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“The Black Student Union Speaks”: Rebellion And Its Response In New Haven Public Schools, 1967-1970, Aden Gonzales Apr 2026

“The Black Student Union Speaks”: Rebellion And Its Response In New Haven Public Schools, 1967-1970, Aden Gonzales

Kaplan Senior Essay Prize for Use of Library Special Collections

This thesis studies a series of student uprisings that took place at Hillhouse High School in New Haven, Connecticut, during the 1967-1968 school year. Through contemporary news reports from the mainstream and underground press, correspondences with the mayor, police records, municipal reports, student-created ephemera, and interviews with then-students, a story emerges of a student rebellion which exposed long-festering problems within the school and forced a series of constructive reforms within the district. It is also a story about how, out of a fractured response to the student rebellion, a progressive teachers’ union was made. Finally, it is a story about …

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“At The Yale Women’S Center, Some Women Aren’T Welcome”: Reproductive Activism, Defining Feminism, And Determining Belonging In Women’S Spaces At Yale In 1987, Emi Glass Apr 2026

“At The Yale Women’S Center, Some Women Aren’T Welcome”: Reproductive Activism, Defining Feminism, And Determining Belonging In Women’S Spaces At Yale In 1987, Emi Glass

Kaplan Senior Essay Prize for Use of Library Special Collections

Tucked into the back pages of the Yale Daily News issue published on October 6, 1987 sits two opposing opinion pieces: one authored by members of the student organization Yale Students for Life (YSFL), and the other written by members of the Yale Women’s Center Coordinating Committee. While each article was addressed “to the editors,” these two groups were really in conversation with each other. The left-three quarters of the page features the piece written by YSFL, titled “Pro-life merits space at Women’s Center.” The right-hand side features a shorter piece written by the Women’s Center coordinating committee entitled “Center …

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Wage Gap Disclosure In The Tropics, Pablo Castro, Mayara Felix, Ieda Matavelli, Bobak Pakzad-Hurson Apr 2026

Wage Gap Disclosure In The Tropics, Pablo Castro, Mayara Felix, Ieda Matavelli, Bobak Pakzad-Hurson

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We evaluate the effects of mandatory disclosures of firm-specific gender wage gaps in Brazil—the first developing country to enact a large-scale pay transparency law. The mandate took effect in 2023, automatically releasing to the public government-curated reports showing firm-specific gender wage gaps, separately by major occupational groups, for formal sector firms with 100 employees or more. Regression discontinuity estimates on outcomes one year after the release show that the mandated disclosures had no effects on the gender wage ratio, average wages for men or women, or the number of occupations within firms. We document that gender wage gaps persist in …

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How Wasteful Is Signaling?, Alex Frankel, Navin Kartik Apr 2026

How Wasteful Is Signaling?, Alex Frankel, Navin Kartik

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

Signaling is wasteful. But how wasteful? We study the fraction of surplus dissipated in a separating equilibrium. For isoelastic environments, this waste ratio has a simple formula: β/(β + σ), where β is the benefit elasticity (reward to higher perception) and σ is the elasticity of higher types’ relative cost advantage. The ratio is constant across types and is independent of other parameters, including convexity of cost in the signal. We show that the directional effects of β and σ on waste extend to non-isoelastic environments.

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From Conversations To Mechanisms: Aligning Advertiser Incentives In Ai-Powered Product Recommendations, Dirk Bergemann, Marek Bojko, Paul Dütting, Renato Paes Leme, Haifeng Xu, Song Zuo Apr 2026

From Conversations To Mechanisms: Aligning Advertiser Incentives In Ai-Powered Product Recommendations, Dirk Bergemann, Marek Bojko, Paul Dütting, Renato Paes Leme, Haifeng Xu, Song Zuo

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We study the design of efficient dynamic recommendation systems, such as AI shopping assistants, in which a platform interacts with a user over multiple rounds to identify the most suitable product among those offered by advertisers. Advertisers have multi-dimensional private information: their private value from a purchase and private information about the user’s preferences. In each round, the platform displays recommendations; the user learns product characteristics of the shown items and then chooses whether to purchase, exit without purchasing, or submit a new query. These actions generate a stream of feedback—purchase, exit, and follow-up queries—that is informative about the user’s …

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Cross-Border Product Adoption: Individual Imports, Migrant Networks, And Domestic Retailers, David Argente, Esteban Méndez, Diana Van Patten Apr 2026

Cross-Border Product Adoption: Individual Imports, Migrant Networks, And Domestic Retailers, David Argente, Esteban Méndez, Diana Van Patten

