Pre-production Papers
The following papers, listed alphabetically by the first author's last name, have been accepted for publication in JEEA, and can be downloaded in in the EEA membership log in area.
Chain Restaurant Calorie Posting Laws, Obesity, and Consumer Welfare
This paper investigates whether and why laws requiring chain restaurants to post calories on menus and menu boards work. We develop a model of calories consumed that highlights multiple potential channels through which these laws influence choice and that outlines an empirical strategy to disentangle these alternatives.
Coordination and Incumbency Advantage in Multi-Party Systems - Evidence from French Elections
Free and fair elections should incentivize elected officials to exert effort and enable citizens to select representative politicians and occasionally replace incumbents. However, incumbency advantage and coordination failures possible in multi-party systems may jeopardize this process. We ask whether these two forces compound each other.
Information Nudges, Subsidies, and Crowding Out of Attention: Field Evidence from Energy Efficiency Investments
How can information substitute or complement financial incentives such as Pigouvian subsidies? We answer this question in a large-scale field experiment that cross-randomizes energy efficiency subsidies with information about the financial savings of LED lighting. Information has two effects: It shifts and rotates demand curves. The direction of the shift is ambiguous and highly dependent on the information design.
Rationally Inattentive Statistical Discrimination: Arrow Meets Phelps
When information acquisition is costly but flexible, a principal may rationally acquire information that favors one group over another. The former group faces incentives to invest in becoming productive, while the latter is discouraged from such investments.
Revisiting Productivity Dynamics in Europe: A New Measure of Utilization-Adjusted TFP Growth
We compute new estimates of Total Factor Productivity (TFP) growth in the five largest European economies. Our estimates account for positive profits and use firm surveys to proxy for unobserved changes in factor utilization.
Risk Gravity
We consider the canonical trade model with heterogeneous firms, love for variety and trade costs, and integrate it in the consumption CAPM model. This yields a structural gravity equation that includes an additional factor related to risk premia. Empirical evidence based on firm-level data confirms the importance of cross-sectional heterogeneity in risk and time-varying risk premia to shape bilateral trade flows.
The Effect of Asset Encumbrance on Bank Behavior: Evidence from the Introduction of Covered Bonds in Norway
We use the introduction of covered bonds in Norway in 2007 together with administrative and supervisory data at the bank and loan level to investigate the effect of asset encumbrance, i.e. pledging assets as collateral, on the composition of bank balance sheets and bank risk.
The Value and Profits of Firms
The real growth of the stock market value of firms has increased from close to 0% on average per year between 1958 and 1980, to 5.2% between 1980 and today. This change coincides with the rise of market power and profits, starting in 1980. This paper proposes to decompose the value of firms based on profits (earnings) rather than dividends.