EconometricaPub Date : 2024-07-30DOI: 10.3982/ECTA21470
Navin Kartik, SangMok Lee, Tianhao Liu, Daniel Rappoport
{"title":"Beyond Unbounded Beliefs: How Preferences and Information Interplay in Social Learning","authors":"Navin Kartik, SangMok Lee, Tianhao Liu, Daniel Rappoport","doi":"10.3982/ECTA21470","DOIUrl":"10.3982/ECTA21470","url":null,"abstract":"<p>When does society eventually learn the truth, or take the correct action, via observational learning? In a general model of sequential learning over social networks, we identify a simple condition for learning dubbed <i>excludability</i>. Excludability is a joint property of agents' preferences and their information. We develop two classes of preferences and information that jointly satisfy excludability: (i) for a one-dimensional state, preferences with single-crossing differences and a new informational condition, directionally unbounded beliefs; and (ii) for a multi-dimensional state, intermediate preferences and subexponential location-shift information. These applications exemplify that with multiple states, “unbounded beliefs” is not only unnecessary for learning, but incompatible with familiar informational structures like normal information. Unbounded beliefs demands that a single agent can identify the correct action. Excludability, on the other hand, only requires that a single agent must be able to displace any wrong action, even if she cannot take the correct action.</p>","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"92 4","pages":"1033-1062"},"PeriodicalIF":6.6,"publicationDate":"2024-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141863682","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
EconometricaPub Date : 2024-07-30DOI: 10.3982/ECTA20484
Bridget Hoffmann, Juan Pablo Rud
{"title":"The Unequal Effects of Pollution on Labor Supply","authors":"Bridget Hoffmann, Juan Pablo Rud","doi":"10.3982/ECTA20484","DOIUrl":"10.3982/ECTA20484","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 <p>We use high-frequency data on fine particulate matter air pollution (PM 2.5) at the locality level to study the effects of high pollution on daily labor supply decisions in the metropolitan area of Mexico City. We document a negative, non-linear relationship between PM 2.5 and same-day labor supply, with strong effects on days with extremely high pollution levels. On these days, the average worker experiences a reduction of around 7.5% of working hours. Workers partially compensate for lost hours by increasing their labor supply on days that follow high-pollution days. We find that low-income workers reduce their labor supply significantly less than high-income workers. Unequal responses to high pollution along other dimensions (job quality, flexibility, gender) matter, but less than income. We provide suggestive evidence that reductions in labor supply due to high pollution are consistent with avoidance behavior.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"92 4","pages":"1063-1096"},"PeriodicalIF":6.6,"publicationDate":"2024-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.3982/ECTA20484","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141863684","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
EconometricaPub Date : 2024-07-30DOI: 10.3982/ECTA22780
Andrew Caplin
{"title":"A Comment on: “Presidential Address: Economics and Measurement: New Measures to Model Decision Making” by Ingvild Almås, Orazio Attanasio, and Pamela Jervis","authors":"Andrew Caplin","doi":"10.3982/ECTA22780","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA22780","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"92 4","pages":"979-985"},"PeriodicalIF":6.6,"publicationDate":"2024-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141967699","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
EconometricaPub Date : 2024-07-30DOI: 10.3982/ECTA22781
Jesse M. Shapiro
{"title":"A Comment on: “Presidential Address: Economics and Measurement: New Measures to Model Decision Making” by Ingvild Almås, Orazio Attanasio, and Pamela Jervis","authors":"Jesse M. Shapiro","doi":"10.3982/ECTA22781","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA22781","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"92 4","pages":"987-990"},"PeriodicalIF":6.6,"publicationDate":"2024-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141967700","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
EconometricaPub Date : 2024-07-30DOI: 10.3982/ECTA21528
Ingvild Almås, Orazio Attanasio, Pamela Jervis
{"title":"Presidential Address: Economics and Measurement: New Measures to Model Decision Making","authors":"Ingvild Almås, Orazio Attanasio, Pamela Jervis","doi":"10.3982/ECTA21528","DOIUrl":"10.3982/ECTA21528","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Most empirical work in economics has considered only a narrow set of measures as meaningful and useful to characterize individual behavior, a restriction justified by the difficulties in collecting a wider set. However, this approach often forces the use of strong assumptions to estimate the parameters that inform individual behavior and identify causal links. In this paper, we argue that a more flexible and broader approach to measurement could be extremely useful and allow the estimation of richer and more realistic models that rest on weaker identifying assumptions. We argue that the design of measurement tools should interact with, and depend on, the models economists use. Measurement is not a substitute for rigorous theory, it is an important complement to it, and should be developed in parallel to it. We illustrate these arguments with a model of parental behavior estimated on pilot data that combines conventional measures with novel ones.</p>","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"92 4","pages":"947-978"},"PeriodicalIF":6.6,"publicationDate":"2024-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141863776","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
