK consumer data. This class of model is used widely in theoretical analysis of retail pricing. We quantify cross-category pricing effects and find that internalizing them substantially reduces market power. We find that consumers inclined to one-stop (rather than multi-stop) shopping have a greater pro-competitive impact because they generate relatively large cross-category effects.