VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Essays in macroeconomics and finance
Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
Economics.

This thesis consists of three chapters on macroeconomics and finance. The first chapter investigates the effects of large swings in the exchange rate on aggregate economic activity and inequality among households. The literature lacks a consensus on these questions. I document new stylized facts from Swiss administrative data on how the large and unexpected appreciation of the Swiss Franc in January 2015 affected households across income and wealth distributions. I then develop a quantitative model consistent with these facts to measure the welfare implications of this appreciation across the distribution and evaluate the effects of alternative monetary policy actions by the Swiss National Bank around this event. The second chapter is co-authored with Adrien Auclert, Hannes Malmberg and Matthew Rognlie. We use a sufficient statistic approach to quantify the general equilibrium effects of population aging on wealth accumulation, expected asset returns, and global imbalances. Combining population forecasts with household survey data from 25 countries, we measure the compositional effect of aging: how a changing age distribution affects wealth-to-GDP, holding the age profiles of assets and labor income fixed. In a baseline overlapping generations model this statistic, in conjunction with cross-sectional information and two standard macro parameters, pins down general equilibrium outcomes. Since the compositional effect is positive, large, and heterogeneous across countries, our model predicts that population aging will increase wealth-to-GDP ratios, lower asset returns, and widen global imbalances through the twenty-first century. These conclusions extend to a richer model in which bequests, individual savings, and the tax-and-transfer system all respond to demographic change. The final chapter provides a historical decomposition of business cycles in Switzerland. First, I construct historical national accounts data from 1890 to 2018. Second, I apply the business cycle accounting procedure to decompose economic fluctuations into four wedges that capture different underlying frictions. In the Great Depression and the 1920 recession, the efficiency wedge helped the economy escape a massive downturn implied by the labor wedge. The reverse was observed during the 1990 recession, when the efficiency wedge implied a strong recession limited by the action of the labor wedge. The 1973 recession can primarily be explained by the efficiency wedge and, less importantly, by the investment wedge. Surprisingly, the government spending wedge, which includes fluctuations in net exports, plays a minor role in explaining business cycle fluctuations in Switzerland
Essays in political economy
Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
Political Science.

In this dissertation, I study how elections -- and electoral rules, in particular -- shape the selection of candidates with distinct attributes into office. I examine how electoral rules applied to local politics -- the very first rung of the tall ladder of political careers -- shape the nature of electoral competition by affecting female candidates' career trajectories and allowing independent candidates without a partisan affiliation to thrive. I do so using modern causal inference techniques and introduce new methods to study heterogeneous effects in close elections
Essays in political methodology
Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
Political Science.

This dissertation is comprised of four chapters, which are united by their focus on the applications of machine learning methods to improve the robustness and flexibility of causal inference strategies commonly used by social scientists. Chapter 1 proposes methods that use spatial smoothing techniques to flexibly adjust for unobserved spatial confounders for observational causal inference problems. Chapter 2 examines the robustness of instrumental variables strategies in a decade's worth of published articles in political science and provides guidelines for empirical practice related to inference with weak instruments. Chapter 3 introduces a framework for estimating treatment effects by combining predictions from machine learning models with weights that balance observable characteristics across treatment and control groups in a variety of data settings frequently encountered by social scientists. Chapter 4 applies these methods to the question of whether private election funding affected turnout and votes for the democratic party in the 2020 election, and finds scant evidence in favor of popular narratives that these grants swung the election
Essays on belief formation
Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
Economics.

