VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Essays in labor macroeconomics and monetary economics

This dissertation explores three questions in macroeconomics: two pertaining to labor macroeconomics and one concerning monetary economics. In the first chapter, I study the role wealth plays in workers' labor market outcomes and, in turn, how it impacts their earnings prospects over the business cycle. In the second chapter (joint with Basil Halperin) we investigate the optimal monetary policy in an sectoral economy with menu costs and find that the central bank should target constant nominal wages and not constant prices, as is typically prescribed. In the third and final chapter (joint with Aniket Baksy) we show that increased educational attainment played an important role in the decline in worker mobility in the US over the past three decades. This contrast with the existing literature, which attributes the decline to lower economic dynamism

Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
Economics.
Advisor: Auclert Adrien
Kehoe Patrick J.
Hall Robert E. (Robert Ernest)
Pastorino Elena
Essays in Macroeconomics

This thesis contains four chapters examining issues in macroeconomics. The first chapter proposes a simple explanation for the slowdown in the skill premium and the flatlining of the skilled labor share, that firms have adopted skill-replacing technologies in response to the rapidly rising skill premium of the 1980 to 2000 period. It provides a dynamic general equilibrium model that accounts for up to 60 percent of the slowdown of the skill premium relative to a no-technology-adoption counterfactual, and provides microeconomic evidence using a case study of accountants. The second chapter explores the macroeconomic consequences of zombie lending, a phenomenon where banks delay loss recognition to avoid having to contract credit to stay compliant with regulation. It constructs a novel general equilibrium model in which zombie lending allows banks to extend more credit than otherwise possible but also leads to misallocation of resources, finding that the latter effect dominates in the long run. The third chapter explores the relationship between economic policy uncertainty and elections, showing that the increase in policy uncertainty around elections is driven by close and polarized elections. The fourth chapter proposes a novel explanation for the long-run decline in worker mobility, based on higher college enrollment of young workers. The decline in worker mobility arises for two reasons: first, since young workers are the most rapid switchers, their withdrawal from the labor market reduces measured average worker mobility directly, and second, since young workers learn about the careers they are best suited for while in school, higher schooling leads to less job switching by workers who are poorly matched initially in the labor market

Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
Economics.
Advisor: Kehoe Patrick J.
Bloom Nick
Bocola Luigi
Pastorino Elena
Essays in macroeconomics

This dissertation in macroeconomics contains three chapters. The first chapter studies the cyclical competition for workers. The second chapter, joint with Adrien Auclert, Matthew Rognlie, and Ludwig Straub, studies exchange rates and monetary policy in a New Keynesian model with Heterogeneous Agents (HANK). The third chapter, joint with Aniket Baksy, evaluates the effects of 'Zombie lending', where banks lend to insolvent, unprofitable and unproductive firms, on aggregate consumption

Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
Economics.
Advisor: Auclert Adrien
Kehoe Patrick J.
Bocola Luigi
Pastorino Elena
Essays in macroeconomics and finance

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

Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
Economics.
Advisor: Auclert Adrien
Kehoe Patrick J.
Bocola Luigi
Di Tella Sebastian T.
Tonetti Christopher
Essays in political economy

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

Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
Political Science.
Advisor: Cox Gary W.
Hainmueller Jens
Hall Andrew B.
Essays in political methodology

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

Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
Political Science.
Advisor: Acharya Avidit
Hainmueller Jens
Grimmer Justin
Wager Stefan
Essays on belief formation

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

Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
Economics.
Advisor: Bernheim B. Douglas
Niederle Muriel
Gentzkow Matthew
Essays on economic disadvantage

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

Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
Economics.
Advisor: Chetty Raj
Diamond Rebecca (Of Stanford University. Graduate School of Business)
Mahoney Neale 
Sorkin Isaac
Essays on economic theory and its applications

Recent advances in mechanism design and information design have enhanced our theoretical understanding of incentives and strategic interactions. This dissertation applies these tools to derive empirical and policy implications. The dissertation considers three distinct, classical problems in economics---regulation of externalities, redistribution by public provision of goods, and welfare analysis of economic policies---and shows how new insights can be drawn from mechanism design and information design

Keywords: Business.
Advisor: Milgrom Paul R. (Paul Robert)
Skrzypacz Andrzej
Akbarpour Mohammad
Bulow Jeremy
Vasserman Shoshana
Essays on emotions and economic decision making

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.

Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
Economics.
Advisor: Bernheim B.
Jackson Matthew
Niederle Muriel
Essays on entrepreneurship and development 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

Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
Economics.
Advisor: Dupas Pascaline
Bernheim B. Douglas
Fafchamps Marcel
Essays on health 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

Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
Economics.
Advisor: Duggan Mark G. (Mark Gregory)
Einav Liran
Rossin-Slater Maya
Essays on inequality of opportunities in education : policies and behavioral mechanisms

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

Keywords: Education.
Advisor: Bettinger Eric
Dee Thomas S. (Thomas Sean)
Niederle Muriel
Essays on information and learning

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

Keywords: Business.
Advisor: Skrzypacz Andrzej
Akbarpour Mohammad
Kreps David M.
Essays on judicial selection and judicial behavior

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

Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
Political Science.
Advisor: Bonica Adam
Brady David W.
Cain Bruce E. 
Fiorina Morris P.
Iyengar Shanto
Essays on machine learning and empirical legal studies

This dissertation is a collection of essays using supervised machine learning to measure the prevalence of textualism in judicial opinions. The first essay compares my supervised machine-learning measures to existing natural language processing methods. The second and third essays explore what these measures tell us about the evolution of textualism in the federal courts of appeals and state supreme courts, respectively.

Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
Political Science.
Advisor: Bonica Adam
Cain Bruce
Nyarko Julian
Essays on macroeconomics and housing markets

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

Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
Economics.
Advisor: Piazzesi Monika
Schneider Martin (Professor of economics)
Pistaferri Luigi