We study the effect of information on technology adoption and productivity in agriculture. Our empirical strategy exploits the expansion of the mobile phone network in previously uncovered areas of rural India coupled with the availability of call centers for agricultural advice. We measure information on agricultural practices by analyzing the content of 2.5 million phone calls made by farmers to one of India’s leading call centers for agricultural advice. We find that areas receiving coverage from new towers and with no language barriers between farmers and advisers answering their calls experience higher adoption of high yielding varieties of seeds and other complementary inputs, as well as higher increase in agricultural productivity. Our estimates indicate that information frictions can explain around 25 percent of the agricultural productivity gap between the most productive and the least productive areas in our sample.

We study paternalistic preferences in a large-scale experiment, where 14,000 people sampled from the general population of the U.S., have the option to intervene and prevent additionally sampled, real workers from making consequential mistakes. Our data show that the nature of an intervention affects peoples’ willingness to intervene substantially : people are much more willing to provide information than to restrict freedom of choice, even if the outcome is identical. We propose a simple formal framework that allows us to categorize people as either non-interventionists, liberal paternalists, or hard paternalists, and we study the relation of type classification and background characteristics.

This paper examines the exchange rate policy in a two-country model with nominal wage rigidities and firm dynamics. We first show that a flexible exchange rate is unable to replicate the flexible price allocation because of the inefficiency generated by incomplete financial markets. In our setting with heterogeneous firms, a monetary intervention aimed at dampening nominal exchange rate fluctuations stabilizes the firm selection in the export market. The reduction in wage setting uncertainty ensured by a fixed exchange rate is particularly relevant when firms are small and homogeneous, thus providing a rationale for the fear of floating in exchange rate policies.

Effective organizations are able to adapt members’ strategies to unforeseen change in an efficient manner. We study when relational contracts enable organizations to achieve this. Specifically, in a novel experiment we explored the hypothesis that basing a relational contract on general principles rather than on specific rules is more successful in achieving efficient adaptation. In our Baseline condition, we indeed observe that, compared to pairs who relied on specific rules, those who articulated general principles achieved significantly higher performance after change occurred. Underlying this correlation, we also find that pairs with principle-based agreements were more likely both to expect and to take actions that were consistent with what their relational contract prescribed. To investigate whether there is a causal link between principle-based agreements and performance, we implemented a "Nudge" intervention intended to foster principle-based relational contracts. The Nudge succeeded in causing more pairs to articulate principles, but the intervention failed to increase performance after the shock because many of the pairs induced to articulate principles then did not take actions that were consistent with their relational contracts. In short, our results suggest that (1) principle-based relational contracts may improve organizational performance, but also that (2) high-performing relational contracts may be difficult to build.

The right to be heard is a fundamental principle underlying most legal systems and constitutes a basic human right. Legal scholars argue that the right to be heard is essential for the rule of law because it helps achieving truth and legitimizes judicial sentencing. On the other hand, hearings are labor and time intensive, leading to an overloaded criminal justice system, particularly for mass crimes. We experimentally evaluate the importance of hearings in the context of a large-scale reform of the Swiss Criminal Procedure Code, which delegated sentencing power from courts to the prosecutors through the means of penal orders. As a consequence of the reform, prosecutors sentence offenders by sending them a penal order that is solely based on police reports in roughly 90% of all criminal proceedings, de facto removing the defendants’ right of being heard. We conducted a field experiment in collaboration with a public prosecution office in Switzerland and randomly invited defendants to participate in a prosecutorial hearing, allowing us to investigate the causal effect of hearings on prosecutorial sentencing, perceptions of procedural fairness, and recidivism.

Official (government-to-government) lending is much larger than commonly known, often surpassing total private cross-border capital flows, especially during disasters such as wars, financial crises and natural catastrophes. We assemble the first comprehensive long-run dataset of official international lending, covering 230,000 loans, grants and guarantees extended by governments, central banks, and multilateral institutions in the period 1790-2015. Historically, wars have been the main catalyst of government-to-government transfers. The scale of official credits granted in and around WW1 and WW2 was particularly large, easily surpassing the scale of total international bailout lending after the 2008 crash. During peacetime, development finance and financial crises are the main drivers of official cross-border finance, with official flows often stepping in when private flows retrench. In line with the predictions of recent theoretical contributions, we find that official lending increases with the degree of economic integration. In crises and disasters, governments help those countries to which they have greater trade and banking exposure, hoping to reduce the collateral damage to their own economies. Since the 2000s, official finance has made a sharp comeback, largely due to the rise of China as an international creditor and the return of central bank cross-border lending in times of stress, this time in the form of swap lines.