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

This paper studies how new varieties enter markets and become locally available. We provide causal evidence of demand externalities that operate in two steps. First, information about new varieties diffuses directly through real-world social ties among consumers. Second, early purchases generate an indirect spillover to firms: local retailers learn from 'pioneer' consumers which new varieties are most likely to succeed and adjust their product offerings accordingly. We study this process in the context of direct-to-consumer imports. Using customs records on individuals' purchases matched to population-wide social networks, international migrant links, and retailer catchment areas, we document economically meaningful demand externalities. …

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Pay-Per-Crawl Pricing For Ai: The Lm-Tree Agent, Richard Archer, Soheil Ghili, Nima Haghpanah Apr 2026

Pay-Per-Crawl Pricing For Ai: The Lm-Tree Agent, Richard Archer, Soheil Ghili, Nima Haghpanah

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

No abstract provided.

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Growth With New And Old Technologies, Bernardo Ribeiro Apr 2026

Growth With New And Old Technologies, Bernardo Ribeiro

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

This paper proposes a semi-endogenous growth theory that incorporates technology vintages and the endogenous evolution of multiple technological paradigms through innovation. It provides a characterization of both balanced growth equilibrium and transitional dynamics in an environment where new technologies continuously emerge. From a positive perspective, the model rationalizes two distinct empirical patterns. Using two centuries of US patent data, I first document that the age profile of patents has a pronounced hump shape: most contemporary patents build upon technologies that are between 50 and 100 years old. Second, this age profile has remained stable throughout the past century. From a …

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Soft-Floor Auctions: Harnessing Regret To Improve Efficiency And Revenue, Dirk Bergemann, Kevin Breuer, Peter Crampton, Jack Hirsch, Yero S. Ndiaye, Axel Ockenfels Apr 2026

Soft-Floor Auctions: Harnessing Regret To Improve Efficiency And Revenue, Dirk Bergemann, Kevin Breuer, Peter Crampton, Jack Hirsch, Yero S. Ndiaye, Axel Ockenfels

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

A soft-floor auction asks bidders to accept an opening price to participate in a second-price auction. If no bidder accepts, lower bids are considered using first-price rules. Soft floors are common despite being irrelevant with standard assumptions. When bidders regret losing, soft-floor auctions are more efficient and profitable than standard optimal auctions. Revenue increases as bidders are inclined to accept the opening price to compete in a regret-free second-price auction. Efficiency improves because a soft floor allows for a lower hard reserve, reducing the frequency of no sale. Theory and experiment confirm these motivations from practice.

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Early Childcare Attendance And Cognitive Skills In Adolescence, Ingvild Almas, Nina Drange, Costas Meghir, Henrik Daae Zachrisson Apr 2026

Early Childcare Attendance And Cognitive Skills In Adolescence, Ingvild Almas, Nina Drange, Costas Meghir, Henrik Daae Zachrisson

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

This paper examines the impact of early childcare on academic achievement for children in grade 5 and grade 9, based on a 2003 policy expansion that created quasi-random variation in slot availability for children aged 1–2. Starting childcare one year earlier increases math scores by 9.7% of a standard deviation (SD) in grade 9. Children whose mothers do not hold a high school diploma benefit by a significant 0.28% of a SD at grade 9, reducing the math achievement gap from children of higher-educated mothers by about one third. We also present evidence of strong improvements for children of immigrants.

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Capital Flows And The Global Collateral Cycle, Ana Fostel, John Geanakoplos, Gregory Phelan Apr 2026

Capital Flows And The Global Collateral Cycle, Ana Fostel, John Geanakoplos, Gregory Phelan

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

Cross-country disparities in collateral technologies alone can account for large capital flows among mature economies, and allow the most advanced country to run a permanent trade deficit. When the collateral technology advantage is in creating negative beta (super safe) financial assets backed by positive beta assets, a Global Collateral Cycle emerges, with pro-cyclical gross and net flows and increased global asset price volatility. The supply of super safe assets is necessarily curtailed in downturns, providing a complementary (supply) channel to the flight to safety (demand) channel for explaining why US safe asset prices rise during crises.