This dissertation comprises three chapters that study the role of bounded rationality and psychological mechanisms in the formation of subjective beliefs using experimental methods. The first chapter studies belief updating biases — under- and overreaction to new information. Evidence from experiments, surveys, and the field has uncovered both underreaction and overreaction to new information. We provide new experimental evidence on the underlying mechanisms of under- and overreaction by comparing how people make inferences and revise forecasts in the same information environment. Participants underreact to signals when inferring about underlying states, but overreact to the same signals when revising forecasts about future outcomes — a phenomenon we term "the inference-forecast gap." We show that this gap is largely driven by different simplifying heuristics used in the two tasks, and we provide evidence supporting both similarity and timing as plausible mechanisms. The second chapter explores the role of motivated reasoning in the bias of correlation neglect in belief formation. Experimental participants receive potentially redundant signals about either an ego-relevant state — their IQ test performance — or an ego-irrelevant state. A simple hypothesis based on motivated reasoning predicts asymmetric updating about signal redundancy and about the focal state only in the treatment with ego-relevance. We find qualified support for our hypothesis: participants generally underappreciate the extent to which identical signals are more likely to come from the same source (and thus contain redundant information), but the bias is significantly stronger for ego-favorable signals than for ego-unfavorable signals. This asymmetric effect disappears in the treatment where the focal state is ego-irrelevant. These results suggest that individuals may neglect the correlation between desirable signals to sustain motivated beliefs. However, the asymmetric updating effect on signal redundancy is not quantitatively large enough to generate significant asymmetric updating about the ego-relevant state (own IQ test performance). The third chapter studies the formation of misspecified mental models. Using a novel experimental approach that directly elicits individuals' mental models, we show that making choices can lead individuals to adopt models that exaggerate the importance of their choice variable for payoff-relevant outcomes. In other words, one key factor in the economic environment — the endowed ability to choose the value of a variable — can cause agents to form models that feature an outsized effect of that variable. We refer to the resulting belief distortions as choice-induced model distortions, which shed light on the formation of a large class of empirically observed misspecified models. We discuss the potential psychological mechanisms and economic consequences of choice-induced misspecified models
Essays on economic disadvantage
Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
Economics.

US homeowning households tend to be less geographically mobile than households that do not own a home. However, it is unknown whether the inducement to move from a legal process that makes foreclosure more likely on the margin can lead households to make beneficial moves even under adverse circumstances. In "Household Spatial Effects of Foreclosure Process" I link mortgage and foreclosure deeds and property characteristics with residential moves of US households and their neighborhood characteristics. Variation in the foreclosure process used across US states puts observably similar households at greater risk of foreclosure in those that follow a nonjudicial rather than judicial process. Using a spatial regression discontinuity design (RDD), I find that under a nonjudicial foreclosure process, households are more likely to be foreclosed (2 pp), to move out of their home (3 pp), and to undertake more distant moves (2 pp). Induced moves come not only from completed foreclosures but also from short sales. Households experience relatively greater increases in destination relative to origin tract median income ($1,000) and household income rank at age 29 of children who grew up there (0.5 percentile). Together these results suggest that any potential long-term negative effects of foreclosure on households are not driven by adverse changes in neighborhood characteristics. Overdraft and insufficient funds (NSF) fees comprise a majority of all checking account fees. They disproportionately fall on a small share of consumers, who tend to be younger and report lower incomes. Consumers overwhelmingly report overdrafts as mistakes, though a minority prefer they be allowed. "The Dynamics of Overdraft Fees and Incidence" studies the dynamics of overdraft/NSF fees in confidential supervisory data from several large banks representing over 20 million US checking accounts, observing every transaction over an 18-month period for a random sample of these accounts. Fixed-effects panel regressions recover within-person variation in overdraft/NSF fees as a function of account tenure and other time-varying characteristics. Our estimates imply that, for accounts opted into overdraft coverage, overdraft/NSF fees increase by about 20% over the first year of account ownership. We find no such effect for accounts opted out. We also present novel results on the relationship between within-person variation in overdraft/NSF activity and overdraft limit, linked and unlinked deposit and credit account balances, measures of account activity, and average daily balances. We find evidence of persistence in monthly overdraft/NSF fees even after controlling for account activity
Essays on emotions and economic decision making
Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
Economics.

My dissertation delves into the intricate interplay between emotions and decision-making within the field of economics. In Chapter 1, I explore the implications of empathy for income redistribution. I define empathy as the accurate simulation of how one would feel if they were in another's situation. When faced with a redistribution decision, the wealthy would feel guilty if they did not help the poor. In order to reduce such guilt, the wealthy may adopt beliefs that entail low empathy--i.e., they may systematically underestimate the value of incremental resources to the poor--in order to justify less redistribution. Understanding how individuals accurately encode their emotions within their reported beliefs is paramount for economists, as misconceptions in this realm can lead to incorrect inferences and misguided policy recommendations. In Chapter 2, jointly with James Andreoni and B. Douglas Bernheim, I explore whether individuals report their happiness accurately, and explain implications for the interpretation of happiness data. Emotions such as overconfidence, fear, and greed, may exert substantial influence on financial decision-making. In Chapter 3, jointly with Sandro Ambuehl and B. Douglas Bernheim, I study the magnitude of trading mistakes by US retail investors in a laboratory setting.
Essays on entrepreneurship and development economics
Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
Economics.