We investigate the effects of high-speed rail (HSR) on the location of economic activity. We set up a spatial quantitative general equilibrium model that incorporates spatial linkages between firms (including manufacturing and services), agglomeration economies, as well as commuting and migration. The model is estimated for Japan in order to investigate the impacts of the Shinkansen, i.e., the first HSR ever built. We show that traveling by train strengthens firms’ linkages, but is less important for commuting interactions. The Shinkansen increases welfare by about 5%. We show that extensions of the Shinkansen network may have large effects (up to a 30% increase in employment) on connected municipalities, although the effects are smaller for places with higher fixed costs. Our counterfactuals show that, without the Shinkansen, Tokyo and Osaka would be 6.3% and 4.4% larger, respectively.

Why are there so many false positive results in the published scientific literature ? And what is the actual share of results that do not replicate in different literatures in the experimental social sciences ? I will discuss several recent large replication projects, as well as our studies on "wisdom-of-crowds" mechanisms like prediction markets and forecasting surveys where researchers attempt to predict replication outcomes as well as new outcomes.

In many important economic settings, limited information makes it impossible for decision makers to ensure that each individual gets what he or she deserves. Decision makers are then faced with the trade-off between giving some individuals more than they deserve, false positives, and giving some individuals less than they deserve, false negatives. We present the results from two large-scale experimental studies of how people from the general population in the US and Norway trade off these two mistakes. We find that most people are more concerned with avoiding false negatives than with avoiding false positives, but we also document systematic variation in how people make this trade-off between the two countries and across the political specter. The findings shed light on people’s attitudes to a wide range of policies by providing novel evidence on an important dimension of people’s social preference.

In this work we introduce a general equilibrium model with landlords, indebted owner-occupiers and renters to study housing markets’ dynamics. We estimate it by using standard Bayesian methods and match the US data of the last decades. This framework is particularly suited to explain current trends on housing markets. We highlight the crucial relationship between interest rates, house prices and rents, and argue that it helps understanding the main driving forces. Our analysis suggests that current developments on housing markets can play a role for a recovery from the Covid pandemic as they have an expansionary effect on aggregate output. Moreover, we account for the heterogeneous impact of crisis-induced policies depending on agents’ status on the housing market. We show how, despite an increase in housing prices, the welfare of landlords has been negatively hit. This is associated to the joint decrease in returns on housing and financial assets that reduces their financial incomes.

This work in progress focuses on producing reliable statistics on migration flows in France in order to analyze their economic effects. Using residence permits information collected in the central foreigners register, what is known as AGDREF - Application de gestion des dossiers des ressortissants étrangers en France, we compute time series on immigration in France. These administrative data have the advantage of being exhaustive in their scope : foreign nationals from countries not members of the European Union or European Free Trade Association, who obtain a residence permit. This makes it possible to characterize the dynamics of immigration of third-country nationals to France, and to analyze their consequences for the economy. Among the results obtained, we observe an upward trend in migration for work and study purposes in recent years. Since 2008, selective labor migration has been growing at a steady pace, and a significant proportion of non-selective labor migration is due to case-by-case regularizations, through working, of irregular immigrants, including rejected asylum seekers. Using vector autoregressive (VAR) models on monthly data for 1994-2018, we obtain that the response of the economy to an exogenous change in the immigration rate is significantly positive. Our results suggest that immigration in France contributes to raising the average standard of living and reducing unemployment. The decomposition according to category of entry gives interesting results : family immigration in particular have a positive effect on the economy.

We study whether bonus payments for information provision can improve the information flow between physicians. We consider the situation of a primary care physician (PCP) deciding on the provision of information of varying qualities to a specialist while referring a patient. Our theoretical model, which includes altruism and the aversion to lose profit relative to a reference profit, predicts that bonus payments increase the provision of both high- and low-quality information. Running a controlled laboratory experiment we find support for this prediction. Moreover, we observe that in case that the beneficiary of information provision receives a higher payoff than the PCP, PCPs more often pass on high-quality information when the beneficiary is a patient instead of a specialist. In case that the beneficiary receives a lower payoff than the PCP, the type of the beneficiary (specialist or patient) does not affect the provision of high-quality information. As a consequence, specialists more often receive high-quality information when they earn smaller instead of larger profits than PCPs, while there is no such difference for patients. As such our observations suggest that the level of high-quality information transferred by PCPs depends on an interaction of who benefits from information provision and the payoff relation between beneficiaries and PCPs.

