This paper reports the results of the first systematic attempt at quantitatively measuring the seminar culture within economics and testing whether it is gender neutral. We collected data on every interaction between presenters and their audience in hundreds of research seminars and job market...

This paper examines the problem of a college affected by both a legal ban on affirmative action in admissions and pressure to raise enrollment of underrepresented minorities (URMs), as exemplified by UCLA, which adopted a holistic admissions process in 2006 in response to protests over low URM...

This paper compares retrospective and prospective analyses of the effect of flip charts on test scores in rural Kenyan schools. Retrospective estimates that focus on subjects for which flip charts are used suggest that flip charts raise test scores by up to 20 percent of a standard deviation....

We analyze the extent to which simple markets can be used to aggregate disperse information into efficient forecasts of uncertain future events. Drawing together data from a range of prediction contexts, we show that market-generated forecasts are typically fairly accurate, and that they...

We analyze financial market data in order to produce an ex-ante assessment of the economic consequences of war with Iraq. The novel feature of our analysis derives from the existence of a market for Saddam Securities,' a new future traded on an online betting exchange that pays only if Saddam...

Prediction markets--markets used to forecast future events--have been used to accurately forecast the outcome of political contests, sporting events, and, occasionally, economic outcomes. This chapter summarizes the latest research on prediction markets in order to further their utilization by...

This review paper articulates the relationship between prediction market data and event studies, with a special focus on applications in political economy. Event studies have been used to address a variety of political economy questions from the economic effects of party control of government to...

To understand the extent to which partisan majorities in Congress influence economic policy, we compare financial market responses in recent midterm elections to Presidential elections. We use prediction markets tracking election outcomes as a means of precisely timing and calibrating the...

While most empirical analysis of prediction markets treats prices of binary options as predictions of the probability of future events, Manski (2004) has recently argued that there is little existing theory supporting this practice. We provide relevant analytic foundations, describing sufficient...

Prediction Markets, sometimes referred to as "information markets," "idea futures" or "event futures", are markets where participants trade contracts whose payoffs are tied to a future event, thereby yielding prices that can be interpreted as market-aggregated forecasts. This article summarizes...