This dissertation studies various research questions concerning entrepreneurship in developing countries through a behavioral economics lens, using lab experiments, and having an element of a gender dimension. The first chapter explores whether aspiring entrepreneurs in Colombia make mistakes when estimating their odds of success consistent with behavioral biases. It finds evidence supporting the presence of biases leading to over-entry among the less prepared individuals. The second chapter studies the implications of a relatively lower or greater role of luck (when both luck and skill determine an outcome) on confidence in one's skill. The chapter finds evidence for over-confidence among both male and female Colombian entrepreneurs but to a greater extent among men. The chapter also finds evidence of both genders giving themselves the benefit of the doubt when luck matters more, and their outcome is low. The third chapter explores the validity of using personality tests when screening entrepreneurs and possible strategies for reducing response manipulations. The chapter finds that survey-takers do manipulate their answers to appear more entrepreneurial when incentivized, and the manipulations impact the scores' predictiveness of entrepreneurial talent and trustworthiness. The chapters overall provide insights into three dimensions that might affect aspiring entrepreneurs' outcomes
Essays on health economics
Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
Economics.

The chapters in this dissertation investigate how the design of public health insurance programs affects the behavior of individuals and whether absent the availability of formal insurance systems, individuals in a family act as informal insurance. The first chapter studies how Medicare and Medicaid -- the two largest public health insurance programs in the United States -- jointly shape patients' access to healthcare and healthcare spending. The second chapter examines how a major healthcare policy affected the working behavior of older populations. The third chapter characterizes the role of informal insurance channels within a family in mitigating the consequences of adverse health events on families
Essays on inequality of opportunities in education : policies and behavioral mechanisms
Keywords: Education.

It is generally accepted that education is a powerful enabler of social mobility in the modern world. However, access to quality and specialized education is still highly unequal, creating pathways for some groups of people and barriers to others. This dissertation explores three approaches to understanding and addressing inequalities of opportunity in three separate chapters. The first chapter examines the importance of test design, in particular the time limit component, as a driver of gender gaps in performance. The second chapter evaluates the potential of a growth mindset intervention for narrowing gender gaps in challenge-seeking and competitive behavior. The third chapter investigates the educational attainment and labor market outcomes of an affirmative action policy for college admission that targets low-income and underrepresented racial minorities. Respective results show that changing the time limit of a test may increase female representation in competitive programs, teaching growth mindset may help some women become more challenge-seeking and competitive, and that affirmative action can more than double the chances of black low-income students entering a prestigious career without negatively impacting the prospects of students displaced by the policy. In summary, these studies provide evidence that informs the potential of an institution, a practice, and a policy to open pathways for more equitable opportunities in education and the labor market
Essays on information and learning
Keywords: Business.

This dissertation investigates the value of information in different contexts. In chapter I, consumers have preferences over content categories which are not known to the content provider, and the content provider learns this information over time. I study the optimal learning strategy in this scenario. In chapter II, firms have knowledge about the quality of the products in the market while consumers observe this information imperfectly. Chapter II studies how the magnitude of consumer mistakes affects their welfare. In chapter III, a monopolist has information about the future payoff of a security, which he can sell to financial market investors. Chapter III explores how the market outcomes change under different regulatory policies
Essays on judicial selection and judicial behavior
Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
Political Science.

The last twenty years of research on judicial selection have produced three primary lines of research. The oldest of this scholarship examines how and when electoral pressures influence judicial behavior. Subsequent work expanded the focus to the four primary types of selection methods and considers how these processes may affect outcomes in certain case areas (e.g., abortion or capital punishment). Finally, recent work has zoomed out to the level of ideology and considers whether a given selection method produces particularly liberal or conservative judges. While each branch of the literature has produced high quality work, they also leave much to be explored. My dissertation addresses unanswered questions within these research traditions. The first paper examines the relationship between selection methods and ideological extremity; the second considers whether particular selection methods are associated with polarization; and the third addresses whether partisan elections produce cross-party behavioral convergence in death penalty cases. Collectively, these three projects deepen our understanding of the consequences of selection method choice
Essays on macroeconomics and housing markets
Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
Economics.

