The feeling or impression that students get about enrolling in a particular college may be an important determinant of their college application decision. Combining institutional records on college campus tour participants over the last decade with hourly weather information, we leverage tour...

We study the welfare effects of offering choice over coverage levels—“vertical choice”—in regulated health insurance markets. We emphasize that heterogeneity in the efficient level of coverage is not sufficient to motivate choice. When premiums do not reflect individuals' costs, it may...

Human drivers routinely make implicit tradeoffs between their selfish interests and the safety of passengers, as when they perform a rolling stop in order to reach their destination faster. Here I explore whether they are comfortable with autonomous vehicles (AVs) that encode similar selfish...

We find that test score optional policies harm the likelihood of elite college admission for high achieving applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds. We show that at one elite college campus, SAT (and ACT) scores predict first year college GPA equally well across income and other demographic...

"Highest Exam provides a detailed, research-driven survey of the gaokao, China's high-stakes college entrance exam. Focusing on the gaokao's social impact, Ruixue Jia and Hongbin Li--past test-takers themselves--explore how the exam serves state interests, inspires individualistic attitudes, and...

This paper studies whether universities should select their students only using specialised subject-specific tests or based on a broader set of skills and knowledge. I show that even if broader skills are not improving graduates' outcomes in the labour market, the university chooses to use them...

A standard conception of meritocracy, reflected in state referenda and the many legal filings against university admissions policies, is that assignment rules should be blind to group identity and monotonic in measures of past accomplishment. We present theoretical arguments and a survey of...

Should choice be offered in social insurance programs? The paper presents a conceptual framework that identifies the key forces determining the value of offering choice, reviews some existing evidence on these forces, and aims to guide further empirical research in different in- surance domains....

We study gender inequality in conference acceptance using data from the Irish Economic Association annual conference from 2016 to 2022, exploiting the introduction of anonymised submission in 2021 to study the effect of blinding. While no gender gap is observed in the organisers' acceptance...

Punishment menus allow offenders to choose the punishment to which they will be subjected from a set of options. We present several behaviorally informed rationales for why punishment menus may serve as effective deterrents, notably by causing people to refrain from entering a calculative...

This paper studies whether universities should select their students only using specialised subject-specific tests or based on a broader set of skills and knowledge. I show that even if broader skills are not improving graduates' outcomes in the labour market, the university chooses to use them...

Amidst concerns about replicability but also thanks to the professionalisation of labs, the rise of pre-registration, the switch to online experiments, and enhanced computational power, experimental economics is undergoing rapid changes. They all call for efficient designs and data analysis,...

This paper examines how a firm's choice of the type of experiment impacts on its potential exploitation of new technological opportunities. It does so in the context of the failure of successful firms (or disruption) where the literature has informally suggested that firms undertake errors in...

We study a problem in which policymakers need to screen self-selected individuals by unobserved heterogeneity in social welfare gains from a policy intervention. In our framework, the marginal treatment effects and marginal treatment responses arise as key statistics to characterize social...

In this paper, we consider a one shot principal agent problem. The owner of the firm (principal) hires a manager (agent). As firm value is non‐contractible by assumption, an incentive contract is written on accounting income. The manager performs some productive task that increases firm value...

This paper studies whether universities should select their students only using specialised subject-specific tests, or on the basis of a broader set of skills and knowledge. The empirical analysis is guided by a theoretical framework. The theoretical model shows that even if broader skills are...

School choice may allow schools to impede access to students perceived as costlier to educate. To test this, we sent emails from fictitious parents to 6,452 charter schools and traditional public schools subject to school choice in 29 states and Washington, D.C. The fictitious parent asked...

We conduct a stated-choice experiment to analyze the decision to contribute to front- or back-loaded tax-sheltered savings accounts. Our experimental design includes a randomized financial education treatment that provides information on these accounts. We assess whether respondents learn about...

We study the welfare effects of offering choice over coverage levels––“vertical choice”––in regulated health insurance markets. Though the efficient level of coverage, which trades off the value of risk protection and the social cost from moral hazard, likely varies across consumers,...

We study a problem in which policymakers need to screen self-selected individuals by unobserved heterogeneity in social welfare gains from a policy intervention. In our framework, the marginal treatment effects and marginal treatment responses arise as key statistics to characterize social...

Variable pay, defined as pay that is tied to some measure of a firm's output, has become more important for executives of the typical American firm. Variable pay is usually touted as a way to provide incentives to managers whose interests may not be perfectly aligned with those of owners. The...

College admissions is decentralized, creating frictions that limit student choice. We study the Common Application (CA) platform, under which students submit a single application to member schools, reducing frictions and increasing student choice. Joining the CA increases the number of...

Using proprietary data from a major fund data provider, we analyze the screening activity of investment consultants (ICs) who advise institutional investors with trillions of dollars in assets. We find that ICs frequently shortlist funds using threshold screens clustered at round, base 5 or base...

Should choice be offered in social insurance programs? The paper presents a conceptual framework that identifies the key forces determining the value of offering choice, reviews some existing evidence on these forces, and aims to guide further empirical research in different in- surance domains....

The merit-vs-diversity balance in university-admissions remains a controversial issue. Statistical analysis of these problems is jeopardized by applicant characteristics observed by admission-officers but unobserved by researchers. Using administrative microdata from the two-stage Cambridge...