A common finding in the literature is that pollution worsens with economic growth but then decreases after the GDP per capita reaches a certain threshold, which lends support to the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis. However, we argue that the environmental turning point could not be...

We provide evidence that sellers respond to buyers' belief biases in a collective lottery betting market, by adopting sales strategies which cater to believers in the Hot Hand and Gambler's Fallacies. Lottery players on the buyer side tend to avoid buying tickets which are similar to the...

Traditionally, the Gambler's Fallacy is described as the belief that a sequence of independent outcomes over time should exhibit short-run reversals. The underlying psychological bias thought to drive this fallacy is Representativeness Bias: the idea that even a small sample of outcomes should...

Recent theories (Rabin, 2002; Rabin and Vayanos, 2010) propose that both the Gambler's Fallacy and the Hot Hand Fallacy are driven by Representativeness Bias, also known as the Law of Small Numbers (Tversky and Kahneman, 1971). The Lucky Store Effect (Guryan and Kearney, 2008), in which the...

Population aging has significant economic and social costs, and this paper studies its impacts on inequality, both theoretically and empirically. First, we build a two-period overlapping-generation model with an uncertain lifetime and find that population aging has the overall effect of...

Population aging has significant economic and social costs, and this paper studies its impacts on inequality, both theoretically and empirically. First, we build a two-period overlapping-generation model with an uncertain lifetime and find that population aging has the overall effect of...

University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. July 2009. Major: Economics. Advisor: Patrick Bajari. 1 computer file (PDF); vii, 72 pages.

Exploiting tariff variations during the U.S.–China trade war, we find that the U.S. tariff escalation is associated with a relative increase in corporate expenditure on research and development by listed Chinese manufacturing companies. Through a novel approach that infers the degree of...

There has been a long debate on whether the expected utility model can explain lottery purchase decision under uncertainty. The traditional strand of research, named the effective price approach, following the expected utility approach takes the expected loss of each ticket as the lottery price...

How do de-globalization events affect corporate innovation decisions? By exploiting tariff variations during the U.S.–China trade war as a quasi-natural experiment, we find that the escalation of U.S. tariffs is associated with a relative increase in corporate expenditure on research and...