Knowledge that Transforms

We provide an empirical test of contrast effects—a bias where a decision maker perceives information in contrast to what preceded it—in the quasi-experimental context of speed dating decisions. We document that prior partner attractiveness reduces the subsequent likelihood of an affirmative dating decision. This relationship is confined to recent interactions, consistent with a perceptual error, but not learning or the presence of a quota in affirmative responses. The contrast effect is driven almost entirely by male evaluators. Additional evidence documents the effect's linearity with respect to prior partner attractiveness, its amplification for partners of moderate attractiveness, and its partial attenuation with accumulated experience.

Using administrative panel data on the entire population of new labour immigrants to The Netherlands, we estimate the effects of individual labour market spells on immigration durations using the “timing-of-events” method. The model allows for correlated unobserved heterogeneity across migration, unemployment and employment processes. We find that unemployment spells increase return probabilities for all immigrant groups, while re-employment spells typically delay returns.

We investigate how prenatal economic fluctuations affected birth weight in Argentina during the period from January 2000 to December 2005 and document its procyclicality.We find evidence that the birth weight of children born to low-educated (less than high school) mothers is sensitive to macroeconomic fluctuations during both the first and third trimesters of pregnancy, while those of high-educated (high school or above) mothers react only to the first trimester of pregnancy.Our results are consistent with low-educated women facing credit constraints and suffering from both nutritional deprivation and maternal stress, while high-educated women are affected only by stress.

Using Bayesian methods, we estimate a Markov-switching New Keynesian (MSNK) model that allows shifts in the monetary policy reaction coefficients and shock volatilities with U.S. data. We find that a more aggressive monetary policy regime was in place after the Volcker disinflation and before 1970 than during the Great Inflation of the 1970s. Our estimates also indicate that a low-volatility regime has been in place during most of the sample period after 1984. We connect the timing of the different regimes to a measure of inflation persistence.

To explain the rise in Afghan opium production, we explore how rising conflicts change the incentives of farmers. Conflicts make illegal opportunities more profitable as they increase the perceived lawlessness and destroy infrastructure crucial to alternative crops. Exploiting a unique data set, we show that Western hostile casualties, our proxy for conflict, have a strong impact on subsequent local opium production. Using the period after the planting season as a placebo test, we show that conflict has a strong effect before but no effect after planting, indicating causality.

This paper explores the empirical content of the weak axiom of revealed preference (WARP) for repeated cross-sections. In a heterogeneous population, the fraction of consumers who violate WARP is not point identified but can be bounded. These bounds, as well as some nonparametric refinements, correspond to intuitive behavioral assumptions if there are two goods. With three or more goods, such intuitions break down, and plausible assumptions can have counterintuitive implications. We also provide estimators and confidence regions. The empirical application reveals that in the British Family Expenditure Survey, upper bounds are frequently positive but lower bounds are not significantly so.

The Schumpeterian opportunity cost hypothesis predicts that firms concentrate innovative activities in recessions. However, empirical evidence suggests that innovative activities are procyclical. Theory proposes that firms shift R&D investments and innovation from recessions to booms to maximize returns by capturing high-demand periods before imitators compete away rents. This paper provides the first empirical test of these predictions. Results indicate that R&D spending is more procyclical in industries with faster obsolescence, where matching invention to demand is more valuable, and innovation is more procyclical in industries with weaker IP protection, where imitation poses a greater threat.

We investigate the effect of competition on price dispersion in the airline industry. Using panel data from 1993 to 2008, we find a nonmonotonic effect of competition on price dispersion. An increase in competition is associated with greater price dispersion in concentrated markets but with less price dispersion in competitive markets—an inverse-U relationship. Our empirical findings are consistent with an oligopolistic second-degree price discrimination model and encompass contradictory findings in the literature.

This paper examines the productivity growth effects of educational attainment and its interaction with the distance to the world technology frontier, which is the percentage distance to the country with the highest total factor productivity (TFP) (the United Kingdom or United States), while allowing for the endogeneity of educational attainment in some of the estimates. For this purpose, a new annual data set for educational attainment is constructed for 21 industrialized countries over the period from 1870 to 2009. The results show that changes in educational attainment and the interaction between education and the distance to the frontier, as predicted by Schumpeterian growth theory, have been influential for productivity growth over the past 140 years.

Despite the prevalence of R&D support programs, evaluation studies based on explicit differences in support allocation are rare. In this paper, the identification of the causal effect of R&D support on company performance is based on geographic variation in government funding arising from a population-density rule. I find positive impacts on R&D investment, employment, and sales among the participants who were granted an R&D subsidy as a result of additional aggregate R&D support funding in their region. Although there are no instantaneous impacts on productivity, the study provides evidence of long-term productivity gains.