EconometricaPub Date : 2024-07-30DOI: 10.3982/ECTA19408
Laura Boudreau
{"title":"Multinational Enforcement of Labor Law: Experimental Evidence on Strengthening Occupational Safety and Health Committees","authors":"Laura Boudreau","doi":"10.3982/ECTA19408","DOIUrl":"10.3982/ECTA19408","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Annually, work-related mortality is responsible for 5–7% of all global deaths, and at least 1-in-9 workers experience nonfatal occupational accidents (ILO (2019a,b)). Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) committees are considered the key worker voice institution through which to improve workplace safety and health (ILO (1981)). I present evidence of OSH committees' causal effects on workers and on factories. To do so, I collaborated with 29 multinational apparel buyers that committed to enforce a local mandate for OSH committees on their suppliers in Bangladesh. With the buyers, I implemented a nearly year-long field experiment with 84 supplier factories, randomly enforcing the mandate on half. The buyers' intervention increased compliance with the OSH committee law. Exploiting the experimental variation in OSH committees' strength, I find that stronger OSH committees had small, positive effects on objective measures of safety. These improvements did not come at a cost to workers in terms of wages or employment or to factories in terms of labor productivity. The effects on compliance, safety, and voice were largest for factories with better managerial practices. Factories with worse practices did not improve, and workers in these factories reported lower job satisfaction; this finding suggests complementarity between external enforcement and internal capacity in determining the efficacy of regulation.</p>","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"92 4","pages":"1269-1308"},"PeriodicalIF":6.6,"publicationDate":"2024-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141863685","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
EconometricaPub Date : 2024-07-30DOI: 10.3982/ECTA19967
Xiaosheng Mu, Luciano Pomatto, Philipp Strack, Omer Tamuz
{"title":"Monotone Additive Statistics","authors":"Xiaosheng Mu, Luciano Pomatto, Philipp Strack, Omer Tamuz","doi":"10.3982/ECTA19967","DOIUrl":"10.3982/ECTA19967","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The expectation is an example of a descriptive statistic that is monotone with respect to stochastic dominance, and additive for sums of independent random variables. We provide a complete characterization of such statistics, and explore a number of applications to models of individual and group decision-making. These include a representation of stationary monotone time preferences, extending the work of Fishburn and Rubinstein (1982) to time lotteries. This extension offers a new perspective on risk attitudes toward time, as well as on the aggregation of multiple discount factors. We also offer a novel class of non-expected utility preferences over gambles which satisfy invariance to background risk as well as betweenness, but are versatile enough to capture mixed risk attitudes.</p>","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"92 4","pages":"995-1031"},"PeriodicalIF":6.6,"publicationDate":"2024-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141863775","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
EconometricaPub Date : 2024-07-30DOI: 10.3982/ECTA18422
Gabriel Kreindler
{"title":"Peak-Hour Road Congestion Pricing: Experimental Evidence and Equilibrium Implications","authors":"Gabriel Kreindler","doi":"10.3982/ECTA18422","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA18422","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Developing country megacities suffer from severe road traffic congestion, yet the level of congestion is not a direct measure of equilibrium inefficiency. I study the peak-hour traffic congestion equilibrium in Bangalore. To measure travel preferences, I use a model of departure time choice to design a field experiment with congestion pricing policies and implement it using precise GPS data. Commuter responses in the experiment reveal moderate schedule inflexibility and a high value of time. I then show that in Bangalore, traffic density has a moderate and linear impact on travel delay. My policy simulations with endogenous congestion indicate that optimal congestion charges would lead to a small reduction in travel times, and small commuter welfare gains. This result is driven primarily by the shape of the congestion externality. Overall, these results suggest limited commuter welfare benefits from peak-spreading traffic policies in cities like Bangalore.</p>","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"92 4","pages":"1233-1268"},"PeriodicalIF":6.6,"publicationDate":"2024-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141968371","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
EconometricaPub Date : 2024-06-05DOI: 10.3982/ECTA20819
Benedikt M. Pötscher, David Preinerstorfer
{"title":"A Comment on: “A Modern Gauss–Markov Theorem”","authors":"Benedikt M. Pötscher, David Preinerstorfer","doi":"10.3982/ECTA20819","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA20819","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 <p>We show that Theorem 4 in Hansen (2022) applies to exactly the same class of estimators as does the classical Aitken theorem. We furthermore point out that Theorems 5–7 in Hansen (2022) contain extra assumptions not present in the classical Gauss–Markov or Aitken theorem, and thus the former theorems do not contain the latter ones as special cases.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"92 3","pages":"913-924"},"PeriodicalIF":6.1,"publicationDate":"2024-06-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.3982/ECTA20819","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141251391","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}