We investigate how a cautious decision maker might aggregate various opinions of experts who face model misspecification. We first consider a more general case in which both the decision maker’s and experts’ preference relations are variational introduced by Maccheroni et al. (2006). We show...

We study a voting model with partial information in which the evaluation of social welfare must be based on information about agents' top choices plus qualitative background conditions on preferences. The former is elicited individually, while the latter is not. The social evaluator is modeled...

We use Belgian data on domestic firm-to-firm transactions and ask how the measurement of the share of imports in final consumption is affected when one uses data recorded at higher levels of aggregation. We find that aggregating detailed firm-to-firm transaction data to the firm level and...

We study the implications of trade aggregation in an infinite-horizon economy with multiple countries, asking whether there is a role for alternatives to the Armington aggregator in a wide range of workhorse open-economy macroeconomics models. We show analytically that the first-order dynamics...

Uncovering the heterogeneous effects of particular policies or "treatments” is a key concern for researchers and policymakers. A common approach is to report average treatment effects in different subgroups based on observable covariates. However, there is likely to be considerable uncertainty...

Large cities (central places) excessively export to smaller cities in their surrounding hinterland. Using Japanese inter-city trade data, we identify a substantial centrality bias: Shipments from central places to their hinterland are 50%-125% larger than predicted by gravity forces. This upward...