This dissertation contains three papers on the topics of macroeconomics and housing market. The first chapter quantifies the extent to which the US housing market is racially segmented. The second chapter, co-authored with Terry O'Malley and Fang Yao, studies how household consumption responds to persistent changes to income. The third chapter studies how household borrowing and regional house prices change in response to minimum downpayment and maximum loan-to-income regulations
Essays on minimum wage and immigration policy
Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
Economics.

This dissertation has three chapters. The first chapter provides causal evidence on the effect of implementing or increasing a wage floor (an occupation-specific minimum wage) on the wage difference between outsourced, insourced, and informal workers, the employment of outsourced and insourced workers, and the size of the informal labor market. To do so, I use matched employer-employee data from Brazil, focusing on the labor market for cleaning workers. Brazil has regional occupation-specific wage floors that increased in response to yearly federal minimum wage increases starting in 2000. I use this institutional context to implement a simulated instrument that predicts the regional wage floors based only on the federal minimum wage increase and the wage floor in 1999. Estimation results show that a wage floor increase decreases the outsourced wage penalty, which makes outsourced workers relatively more expensive than insourced workers, thus reducing outsourcing employment. Finally, I find no significant effect on informal worker employment and a reduction in the informal wage penalty. The second chapter characterizes the contribution of immigrants to US innovation. Leveraging new data, we use the age of SSN assignment to identify immigrant status. Immigrants represent 16 percent of inventors but authored 23 percent of patents. Immigrant inventors contribute to knowledge diffusion across borders. They disproportionately rely on foreign technologies and inventor collaborations, and are cited more abroad. Using variation from premature inventor deaths, we find immigrant inventors create stronger innovation productivity spillovers on their collaborators than US-born inventors. A simple model implies immigrants are responsible for 36 percent of aggregate innovation, two-thirds due to innovation externalities on US-born collaborators. Finally, the third chapter estimates if the large influx of immigrants to Brazil between 1870 and 1920 contributed to the decline in women's participation in manufacturing employment during the same period. To do so, I assemble a novel country-wide data set that covers employment by gender and industry for the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century in Brazil. I used a shift-share instrument similar to Card (2001) to estimate the causal effect. It predicts the influx of immigrants by assuming that immigrants of a specific nationality are more likely to settle in states with a large population from their home country. My results indicate that, counter-intuitively, the increase in immigration actually slowed down the decline in women's labor force participation in manufacturing
Essays on monetary policy and financial markets
Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
Economics.

This thesis studies the interaction of monetary policy and financial markets. The thesis examines the impact of monetary policy shocks on the cross-section of bond prices (e.g., government and corporate bonds). It also analyzes how monetary policy interacts with the portfolios of financial intermediaries and households. In the first chapter, Heterogeneous Intermediaries and Bond Characteristics in the Transmission of Monetary Policy, together Federic Holm-Hadulla, we study the transmission of monetary policy to the corporate bond market. We show that corporate bond purchases by the central bank give rise to credit spread shocks, whereas government bond purchases mainly cause term spread shocks. The yields of bonds held by different intermediaries respond heterogeneously to the two shocks because intermediaries systematically select different types of bonds. We explain these findings through the lens of a model of the fixed-income market with multiple risk factors. Insurance companies and pension funds select into assets with high interest-rate risk exposure to match their long-duration liabilities. The mutual fund sector instead absorbs securities that carry credit risk. Different policy tools affect the market prices of risk factors differentially, thereby redistributing risks across intermediary sectors and ultimately across the households investing in them. In the second chapter, Central Bank Communication and the Yield Curve, with Andrea Vedolin, Gyuri Venter, and Paul Whelan, we study the interaction between monetary policy and sovereign bonds in the Euro area. We argue that monetary policy in the form of central bank communication can shape long-term interest rates by changing risk premia. Using high-frequency movements of default-free rates and equity, we show that monetary policy communications by the ECB on regular announcement days led to a significant yield spread between peripheral and core countries during the European sovereign debt crisis by increasing credit risk premia. We also show that central bank communication has a powerful impact on the yield curve outside of regular monetary policy days. In the third chapter, Household Portfolios, Monetary Policy, and Asset Prices, together with Ciaran Rogers, we examine the role of the household portfolio rebalancing channel for the aggregate and redistributive effects of monetary policy. The transmission of monetary policy works not only through regular income and substitution motives but also through an endogenous portfolio rebalancing effect that generates changes in equilibrium asset prices and a subsequent wealth effect on consumption