The liquidity of financial system plays a central role in systemic crises. In this paper, we show that the ECB haircut policies provided an important liquidity support to distressed financial institutions during the euro area sovereign debt turmoil. Using novel, micro data on the pool of collateral eligible to ECB open market operations, we construct a "public" liquidity mismatch indicator (LMI) for the French aggregate banking sector based on the ECB haircuts. We then compare it to the "private" LMI based on the haircuts in private repo markets in the spirit of Bai et al. (2018). The difference between the two indicators represents a new measure of the ECB liquidity support. Our results suggest that the ECB haircut policies indeed helped French banks to reduce the liquidity mismatch. Moreover, higher ECB liquidity support is associated with higher cash and sovereign asset holdings by the French banks as well as with their lower probability of default.

We study the effect of opening a new high school on individual schooling decisions at the end of lower secondary education. The working sample covers all ninth graders between 2007-2008 and 2012-2013 in France. The two-way fixed-effect estimation strategy uses variation in time and space to estimate the causal effect of an increase in school supply. Opening a new high school significantly increases the probability of pupils from neighboring middle schools continuing in higher secondary education. The effect is exclusively due to new high schools proposing a vocational track. Furthermore, the effect is mainly driven by low-achieving students.

In this paper, we use a laboratory experiment to analyze the effect of social preferences in a coordination game with Pareto-ranked equilibria. Inequality is increased by increasing the coordination payoffs of some subjects while the coordination payoffs of others remain unchanged. Theoretically, in this setting, inequality aversion may lead to a negative relationship between inequality and coordination success, while total payoff motivations lead to a positive relationship. Using a within-subject experimental design, we find that more inequality unambiguously yields a higher level of coordination success. Furthermore, this result holds even for subjects whose payoffs remain unchanged. Our results suggest that total payoff motivations drive the positive
relationship between inequality and coordination success found in this experiment. Moreover, our data highlight that the order of treatment matters. Groups facing over time a reduction in inequalities reach the efficient outcome more often, over the entire experiment, compared to groups facing over time an increase in inequalities. This study thus contributes to understanding whether social preferences and variations in inequality affect the outcome of coordination problems.

This paper tests an intervention aimed at facilitating (cognitively) the adoption of healthy dietary habits. We provide easy-to-understand information about the risks of developing diabetes or heart diseases and give easy-to-follow dietary recommendations to minimize these risks. We implement two variations, one consisting of generic information, the other consisting of information tailored to the individual, the latter resembling newly developed on-line health assessment tools. On top of the information treatment, we implement a second experimental variation nudging people into spending more time thinking about their dietary choices. We find evidence that the information intervention leads to healthier choices in the short run, but mostly in the generic treatment. Surprisingly, we find that people are on average pessimistic about their health, and therefore receive good news on average when the information is tailored to them. We find no evidence that increasing the time available to make choices leads to healthier choices, and find no evidence of long-term changes in habits. These results do not support a bounded rationality explanation for poor dietary choices.

We develop a methodology to estimate robust city level vehicular mobility indices, and apply it to 154 Indian cities using 22 million counterfactual trips measured by a web mapping service. There is wide variation in mobility across cities. An exact decomposition shows this variation is driven more by differences in uncongested mobility than congestion. Under plausible assumptions, a one standard deviation improvement in uncongested speed creates much more mobility than optimal congestion pricing. Denser and more populated cities are slower, only in part because of congestion. Urban economic development is correlated with better (uncongested and overall) mobility despite worse congestion.

In this paper, we develop a unified model of habit formation and attention to examine the behavioral and welfare impacts of realtime feedback on behavior. Our framework encompasses consumption-based habit as in Stigler and Becker (1977), as well as attention-based habit motivated by recent studies in psychology and neuroscience. We test these competing mechanisms using a large-scale field experiment in the context of resource consumption (showering). We implement a novel experimental design that varies household-level realtime feedback cycles that temporarily draw attention to individuals’ cost of consumption. Our results strongly support an attention-based model of habit in favor of workhorse consumption-based models used in economics.

We explore the effects of parental leave entitlements for mothers and fathers on wages and unemployment. To do so we include two types of workers, males and females, who compete for the same jobs, in a labour search and matching model with parental leave. We show that increases in leave duration have ambiguous effects on market tightness and wages. We identify, analytically and graphically, the mechanisms behind these ambiguous effects. Given the variety of theoretical cases we calibrate the model for selected countries (France, Italy, Norway and Portugal) and simulate policy changes. In all countries considered an increase in duration of either type-specific leave reduces both wages and increases unemployment, which is consistent with a relatively large negative effect of the leave on job creation. The simulated effects are however relatively small and suggest that the scope for leave duration policy to reduce gender wage and employment gaps is limited.