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Organizational Targets In General Equilibrium, Joel P. Flynn, George Nikolakoudis, Karthik Sastry Apr 2026

Organizational Targets In General Equilibrium, Joel P. Flynn, George Nikolakoudis, Karthik Sastry

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We build a general equilibrium model in which firms endogenously choose whether to target prices or quantities. We characterize how these choices of organizational targets depend on firms' uncertainty about microeconomic and macroeconomic factors. In equilibrium, the transmission of both nominal and real shocks hinges on firms' organizational targets. For example, under otherwise identical microfoundations, money is neutral under quantity targets and non-neutral under price targets. We further characterize how targets shape firms' strategic interactions and prove that the macroeconomic uncertainty that arises from each choice of targets reinforces incentives to choose that target. That is, choices of organizational targets …

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Training Language Models For Bilateral Trade With Private Information, Dirk Bergemann, Soheil Ghili, Xinyang Hu, Chuanhao Li, Zhuoran Yang Apr 2026

Training Language Models For Bilateral Trade With Private Information, Dirk Bergemann, Soheil Ghili, Xinyang Hu, Chuanhao Li, Zhuoran Yang

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

Bilateral bargaining under incomplete information provides a controlled testbed for evaluating large language model (LLM) agent capabilities. Bilateral trade demands individual rationality, strategic surplus maximization, and cooperation to realize gains from trade. We develop a structured bargaining environment in which LLMs negotiate via tool calls within an event-driven simulator, separating binding offers from natural-language messages to enable automated evaluation. The environment serves two purposes: as a benchmark for frontier models and as a training environment for open-weight models via reinforcement learning. In benchmark experiments, a round-robin tournament among five frontier models (15,000 negotiations) reveals that effective strategies implement price discrimination …

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Lessons Learned: Ignazio Visco, Mercedes Cardona Mar 2026

Lessons Learned: Ignazio Visco, Mercedes Cardona

Journal of Financial Crises

Ignazio Visco served as deputy director general (the equivalent of deputy governor) of the Bank of Italy during the Global Financial Crisis of 2007–09 (GFC) and as governor during the European Sovereign Debt Crisis in 2011 (SDC). During his multidecade tenure at the bank, he held several positions and served under nine prime ministers before stepping down in 2023. Although Italy had the third-largest economy in the eurozone, its banking sector had little exposure to mortgages, which resulted in its being somewhat less impacted by the GFC than other countries. However, the SDC had a severe impact. With the assistance …

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Lessons Learned: Masaaki Shirakawa, Mercedes Cardona, Benjamin Hoffner Mar 2026

Lessons Learned: Masaaki Shirakawa, Mercedes Cardona, Benjamin Hoffner

Journal of Financial Crises

Masaaki Shirakawa became governor of the Bank of Japan (BOJ) in 2008, after a long tenure at the central bank. His career spanned a series of significant crisis events in Japan’s economic history, including the economic boom in the 1980s, which was followed by a period of stagnation characterized by low GDP growth, multiple recessions, and persistent deflation. Shirakawa led the BOJ’s response during the Global Financial Crisis of 2007–09 (GFC). He also initiated the central bank’s contingency plan in response to the 2011 tsunami, earthquake, and Fukushima nuclear disaster before stepping down near the end of his term in …

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Lessons Learned: Eugen Rădulescu, Benjamin Hoffner Mar 2026

Lessons Learned: Eugen Rădulescu, Benjamin Hoffner

Journal of Financial Crises

Eugen Rădulescu has worked at the National Bank of Romania (NBR) since 1990 in various roles covering monetary policy, foreign exchange, and supervision. During his tenure, he contributed to the NBR’s work to fortify Romanian’s post-communist banking laws and the operational structure of its financial system to bring it up to the European standard, enabling Romania to join the European Union (EU) in 2007. Following the Global Financial Crisis of 2007–09 (GFC), Rădulescu was named director of the NBR’s Financial Stability Department and has served in this role until June 2023,when he became senior adviser to the governor of the …

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Lessons Learned: Christos Gortsos, Rosalind Z. Wiggins Mar 2026

Lessons Learned: Christos Gortsos, Rosalind Z. Wiggins

Journal of Financial Crises

Christos Gortsos has been a professor of law at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens since 2016 as well as a visiting professor of law at various other European institutions. Previously, he was a professor of international economic law and held other positions at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences in Athens. He has taught and written extensively on European and international banking and financial law, capital markets regulation, and law and economics. From 2000 to 2017, he served as secretary of the Hellenic Bank Association. He advises the European Parliament on bank resolution and is vice president …

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Black Swans And Financial Stability: A Framework For Building Resilience, Daniel J. Barth, Stacey L. Schreft Mar 2026

Black Swans And Financial Stability: A Framework For Building Resilience, Daniel J. Barth, Stacey L. Schreft

Journal of Financial Crises

This article refines the concept of black swans, typically described as highly unlikely and catastrophic events, to be internally consistent. It explores features of the financial system that prevent the eradication of black swans. The main implication is the need to enhance the financial system’s resilience to withstand unforeseen events rather than focus on past crises. The article introduces a “resilience principle” for designing official-sector policies that can achieve such goals. The principle calls for policies that are adaptable, universal, and systemic. The article provides examples of policies with these features, assuming that the official sector is not better positioned …

