Knowledge that Transforms

Many papers have explored the relationship between average tariff rates and economic growth when theory suggests that the structure of protection is what should matter. We therefore explore the relationship between economic growth and agricultural tariffs, industrial tariffs, and revenue tariffs for a sample of relatively well-developed countries between 1875 and 1913. Industrial tariffs were positively correlated with growth, and agricultural tariffs were generally negatively correlated with growth, although the results are not robust. Revenue tariffs were not related to growth at all.

The effect of expert opinion on demand for experience goods is difficult to quantify, as the relationship between purchases and reviews may be driven by product quality. Further, it is unclear whether a review-based demand effect is due to providing quality or existence information. Using a retail field experiment to overcome these obstacles, we find a significant positive average consumer response to expert opinion labels for wine. Demand decreases for low-scoring wines and increases for wines scoring average or higher. Results indicate that expert opinion labels transmit quality information as opposed to solely shelf visibility.

Retail gasoline prices are known to respond fairly slowly to wholesale price changes. This does not appear to be true for markets with Edgeworth price cycles. Recently many retail gasoline markets in the midwestern United States and other countries have been shown to exhibit price cycles in which competition generates rapid cyclical retail price movements. We show that cost changes in cycling markets are passed on two to three times faster than in markets without cycles. We argue that the constant price movement inherent within the Edgeworth cycle eliminates price frictions and allows firms to pass on cost fluctuations more easily.

In the United States, black workers earn less than their white counterparts and have higher rates of unemployment. Empirical work indicates that most of this wage gap is accounted for by differences in cognitive skills that emerge at an early age. In this paper, we demonstrate that the same is not true for black-white disparity in unemployment. A large unexplained unemployment differential motivates the paper's second contribution—a potential theoretical explanation. This explanation is built around a model that embeds statistical discrimination into the subjective worker evaluation process that lies at the root of the efficiency-wage theory of equilibrium unemployment.

This paper evaluates the health impacts of a signature initiative of the War on Poverty: the introduction of the modern Food Stamp Program (FSP). Using variation in the month FSP began operating in each U.S. county, we find that pregnancies exposed to FSP three months prior to birth yielded deliveries with increased birth weight, with the largest gains at the lowest birth weights. We also find small but statistically insignificant improvements in neonatal mortality. We conclude that the sizable increase in income from FSP improved birth outcomes for both whites and African Americans, with larger impacts for African American mothers.

This paper examines the investment decisions of older individual investors. We find that older and experienced investors are more likely to follow rules of thumb that reflect greater investment knowledge. However, older investors are less effective in applying their investment knowledge and exhibit worse investment skill, especially if they are less educated, earn lower income, and belong to minority racial/ethnic groups. Overall, the adverse effects of aging dominate the positive effects of experience. These results indicate that older investors' portfolio decisions reflect greater knowledge about investing, but investment skill deteriorates with age due to the adverse effects of cognitive aging.

This paper evaluates the presence of racial disparities in the issuance of consumer credit. Using a database of credit histories, I link location-based information on race with individual credit files. After controlling for place-specific factors such as housing vacancy rates and general population demographics, I find qualitatively large differences in the amount of credit offered to similarly qualified applicants living in black versus white areas. High data quality allows distinguishing between issuer-provision (supply) and utilization of credit (demand). Additional estimates using information on payday lending provide support for idea that issuers condition lending on location.

Despite their ubiquity, observational studies to infer the causal effect of a so-called immutable characteristic, such as race or sex, have struggled for coherence, given the unavailability of a manipulation analogous to a “treatment” in a randomized experiment and the danger of posttreatment bias. We demonstrate that a shift in focus from actual traits to perceptions of them can address both of these issues while facilitating articulation of other critical concepts, particularly the timing of treatment assignment. We illustrate concepts by discussing the designs of various studies of the role of race in trial court death penalty decisions.

Many researchers have addressed concerns of omitted variable bias in hedonic price models through the use of spatial fixed effects. We argue that this approach does not consider the biases introduced by effects that overlap the zone of capitalization for nonmarket goods. We show this bias can dominate the usual omitted variable bias using data on developer-provided open space. We control for multiscale capitalization and omitted variables simultaneously by extending the Hausman-Taylor estimator where the panel component of the estimator is defined over repeated transactions within neighborhoods rather than the traditional definition following a unique cross-sectional unit through time.

We analyze the effect of survey design on reported job satisfaction by exploiting two quasi-experiments in the British Household Panel Survey: a change in question design and parallel use of different interview modes. We show that apparently minor differences in survey design lead to substantial biases in econometric results, particularly on gender differences. The common empirical finding that women care less about wages and prefer to work fewer hours than men appears largely an artifact of survey design rather than a true behavioral difference.