We study the role of incentives for the sorting of motivated agents in a lab experiment. Participants can self-select into different teams in which they can earn money but also exert “social effort” to produce charitable donations. The production of donations is characterized by complementarities : a participant’s return of social effort increases in the social effort of others in the same team. Our theoretical and empirical results show that differences in incentives across teams facilitate the sorting of motivated agents and thereby increase donations. Participants exert more social effort if they are in the low-incentive team. Interestingly, this holds for non-motivated participants as well, but only if self-selection is possible.

The study of optimal long-term care (LTC) social insurance is generally carried out under the utilitarian social criterion, which penalizes individuals who have a lower capacity to convert resources into well-being, such as dependent elderly individuals or prematurely dead individuals. This paper revisits the design of optimal LTC insurance while adopting the ex post egalitarian social criterion, which gives priority to the worst-off in realized terms (i.e. once the state of nature has been revealed). Using a lifecycle model with risk about the duration of life and risk about old-age dependence, it is shown that the optimal LTC social insurance is quite sensitive to the postulated social criterion. The optimal second-best social insurance under the ex post egalitarian criterion involves, in comparison to utilitarianism, higher LTC benefits, lower pension benefits, a higher tax rate on savings, as well as a lower tax rate on labor earnings.

This paper exploits a short-lived cooperation program between the U.S.S.R. and China, which led to the construction of 156 ``Million-Rouble plants’’ in the 1950s. We isolate exogenous variation in location decisions due to the relative position of allied and enemy airbases and study the long-run impact of these factories on local economic activity. While the ``156’’ program accelerated industrialization in treated counties until the end of the command-economy era, this significant productivity advantage fully eroded in the subsequent period. We explore the nature of local spillovers responsible for this pattern, and provide evidence that treated counties are overspecialized and far less innovative. There is a large concentration of establishments along the production chain of the Million-Rouble plants, which limits technological spillovers across industries.

We document that gender differences in commuting distances are substantial though decreasing over time following a similar pattern as the gender wage gap. We relate these stylized facts to supply side considerations, using a unique administrative dataset where we can match job seekers’ search criteria --- occupation, reservation wage, maximum commute, etc. --- to the precise characteristics of the jobs preceding and following their unemployment spell. Controlling finely for the previous job, unemployed women have a lower reservation wage than men and search for jobs closer to their residence. This translates into women getting lower wages and shorter commutes upon reemployment. The joint distribution of reservation job attributes and of realized job bundles allow us to identify indifference curves between wage and commute, which we find steeper for women. Through the lens of a job search model where commuting matters, we then estimate that around 10% of the gender wage gap can be accounted for by gender differences in the maximum acceptable commute, with larger contributions for married workers with children. Finally, we verify the robustness of our results using job application data, to show in particular that female workers do not receive less demand from far-away employers, confirming that most of our stylized facts are supply-side driven.

The child penalty is widely regarded as a main driver of the gender wage gap. To make progress on this question one needs to address the potential endogeneity of fertility with respect to labor supply. In this study we combine an event study framework with instrumental variables (IV) using the outcomes of in vitro fertilization (IVF) in Norway as instruments. We find that the endogeneity of fertility timing introduces omitted variable bias in a regular event study, while delayed fertility and intensive margin fertility responses lead to bias in regular IV estimates based on IVF treatments. Our joint approach addresses these issues by centering on the age of child rather than time since IVF, and by instrumenting first and second births. The resulting estimates show that (i) fertility has a short-lived negative effect on earnings that disappears after two years ; (ii) effects are similar for the extensive and intensive margin of fertility ; and (iii) partners are shielded from any negative effects.

Many countries impose temporary employment bans to recently arrived asylum seekers, a period during which take up of legal employment is not permitted. In this paper, we assess the long-term impact of such temporary employment bans on refugees’ labour market integration. To do so, we use micro-data from the European Labour Force Survey that allow identifying refugees and combine them with newly collected data on the presence and length of employment bans across European countries, from 1985 onward. We estimate DID regressions exploiting geographical and temporary variation in employment bans and find that being exposed to an employment ban at arrival reduces employment probability in the medium-run by 15%. Importantly, these effects persist over time – fading away only after about 15 years – and are non-linear in the length of ban duration. Our causal estimates are robust to a number of identification tests : a placebo run on non-refugee migrants, a triple DID where other migrants are used as the control group ; and an IV strategy based on the 2003 EU directive setting a maximum duration to employment bans. The negative impact on employment primarily comes from reduced participation, suggesting that bans may persistently push refugees out of the labour market and into welfare.

