Other Economics Commons^™

Four Essays On Peace Consolidation And Ethnic Reconciliation In Postwar Sri Lanka, Narayani Sritharan

Doctoral Dissertations

In four essays, this dissertation explores the process of peace consolidation and economic recovery from the devastating conflict of 1983-2009 in Sri Lanka. This dissertation addresses a timely and important topic. The findings make an important contribution to the literature on economic development and peacebuilding, specifically on the role of foreign aid in alleviating the risks of conflict and helping countries rebuild their economies after conflict. The dissertation highlights important political economy dimensions that help illustrate social and political dynamics that lead to conflict, such as regional and ethnic inequalities, which also influence post-conflict reconstruction.

In addition to a historical ...

Litigation With Negative Expected Value Suits: An Experimental Analysis, Cary Deck, Paul Pecorino, Michael Solomon

ESI Working Papers

The existence of lawsuits providing plaintiffs a negative expected value (NEV) at trial has important theoretical implications for signaling models of litigation. The signaling equilibrium possible absent NEV suits breaks down with NEV suits because plaintiffs do not have a credible threat to proceed to trial undermining the ability to signal type. Using a laboratory experiment, we analyze behavior with and without the possibility of NEV suits. Absent NEV suits, behavior largely follows predicted patterns. However, the possibility of NEV suits does not cause the signaling equilibrium to unravel and does not cause the dispute rate to increase. Plaintiffs only ...

Inequality As A Barrier To Economic Integration? An Experiment, Gabriele Camera, Lukas Hohl, Rolf Weder

ESI Working Papers

International economic theory suggests that people should embrace economic integration because it promises large gains. But policy reversals such as Brexit indicate a desire for economic disintegration. Here we report results of an experiment of how size and cross-country distribution of gains from integration influence individuals’ inclination to cooperate to reap its intended benefits and to embrace or reject integration. The design considers an indefinitely repeated helping game with multiple equilibria and strategic uncertainty. The data reveal that inequality of potential gains neither affected behavior nor reduced support for economic integration. However, integration may lead to disappointing, unequally distributed welfare ...

Information Aggregation With Heterogeneous Traders, Cary Deck, Tae In Jun, Laura Razzolini, Tavoy Reid

ESI Working Papers

The efficient market hypothesis predicts that asset prices reflect all available information. A seminal experiment reported that contingent claim markets could yield market outcomes consistent with information aggregation when traders hold heterogeneous state-contingent values. However, a recent experiment found the rational expectation model outperformed the prior information and maxi-min models in contingent claim markets when traders hold homogeneous values despite the no trade equilibrium in that setting. But that same study failed to replicate the original result calling into question when, if ever, prices reliably reflect the aggregate information of traders with heterogeneous values. In this paper, we show contingent ...

United We Stand: On The Benefits Of Coordinated Punishment, Vicente Calabuig, Natalia Jiménez, Gonzalo Olcina, Ismael Rodriguez-Lara

ESI Working Papers

Coordinated punishment occurs when punishment decisions are complements; i.e., this punishment device requires a specific number of punishers to be effective; otherwise, no damage will be inflicted on the target. While societies often rely on this punishment device, its benefits are unclear compared with uncoordinated punishment, where punishment decisions are substitutes. We argue that coordinated punishment can prevent the free-riding of punishers and show, both theoretically and experimentally, that this may be beneficial for cooperation in a team investment game, compared with uncoordinated punishment.

Historical Political Economy: What Is It?, Jeffrey Jenkins, Jared Rubin

ESI Working Papers

In this chapter, we define what historical political economy (HPE) is and is not, classify the major themes in the literature, assess the relative strengths and weaknesses of the literature, and point to future directions. We view HPE as social scientific inquiry which highlights political causes or consequences of historical issues. HPE is different from conventional political economy in the emphasis placed on historical processes and context. While we view HPE in the most inclusive manner reasonable, we define it to exclude works that are either solely of contemporary importance or use historical data without any historical context (e.g ...

