Almond (2006) argues that in utero exposure to the 1918 influenza pandemic reduced the 1919 birth cohort's adult socioeconomic status (SES). We show that this cohort came from lower-SES families, which is incompatible with Almond's cohort-comparison identification strategy. The adult SES deficit is reduced after background characteristics are controlled for; it is small and statistically insignificant in models that include household fixed effects. Replicating Almond's state-level dose-response analysis, we find no evidence in census data that influenza exposure reduced adult SES. Evidence from a city-level dose-response analysis on educational attainment using WWII enlistees from 287 cities is mixed.

Using bid-level data from discriminatory auctions for Mexican government bonds, we demonstrate that asymmetric information about default risk is a key friction in sovereign bond markets. We document that large bidders achieve higher bid-acceptance rates than other bidders despite paying no more for executed bids. We then propose a new model of primary markets in which investors may differ in wealth, risk aversion, market power, and information. Only asymmetric information can qualitatively account for our empirical finding, and asymmetric information about rare disasters can quantitatively match bidding and yield moments. Counterfactuals reveal substantial effects of asymmetric information on yields.

When an individual thinks about a problem, his decision to reason further may involve a tradeo between cognitive costs and a notion of value. But it is not obvious that this is always the case, and the value of reasoning is not well-dened. This pa- per analyzes the primitive properties of the reasoning process that must hold for the decision to stop thinking to be represented by a cost-benet analysis. We nd that the properties that characterize the cost-benet representation are weak and intuitive, suggesting that such a representation is justied for a large class of problems. We then provide additional properties that give more structure to the value of reasoning func- tion, including `value of information' and `maximum gain' representations. We show how our model applies to a variety of settings, including contexts involving sequential heuristics in choice, response time, reasoning in games and research. Our model can also be used to understand economically relevant patterns of behavior for which the cost-benet approach does not seem to hold. These include choking under pressure and (over)thinking aversion.

This paper measures impacts of removing children from families investigated for abuse or neglect. We use removal tendencies of child protection investigators as an instrument. We focus on young children investigated before age six and find that removal significantly increases test scores and reduces grade repetition for girls. There are no detectable impacts for boys. This pattern of results does not appear to be driven by heterogeneity in pre-removal characteristics, foster placements, or the type of schools attended after removal. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that development of abused and neglected girls is more responsive to home removal

This paper examines the long-term and spillover effects of management interventions on firm performance. Under the Training Within Industry (TWI) program, the U.S. government provided management training to firms involved in war production between 1940 and 1945. Using a newly collected panel dataset on all 11,575 U.S. firms that applied to the program, we find that the TWI training had positive and long-lasting effects on firm performance and the adoption of beneficial managerial practices. Moreover, it generated complementarities among different types of training and had positive spillover effects on the supply chain of trained firms

This short note addresses the concerns raised by Dewitte (2022) on the empirical exercise in Chaney (2018). I gratefully acknowledge that all coding inconsistencies noted by Dewitte (2022) are to be corrected, and I show that after correcting those inconsistencies, the statistical tests in Chaney (2018) are weaker but remain statistically significant.

Individuals typically differ in their identities—the behaviors they deem ideal for themselves and for the members of their network—and in their tolerance for behaviors that deviate from their ideals. This paper studies compromise—that is, departures from one’s ideal point, to be accepted by others. I show that an individual’s compromise in equilibrium is bounded by the difference between her tolerance level and the lowest tolerance level in society. Relatively intolerant individuals, who serve as “bridges,” are critical for reciprocated compromise. When individuals with extreme identities are systematically less tolerant, societies polarize. In contrast, intolerance among moderates encourages cohesion