David de la Croix, Frédéric Docquier, Alice Fabre, Robert Stelter
{"title":"The Academic Market and the Rise of Universities in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (1000-1800)","authors":"David de la Croix, Frédéric Docquier, Alice Fabre, Robert Stelter","doi":"10.1093/jeea/jvad061","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jeea/jvad061","url":null,"abstract":"We argue that market forces shaped the geographic distribution of upper-tail human capital across Europe during the Middle Ages, and contributed to bolstering universities at the dawn of the Humanistic and Scientific Revolutions. We build a unique database of thousands of scholars from university sources covering all of Europe, construct an index of their ability, and map the academic market in the medieval and early modern periods. We show that scholars tended to concentrate in the best universities (agglomeration), that better scholars were more sensitive to the quality of the university (positive sorting) and migrated over greater distances (positive selection). Agglomeration, selection and sorting patterns testify to an integrated academic market, made possible by the use of a common language (Latin).","PeriodicalId":48297,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the European Economic Association","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.6,"publicationDate":"2023-11-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138494670","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Preventing Violence in the Most Violent Contexts: Behavioral and Neurophysiological Evidence from El Salvador","authors":"Lelys Dinarte-Diaz, Pablo Egana-delSol","doi":"10.1093/jeea/jvad068","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jeea/jvad068","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Violence and delinquency levels in Central America are among the highest in the world and constrain human capital acquisition. We designed and conducted a randomized experiment in El Salvador to measure the impacts of an after-school program aimed at reducing school violence. The program combines a behavioral intervention with extracurricular activities for 10 to 16 year old students. We find the program reduced the participants’ violent behavior both inside and outside of school and indirectly improved their attendance, attitudes toward school and learning, and academic outcomes. Using state-of-the-art technology, we measured participant brain activity and show that the intervention fosters emotion regulation, enabling treated adolescents to remain calmer when faced with external stimuli.","PeriodicalId":48297,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the European Economic Association","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134957759","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Cohabitation <i>VS.</i> Marriage: Mating Strategies by Education in the Usa","authors":"Fabio Blasutto","doi":"10.1093/jeea/jvad065","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jeea/jvad065","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In this paper I analyze the determinants of cohabitation, marriage, and divorce in the US. I first document that college graduates are more likely to marry, and less likely to cohabit and divorce, than non-college educated individuals. To account for these facts within a unified framework, I build and estimate a life-cycle model of partnership formation and dissolution where income processes differ by gender and education. I find that the main driver of education-based differences in mating strategies is that the gender wage gap is larger among college graduates. Since divorce is more costly than ending a cohabitation, marriages tend to be more stable and therefore offer women more protection from human capital depreciation during nonemployment. Consequently, marriage is a more effective means of enforcing household specialization. Since college graduates have more room for household specialization, they are more likely to choose marriage. The variance of income shocks, which affects the demand for consumption insurance, is larger among college graduates. Even if the variance of income shocks could potentially explain partnership choices, simulations suggest a small role of income volatility.","PeriodicalId":48297,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the European Economic Association","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135431077","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Felipe González, Luis R Martínez, Pablo Muñoz, Mounu Prem
{"title":"Higher Education and Mortality: Legacies of an Authoritarian College Contraction","authors":"Felipe González, Luis R Martínez, Pablo Muñoz, Mounu Prem","doi":"10.1093/jeea/jvad066","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jeea/jvad066","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract We provide new evidence on the causal effect of higher education on mortality. Our empirical strategy exploits the reduction in college openings introduced by the Pinochet regime after the 1973 coup in Chile, which led to a sharp downward kink in college enrollment among those cohorts reaching college age in the following years. Using administrative data from the vital statistics, we document an upward kink in the age-specific yearly mortality rate of individuals in the affected cohorts. We estimate a negative effect of college on mortality between ages 34-74, which is larger for men, but also sizable for women. Individuals in the affected cohorts experience worse labor market outcomes, are more likely to be enrolled in the public health system, and report lower consumption of health services. This suggests that economic disadvantage and limited access to care play an important mediating role in the link between higher education and mortality.","PeriodicalId":48297,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the European Economic Association","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135685630","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Katherine B. Coffman, Manuela Collis, Leena Kulkarni
{"title":"Stereotypes and Belief Updating","authors":"Katherine B. Coffman, Manuela Collis, Leena Kulkarni","doi":"10.1093/jeea/jvad063","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jeea/jvad063","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract We explore how feedback shapes, and perpetuates, gender gaps in self-assessments. Participants in our experiment take tests of their ability across different domains. We elicit their beliefs of their performance before and after feedback. We _nd that, even after the provision of highly informative feedback, gender stereotypes in_uence posterior beliefs, beyond what a Bayesian model would predict. This is primarily because both men and women update their beliefs more positively in response to good news when it arrives in a more gender congruent domain (i.e. more male-typed domains for men, more female-typed domains for women), fueling persistence in gender gaps.","PeriodicalId":48297,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the European Economic Association","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136018094","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Motherhood and the Gender Productivity Gap","authors":"Yana Gallen","doi":"10.1093/jeea/jvad064","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jeea/jvad064","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Using Danish matched employer-employee data, I