Measures of urban productivity are typically positively associated with city population. But is this relationship causal? We discuss the main sources of bias in the proper identification of agglomeration effects. We also assess a variety of solutions that have been proposed in the literature to...

We estimate how random weather fluctuations affected infant mortality across 28 African countries in the past, combining high-resolution data from retrospective fertility surveys (DHS) and climate-model reanalysis (ERA-40). We find that infants were much more likely to die when exposed in utero...

We argue exogenous random treatment is insufficient for valid inference regarding the sign and magnitude of causal effects in dynamic environments. In such settings, treatment responses must be understood as contingent upon the typically unmodeled policy generating process. With binary...

This paper analyzes the incentives of a seller to provide (un)biased and (im)precise advice about a complex product such as insurance, banking and telecommunication services. Misleading the buyers by biasing the advice upwards increases the revenues but also the expected fine imposed by the...

We study a market model in which competing firms use costly marketing devices to influence the set of alternatives which consumers perceive as relevant. Consumers in our model are boundedly rational in the sense that they have an imperfect perception of what is relevant to their decision...

A principal chooses one of n=2 projects or an outside option. An agent is privately informed about the projects' benefits and shares the principal's preferences except for not internalizing her value from the outside option. We show that strategic communication is characterized by pandering: the...

Interest in prediction markets has increased in the last decade, driven in part by the hope that these markets will prove to be valuable tools in forecasting, decision-making and risk management - in both the public and private sectors. This paper outlines five open questions in the literature,...