The Primacy Of Property; Or, The Subordination Of Property Rights, Bart J. Wilson

ESI Publications

A property right, the standard view maintains, is a proper subset of the most complete and comprehensive set of incidents for full ownership of a thing. The subsidiary assumption is that the pieces that are property rights compose the whole that is ownership or property, i.e., that property rights explain property. In reversing the standard view I argue that (1) a custom of intelligent and meaningful human action explains property and that (2) as a custom, property is a historical process of selecting actions conditional on the context. My task is to explain how a physical world of human ...

Nobel And Novice: Author Prominence Affects Peer Review, Jürgen Huber, Sabiou M. Inoua, Rudolf Kerschbamer, Christian König-Kersting, Stefan Palan, Vernon L. Smith

ESI Working Papers

Peer-review is a well-established cornerstone of the scientific process, yet it is not immune to status bias. Merton identified the problem as one in which prominent researchers get disproportionately great credit for their contribution while relatively unknown researchers get disproportionately little credit.¹ We measure the extent of this effect in the peer-review process through a pre-registered field experiment. We invite more than 3,300 researchers to review a paper jointly written by a prominent author – a Nobel laureate – and by a relatively unknown author – an early-career research associate –, varying whether reviewers see the prominent author’s name, an anonymized ...

Introducing New Forms Of Digital Money: Evidence From The Laboratory, Gabriele Camera

ESI Working Papers

Central banks may soon issue currencies that are entirely digital (CBDCs) and possibly interest-bearing. A strategic analytical framework is used to investigate this innovation in the laboratory, contrasting a traditional “plain” tokens baseline to treatments with “sophisticated” interest-bearing tokens. In the experiment, this theoretically beneficial innovation precluded the emergence of a stable monetary system, reducing trade and welfare. Similar problems emerged when sophisticated tokens complemented or replaced plain tokens. This evidence underscores the advantages of combining theoretical with experimental investigation to provide insights for payments systems innovation and policy design.

The Doors Of Perception: Theory And Evidence Of Frame-Dependent Rationalizability, Gary Charness, Alessandro Sontuoso

ESI Working Papers

We investigate how strategic behavior is affected by the set of notions (frames) used when thinking about the game. In our games, the action set consists of visual objects: each player must privately choose one, trying to match the counterpart’s choice. We propose a model where different player-types are aware of different attributes of the action set (hence, different frames). One of the novelties is an epistemic structure that allows players to think about new frames, after initial unawareness of some attributes. To test the model, our experimental design brings about multiple frames by varying subjects’ awareness of several ...

How Federal Pollution Discharge Permits Affect U.S. Water Quality: A Study On Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, Cloe C. Mueller

Theses and Dissertations

This paper uses difference-in-difference regression models to examine how state-level pollution discharge permits on concentrated animal feeding operations affect U.S. water quality. I ultimately deem the permitting to be ineffective at improving water quality, calling attention to the need to re-evaluate the ``socially optimal level of pollution."

The 2021 Nba Rule Change: Analyzing Strategic Adjustments And Changes In Worker Productivity, Jeremy Long

All Theses

The NBA introduced a rule change for the 2021/22 season to stop shooters from drawing fouls from “non-basketball moves.” This paper seeks to determine how the 2021 Rule Change has impacted productivity in the NBA and investigate whether it has caused teams to make strategic adjustments. My analysis reveals evidence that the rule change has limited offensive players’ abilities to draw fouls on 3- point shots. While the rule change has rendered non-basketball moves ineffective, there is no evidence of strategic adjustments beyond this arena. I find only limited evidence that the rule change has impacted worker productivity. The ...

Moderate, Overlooked Weather Events And Local Labor Markets, Michael Ellis

All Theses

A substantial amount of research exists on the economic effects of natural disasters and extreme weather, as well as comparatively minor variations in daily weather conditions such as precipitation, temperature, and wind. I construct a sample of over a million storms that range from intense daily weather conditions to extreme weather. I analyze written descriptions of the damages caused by many of these storms to identify 93,743 weather events within the sample that appear to be underemphasized in the existing economic literature. These storms cause more damage and disruptions to commerce than 63.5% of storms in the sample ...