compare the relative pay of men and women to their relative productivity as measured by production function estimation. I find that the gender “productivity gap” is 8%, implying that almost two thirds of the residual gender wage gap is due to productivity differences between men and women. Motherhood plays an important role, yet it also reveals a puzzle: the pay gap for mothers is entirely explained by productivity, whereas the gap for non-mothers is not. In addition, the decoupling of pay and productivity for women without children happens during their prime-child bearing years. These estimates are robust to a variety of specifications for the impact of observables on productivity, and robust to accounting for endogenous sorting of women into less productive firms using a control-function approach. This paper also provides estimates of the productivity gap across industries and occupations, finding the same general patterns for mothers compared to women without children within these subgroups.","PeriodicalId":48297,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the European Economic Association","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135323069","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Hard-to-Interpret Signals","authors":"Larry G Epstein, Yoram Halevy","doi":"10.1093/jeea/jvad062","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jeea/jvad062","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Decisions under uncertainty are often made with information whose interpretation is uncertain because multiple interpretations are possible. Individuals may perceive and handle uncertainty about interpretation differently and in ways that are not directly observable to a modeler. This paper identifies and experimentally examines behavior that can be interpreted as reflecting an individual’s attitude towards such uncertainty.","PeriodicalId":48297,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the European Economic Association","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135567601","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Maristella Botticini, Pietro Buri, Massimo Marinacci
{"title":"The Beauty of Uncertainty: The Rise of Insurance Contracts and Markets in Medieval Europe","authors":"Maristella Botticini, Pietro Buri, Massimo Marinacci","doi":"10.1093/jeea/jvad059","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jeea/jvad059","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Maritime insurance developed in medieval Europe is the ancestor of all forms of insurance that appeared subsequently. We address the question of why modern insurance was first invented in medieval Europe, and neither earlier nor elsewhere. Drawing from insights from the literature on uncertainty aversion, we show that medieval merchants had to bear more frequently natural risks (they traveled longer distances) and new human risks with unknown probabilities (they faced unpredictable attacks by corsairs due to increased political fragmentation and commercial competition in Europe). The increased demand for protection in medieval seaborne trade met the supply of protection by a small group of wealthy merchants with a broad information network who could pool risks and profit from selling protection through a novel business device: the insurance contract. A new market—the market for insurance—was then born. Next, analyzing more than seven thousand insurance contracts redacted by notaries and about one hundred court proceedings housed in the archives of Barcelona, Florence, Genoa, Palermo, Prato, and Venice, we study the main features of medieval trade, the type of risks faced by merchants, and the characteristics of insurance contracts and markets from 1340 to 1500. The empirical analysis delivers two main findings. First, risks related to human activities (e.g., attacks by corsairs) seem to have had a relatively greater impact on insurance premia compared to natural risks (proxied by seasonal risks). Second, distance mattered but the route seems to have had a greater impact on insurance premia. Specific routes (e.g., in the Tyrrenian and the western Mediterranean) were more plagued by human risks, which were harder to avoid for the majority of merchants who did not have a broad information network compared to the few wealthy merchants, who became the key players in selling insurance in the early stages of the development of insurance markets.","PeriodicalId":48297,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the European Economic Association","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136178133","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Behavioral Macroeconomics VIA Sparse Dynamic Programming","authors":"Xavier Gabaix","doi":"10.1093/jeea/jvad057","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jeea/jvad057","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper proposes a tractable way to model boundedly rational dynamic programming. The agent uses an endogenously simplified, or “sparse,” model of the world and the consequences of his actions and acts according to a behavioral Bellman equation. The framework yields a behavioral version of some of the canonical models in macroeconomics and finance. In the life-cycle model, the agent initially does not pay much attention to retirement and undersaves; late in life, he progressively saves more, generating realistic dynamics. In the consumption-savings model, the consumer decides to pay little or no attention to the interest rate and more attention to his income. Ricardian equivalence and the Lucas critique partially fail because the consumer may not pay full attention to taxes and policy changes. In a Merton-style dynamic portfolio choice problem, the agent endogenously pays limited or no attention to the varying equity premium and hedging demand terms. Finally, in the neoclassical growth model, agents act on a simplified model of the macroeconomy; in equilibrium, fluctuations are larger and more persistent.","PeriodicalId":48297,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the European Economic Association","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136058225","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Effect of Social Media on Elections: Evidence from the United States","authors":"Thomas Fujiwara, Karsten Müller, Carlo Schwarz","doi":"10.1093/jeea/jvad058","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jeea/jvad058","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract We study how social media affects election outcomes in the United States. We use variation in the number of Twitter users across counties induced by early adopters at the 2007 South by Southwest (SXSW) festival, a key event in Twitter’s rise to popularity. We show that this variation is unrelated to observable county characteristics and electoral outcomes before the launch of Twitter. Our results indicate that Twitter lowered the Republican vote share in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, but had limited effects on Congressional elections and previous presidential elections. Evidence from survey data, primary elections, and text analysis of millions of tweets suggests that Twitter’s relatively liberal content may have persuaded voters with moderate views to vote against Donald Trump.","PeriodicalId":48297,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the European Economic Association","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136212814","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}