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How The Fdic Sourced Crisis-Time Fed Funding Through The Failed Banks Of 2023, Steven Kelly Mar 2026

How The Fdic Sourced Crisis-Time Fed Funding Through The Failed Banks Of 2023, Steven Kelly

Journal of Financial Crises

During the Banking Crisis of 2023, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) had to contend with the liquidity demands of the second-, third-, and fourth-largest bank failures in US history, all in a compressed timeframe. Facing uncertainty over its liquidity needs, particularly if additional banks were to fail, and optics and political challenges over accessing its standing credit lines with the Treasury—which itself was brushing against the federal debt ceiling—the FDIC relied on two creative forms of financing itself. First, the agency kept open the Federal Reserve (Fed) loans taken on by the failed banks, eschewing its standard practice of …

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Delegation And Verification Under Ai, Lingxiao Huang, Wenyang Xiao, Nisheeth K. Vishnoi Mar 2026

Delegation And Verification Under Ai, Lingxiao Huang, Wenyang Xiao, Nisheeth K. Vishnoi

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

As AI systems enter institutional workflows, workers must decide whether to delegate task execution to AI and how much effort to invest in verifying AI outputs, while institutions evaluate workers using outcome-based standards that may misalign with workers’ private costs. We model delegation and verification as the solution to a rational worker’s optimization problem, and define worker quality by evaluating an institution-centered utility (distinct from the worker’s objective) at the resulting optimal action. We formally characterize optimal worker workflows and show that AI induces phase transitions, where arbitrarily small differences in verification ability lead to sharply different behaviors. As a …

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On Local Overidentification And Efficiency Gains In Modern Causal Inference And Data Combination, Xiaohong Chen, Haitian Xie Mar 2026

On Local Overidentification And Efficiency Gains In Modern Causal Inference And Data Combination, Xiaohong Chen, Haitian Xie

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

This paper studies nonparametric local (over-)identification and the semiparametric efficiency in modern causal frameworks. We develop a unified approach that begins by translating structural models with latent variables into their induced statistical models of observables and then analyzes local overidentification through conditional moment restrictions. We apply this approach to three popular classes of causal models: (1) the general treatment model under unconfoundedness; (2) the negative control model, and (3) the long-term causal inference model under unobserved confounding. The first model yields a locally just-identified statistical model, implying that all regular asymptotically linear estimators of the treatment effect have the same …

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Triple/Double-Debiased Lasso, Denis Chetverikov, Joseph R.V. Sørensen, Aleh Tsyvinski Mar 2026

Triple/Double-Debiased Lasso, Denis Chetverikov, Joseph R.V. Sørensen, Aleh Tsyvinski

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

In this paper, we propose a triple (or double-debiased) Lasso estimator for inference on a low-dimensional parameter in high-dimensional linear regression models. The estimator is based on a moment function that satisfies not only first- but also second-order Neyman orthogonality conditions, thereby eliminating both the leading bias and the second-order bias induced by regularization. We derive an asymptotic linear representation for the proposed estimator and show that its remainder terms are never larger and are often smaller in order than those in the corresponding asymptotic linear representation for the standard double Lasso estimator. Because of this improvement, the triple Lasso …

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First Proof Solutions And Comments, Mohammed Abouzaid, Andrew J. Blumberg, Martin Hairer, Joe Kileel, Tamara G. Kolda, Paul D. Nelson, Daniel Spielman, Nikhil Srivastava, Rachel Ward, Shmuel Weinberger, Lauren Williams Mar 2026

First Proof Solutions And Comments, Mohammed Abouzaid, Andrew J. Blumberg, Martin Hairer, Joe Kileel, Tamara G. Kolda, Paul D. Nelson, Daniel Spielman, Nikhil Srivastava, Rachel Ward, Shmuel Weinberger, Lauren Williams

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

Here we provide our solutions to the First Proof questions. We also discuss the best responses from publicly available AI systems that we were able to obtain in our experiments prior to the release of the problems on February 5, 2025. We hope this discussion will help readers with the relevant domain expertise to assess such responses.