When Do Security Markets Aggregate Dispersed Information?, Brice Corgnet, Cary Deck, Mark Desantis, Kyle Hampton, Erik O. Kimbrough

ESI Publications

We attempt to replicate a seminal paper that offered support for the rational expectations hypothesis and reported evidence that markets with certain features aggregate dispersed information. The original results are based on only a few observations, and our attempt to replicate the key findings with an appropriately powered experiment largely fails. The resulting poststudy probability that market performance is better described by rational expectations than the prior information (Walrasian) model under the conditions specified in the original paper is very low. As a result of our failure to replicate, we investigate an alternate set of market features that combines aspects ...

Hybrid U-Net: Semantic Segmentation Of High-Resolution Satellite Images To Detect War Destruction, Shima Nabiee, Matthew Harding, Jonathan Hersh, Nader Bagherzadeh

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

Destruction caused by violent conflicts play a big role in understanding the dynamics and consequences of conflicts, which is now the focus of a large body of ongoing literature in economics and political science. However, existing data on conflict largely come from news or eyewitness reports, which makes it incomplete, potentially unreliable, and biased for ongoing conflicts. Using satellite images and deep learning techniques, we can automatically extract objective information on violent events. To automate this process, we created a dataset of high-resolution satellite images of Syria and manually annotated the destroyed areas pixel-wise. Then, we used this dataset to ...

Food Price Volatility And Household Welfare: A Case Study Of Major Cities Of Pakistan, Nigar Zehra, Ambreen Fatima

Business Review

The purpose of this paper is to find the impact of food price volatility on the welfare of urban households of Pakistan. Food price volatility in monthly prices of major food commodities for main cities of Pakistan is calculated through standard deviation method. Moreover, the study adopts the methodology provided by Alkire and Foster 2007, and Alkire and Santos 2010 to develop Household Deprived Welfare Index (DWI) for major cities of Pakistan. Following Deaton 1985, the study uses pseudo panel approach. Fixed Effect technique is applied to estimate the impact of volatility on household welfare. The results generated from pseudo ...

A Universally Translatable Explication Of Adam Smith's Famous Proposition On "The Extent Of The Market", Bart J. Wilson, Gian Marco Farese

ESI Publications

Following Adam Smith’s line of argument, we examine the semantics of four economic principles in Chapter III of the Wealth of Nations that compose his famous proposition “that the division of labour is limited by the extent of the market.” We apply the Natural Semantic Metalanguage framework in linguistics to produce a series of explications that are clear and plain, cross-translatable into any language, intelligible to twenty-first-century readers, and faithfully close to the original text. Our paper explicates Smith’s logical argument in Chapter III and demonstrates how his ideas can be shared among speakers with different linguacultural backgrounds ...

Review Of Religion And The Rise Of Capitalism, Jared Rubin

ESI Publications

A review of Religion and the Rise of Capitalism by Benjamin M. Friedman

300 Anniversary Of Smith’ Birth, Vernon L. Smith

ESI Working Papers

Thousand-word brief on key quotes from Adam Smith’s two books (TMS, WN) modelling Society and Economy.

Political Legitimacy In Historical Political Economy, Avner Greif, Jared Rubin

ESI Working Papers

Political legitimacy has long been recognized in the social sciences as an integral component of governance. It encourages obedience without the threat of force, thus lowering governing costs and improving the efficacy of policies. This chapter begins by overviewing the extensive literature on political legitimacy, classifying studies by whether they are based on the beliefs (regarding the legitimacy of the authority) or effectiveness (good governance is legitimate governance). Among the studies focusing on beliefs, most take legitimacy as an exogenous element of political authority. We develop a conceptual framework to study how beliefs regarding political legitimacy form endogenously and impact ...