Does traders’ experience reduce their propensity to participate in speculate bubbles ? This paper studies this issue from a theoretical and an experimental viewpoint. We focus on a game in which bubbles, if they arise, are irrational, as in the Smith, Suchanek, and Williams (1988)’s set up. Our theoretical results are based on Camerer and Ho (1999)’s Experience-Weighted Attraction learning model. Adaptive traders are assumed to adjust their behavior according to actions’ past performance. In the long run, learning induces the market to converge to the unique no bubble equilibrium. However, learning initially increases traders’ propensity to speculate. In the short run, more experienced traders thus create more bubbles. An experiment shows that bubbles are very pervasive despite the fact that subjects have become experienced. Our estimation of the EWA model also indicates that learning is at work.

We study allocation behavior when outcome inequality is inevitable but a fair process is feasible, as in selecting one person from several candidates for a job or award. We show that allocators may be influenced by inappropriate criteria, impeding the implementation of a fair process. We study four interventions to induce process fairness without restricting the allocator’s decisions : Increasing the transparency of the allocation process ; providing a private randomization device ; allowing the allocator to delegate to a public randomization device ; and allowing the allocator to avoid information on inappropriate criteria. All interventions except transparency have positive effects, but differ substantially in their impact.

Recently, several papers have highlighted different mechanisms explaining that bubbles are associated to a larger growth, as it is empirically observed. Main ingredients for these results are the coexistence of heterogeneous traders and the existence of some borrowing constraints, but the bubble can have different roles like providing liquidities or being a collateral. In this paper, we introduce heterogeneous traders by considering an overlapping generations model with households living three periods. Young households cannot invest in capital, while adults have access to investment and face a borrowing constraint. Introducing bubbles in a quite general way, encompassing the different roles they can have in the existing literature, we show that heterogeneity among traders does not prevent the crowding-out effect of the bubble. However, when the borrowing constraint is binding, the bubble may enhance growth. More significantly, these results do not depend on the type and the role attributed to the bubble.

Based on epidemiological evidence, we consider an overlapping generations economy in which agents differ through their ability to procreate. Households with impaired fertility may incur health expenditure to increase their chances of parenthood. This health heterogeneity generates welfare inequalities that deserve to be ruled out. We explore three different criteria of social evaluation in the long-run : the utilitarian approach, the ex-ante egalitarian criterion and the ex-post egalitarian one. We propose a set of economic instruments to decentralize each solution. To correct for the externalities and health inequalities, both a preventive (a taxation of capital) and a redistributive policy are required. We show that a more egalitarian allocation is associated with higher productive investment but reduced health expenditure and thus, lower population growth.

This paper studies the link between anticipated migration durations and immigrants’ behavior. We develop a lifecycle model in which immigrants decide labor market participation, consumption, and investment in location-specific human capital together with the optimal length of migration. We estimate this model combining several data sets that provide unique repeated information on immigrants’ return intentions and realized return migrations. We show that the relation between return intentions and human capital investment leads to behavior- based selective return migration, and analyze how policies which influence migrants’ return decisions affect immigrants’ career profiles.

We estimate the effect of public transport supply on travel times of motor-vehicle and bus users in Rome, Italy. We apply a quasi-experimental methodology exploiting hourly information on public transport service reductions during strikes. We find that a 10 percent reduction in public transit supply increases the travel time of motor-vehicles users by 1.6 percent in the morning peak. The effect of this reduction on travel time of bus users is similar. The congestion-relief benefit of public transport is sizeable and bus travel time gains account for an important share of this benefit. We also estimate the effects of dedicated bus lane provision on travel times of bus and motor-vehicle users. It appears that for specific roads dedicated bus lanes reduce overall travel time, despite the lane loss, and are under-supplied from a welfare perspective.

We study gender differences in a sample with over 9,000 multiple-choice math tests, where in half of the questions both wrong answers and omitted questions score 0, and in the other half wrong answers score 0 but omitted questions score +1. Using a within-participant regression analysis, we find that female participants leave more omitted questions than males under both types of scoring rules, but furthermore, the gender difference gets larger when there is a reward for omitted questions. This gender difference, which is stronger among high ability and older participants, has negative consequences for females in the final score and ranking. In a subsequent survey, female participants show lower levels of confidence and higher risk aversion, which could potentially explain this differential behavior. When both are considered, risk aversion seems to be the main factor in explaining the gender differential in the willingness to guess. A scoring rule that is gender neutral begs for non-differential scoring between wrong answers and omitted questions.