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Stochastic Optimization And Coupling, Frank Yang, Kai Hao Yang Mar 2026

Stochastic Optimization And Coupling, Frank Yang, Kai Hao Yang

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We study optimization problems in which a linear functional is maximized over probability measures that are dominated by a given measure according to an integral stochastic order in an arbitrary dimension. We show that the following four properties are equivalent for any such order: (i) the test function cone is closed under pointwise minimum, (ii) the value function is affine, (iii) the solution correspondence has a convex graph with decomposable extreme points, and (iv) every ordered pair of measures admits an order-preserving coupling. As corollaries, we derive the extreme and exposed point properties involving integral stochastic orders such as multidimensional …

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The Changing Landscape Of International Development: An Introduction, Pascaline Dupas, Pinelopi K. Goldberg, Rohini Pande Mar 2026

The Changing Landscape Of International Development: An Introduction, Pascaline Dupas, Pinelopi K. Goldberg, Rohini Pande

Discussion Papers

Since the late 1980s, extreme poverty has declined sharply, life expectancy and schooling have increased, and electoral democracy has expanded. However poverty reduction has slowed in recent years, particularly following the COVID-19 pandemic, amid intensifying conflict, fragility, climate risks, democratic backsliding, and the erosion of global trends—including trade integration and geopolitical stability—that once supported growth. These dynamics raise three interrelated questions: what barriers impede further progress; where will future growth in lower-income countries come from; and how can growth be broadly shared. Taking stock of 15 chapters forthcoming in Volume 6 of the Handbook of Development Economics, we discuss how …

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Appendix To “Black Swans And Financial Stability: A Framework For Building Resilience”, Daniel J. Barth, Stacey L. Schreft Mar 2026

Appendix To “Black Swans And Financial Stability: A Framework For Building Resilience”, Daniel J. Barth, Stacey L. Schreft

Documents

No abstract provided.

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The Changing Landscape Of International Development: An Introduction, Pascaline Dupas, Pinelopi Goldberg, Rohini Pande Mar 2026

The Changing Landscape Of International Development: An Introduction, Pascaline Dupas, Pinelopi Goldberg, Rohini Pande

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

Since the late 1980s, extreme poverty has declined sharply, life expectancy and schooling have increased, and electoral democracy has expanded. However poverty reduction has slowed in recent years, particularly following the COVID-19 pandemic, amid intensifying conflict, fragility, climate risks, democratic backsliding, and the erosion of global trends—including trade integration and geopolitical stability—that once supported growth. These dynamics raise three interrelated questions: what barriers impede further progress; where will future growth in lower-income countries come from; and how can growth be broadly shared. Taking stock of 15 chapters forthcoming in Volume 6 of the Handbook of Development Economics, we discuss how …

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Menu Pricing Of Large Language Models, Dirk Bergemann Mar 2026

Menu Pricing Of Large Language Models, Dirk Bergemann

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We develop a framework for the optimal pricing and product design of LLMs in which a provider sells menus of token budgets to users who differ in their valuations across a continuum of tasks. Under a homogeneous production technology, we show that users’ high-dimensional type profiles are summarized by a scalar index, reducing the seller’s problem to one-dimensional screening. The optimal mechanism takes the form of committed-spend contracts: buyers pay for a budget that they allocate across token classes priced at marginal cost. We extend the analysis to environments with multiple differentiated models and to competition between a proprietary leader …

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The Geometry Of Learning Under Ai Delegation, Lingxiao Huang, Nisheeth K. Vishnoi Mar 2026

The Geometry Of Learning Under Ai Delegation, Lingxiao Huang, Nisheeth K. Vishnoi

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

As AI systems shift from tools to collaborators, a central question is how the skills of humans relying on them change over time. We study this question mathematically by modeling the joint evolution of human skill and AI delegation as a coupled dynamical system. In our model, delegation adapts to relative performance, while skill improves through use and decays under non-use; crucially, both updates arise from optimizing a single performance metric measuring expected task error. Despite this local alignment, adaptive AI use fundamentally alters the global stability structure of human skill acquisition. Beyond the high-skill equilibrium of human-only learning, the …

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Thin Sets Are Not Equally Thin: Minimax Learning Of Submanifold Integrals, Xiaohong Chen, Wayne Yuan Gao Mar 2026

Thin Sets Are Not Equally Thin: Minimax Learning Of Submanifold Integrals, Xiaohong Chen, Wayne Yuan Gao

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

Many economic parameters are identified by “thin sets” (submanifolds with Lebesgue measure zero) and hence difficult to recover from data in an ambient space. This paper provides a unified theory for estimation and inference of such “thin-set” identified functionals. We show that thin sets are not equally thin: their intrinsic dimensionality m matters in a precise manner. For a nonparametric regression h0 with Hölder smoothness s and d-dimensional covariates in the ambient space, we show that n^{-s/(2s+d−m)} is the minimax optimal rate of estimating linear and nonlinear (e.g., quadratic, upper contour) integrals of h0 on an m-dimensional submanifold (0 ≤ …

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