Pre-production Papers

We provide an evaluation of the impact of German public subsidy schemes in municipalities of Bavaria and Lower Saxony aimed at supporting the deployment of basic broadband infrastructure in rural Germany. Such subsidies are subject to state aid control by the European Commission and may only be granted if the potential market failure is addressed without distorting competition. We first analyse the consequences of the subsidies on reducing the digital divide between urban and rural areas.

This paper provides the first statistical study of political differences between fact-checkers. I collect a comprehensive dataset of articles published by the six main general-interest French fact-checkers up until July 2021 and identify the political orientations of entities that are fact-checked.

A large literature shows that people’s valuation of delayed financial rewards violates exponential discounting, exhibiting a hyperbolic pattern: high short-run impatience that strongly decreases in the length of the delay. We test the hypothesis that the hyperbolic pattern in measured discount rates reflects mistakes driven by the complexity of evaluating delayed payoffs.

A principal contracts with agents to achieve coordination. Multiple equilibria can in general arise under given contract offers, and the principal wishes to maximize her payoff guarantee across equilibrium outcomes. I discuss recent work on contracting for coordination using a simple, unifying framework.

A significant component of the cost of climate change is the investment required for adaptation programs. Effective adaptation strategies are becoming essential for managing the negative economic impacts of climate change. In this study, we estimate climate change damage costs that incorporate adaptation costs and benefits under different environmental scenarios.

In recent decades, there has been an increase in the share of males struggling in the labor market and education. We show in a set of large-scale experimental studies involving more than 35,000 Americans that people are more accepting of males falling behind than they are of females falling behind, and less in agreement with government policies supporting males falling behind.

We use micro data from country-by-country reports of more than 3 600 multinational companies to analyze global profit shifting to avoid taxes. Unlike other data sets, country-by-country reports provide detailed information about the global economic activities of multinational companies, including those in tax haven countries.

This paper studies the role of market structure in regulatory compliance through a unique empirical example: censorship via content removal by three major live-streaming platforms in China. Based on 30 unexpected sensitive events, I first present reduced-form evidence that the largest platform censored a higher number of keywords and complied faster on average than the smaller platforms.

Using the National Compensation Survey from 2009 to 2022 and difference-in-differences methods, we find that state-level sick pay mandates are effective in broadening access for U.S. workers. Increases in coverage reach 30ppt from a 63% baseline five years post-mandate. Mandates have more bite in jobs with low pre-mandate coverage.

A vast scholarship questions whether voters are sufficiently informed to act in their best interest at the polling booth, which may also have implications for the quality of political representation. In this study, we examine cognitive and non-cognitive ability tests conducted on (male) military conscripts by the Finnish Defense Forces, and compare local and national election candidates nominated by political parties and representatives elected by voters with each other and the general population.

We quantify how labor supply elasticities and reservation wages vary between people and over time, and infer workers’ valuation of flexibility in their choices of work hours. Economists and policymakers are keenly interested in these quantities, especially lately with the growth in jobs that offer flexible work schedules. Our study takes advantage of a large natural field experiment at Uber, the largest ride-sharing company.

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.

Within a general macroeconomic environment I derive the welfare effect of capital tax changes in terms of estimable sufficient statistics. Lower capital-labor substitutability in production not only induces a stronger responsiveness of wages and financial returns, but it also reduces the deadweight loss of capital tax hikes. Thus, contrary to conventional wisdom, optimal capital taxes may be higher precisely when ‘trickle down’ effects are stronger.

Despite a formal ‘no-bailout clause,’ we estimate significant net present value transfers from the European Union to Cyprus, Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain, ranging from roughly 0.5% (Ireland) to a whopping 43% (Greece) of 2010 output during the Eurozone crisis. We propose a model to analyze and understand bailouts in a monetary union, and the large observed differences across countries.

This study demonstrates that more information about the unobserved state of the economy may reduce social welfare owing to the presence of nominal rigidity. On the one hand, costly business cycle fluctuations and price dispersions arising from nominal rigidity are muted in a noisy economy.

Motivated by novel survey evidence, we develop a theory of political behavior in which the relative weight voters place on values rather than material considerations increases in income. The model unifies several stylized facts about U.S. politics and makes new predictions. The luxury goods idea implies – and two datasets confirm – that rich moral liberals are considerably more likely to vote against their economic interests than poor moral conservatives, cautioning against the common narrative that the working class is particularly politically motivated by values.

We provide causal evidence for the role of warfare in the development of medieval constitutionalism. Using novel data on the universe of German cities between 1290 and 1710, we show that military conflicts led to city councils that were larger, more likely to be elected by citizens, and more likely to include representatives of craft guilds.