Economics
This article proposes predictive economics as a distinct analytical perspective within economics, grounded in machine learning and centred on predictive accuracy rather than causal identification. Drawing on the instrumentalist tradition…
In this paper, I investigate the 2017 labor market reform in Benin, which reduced firing costs and allowed firms to renew short-term contracts indefinitely. Using micro-data from the Harmonized Household Living Standards Surveys and a…
Vaccines play a crucial role in the prevention and control of infectious diseases. However, the vaccine supply chain faces numerous challenges that hinder its efficiency. To address these challenges and enhance public health outcomes, many…
This paper evaluates the causal effect of the access to Benin's free cesarean section policy on females and their children. I use a large sample of Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) for West African countries and analyze how the…
We introduce a new cost function over experiments, f-information, based on the theory of multivariate statistical divergences, that generalizes Sims's classic model of rational inattention as well as the class of posterior-separable cost…
For many students, placement into developmental education becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Placing college students into developmental education significantly negatively impacts student attainment, student probability of passing, and…
This paper investigates whether the decoy effect - specifically the attraction effect - can foster cooperation in social networks. In a lab experiment, we show that introducing a dominated option increases the selection of the target…
We study a recommendation system where sellers compete for visibility by strategically offering commissions to a platform that optimally curates a ranked menu of items and their respective prices for each customer. Customers interact…
We study public persuasion when a sender communicates with a large audience that can fact-check at heterogeneous costs. The sender commits to a public information policy before the state is realized, but any verifiable claim she makes after…
Natural experiments are a cornerstone of applied economics, providing settings for estimating causal effects with a compelling argument for treatment randomisation, but give little indication of the mechanisms behind causal effects. Causal…
We examine optimal regulation of financial networks with debt interdependencies between financial firms. We first show that firms often have an incentive to choose excessively risky portfolios and overly correlate their portfolios with…
Information criteria (IC) have been widely used in factor models to estimate an unknown number of latent factors. It has recently been shown that IC perform well in Common Correlated Effects (CCE) and related setups in selecting a set of…
In this paper, we introduce a novel equilibrium concept, called the equilibrium cycle, which seeks to capture the outcome of oscillatory game dynamics. Unlike the (pure) Nash equilibrium, which defines a fixed point of mutual best…
Economists often estimate causal effects of policies on multiple outcomes and summarize them into scalar measures of cost-effectiveness or welfare, such as the Marginal Value of Public Funds (MVPF). In many settings, microdata underlying…
Conventional cluster-robust inference can be invalid when data contain clusters of unignorably large size. We formalize this issue by deriving a necessary and sufficient condition for its validity, and show that this condition is frequently…
The random utility model, a cornerstone in economics, is axiomatized by Falmagne (1978) and McFadden and Richter (1990) with the assumption that if a menu is observable, the choice frequencies of all alternatives are also observable.…
In the literature on nonlinear cointegration, a long-standing open problem relates to how a (nonlinear) vector autoregression, which provides a unified description of the short- and long-run dynamics of a vector of time series, can generate…
We propose confidence regions for the parameters of incomplete models with exact coverage of the true parameter in finite samples. Our confidence region inverts a test, which generalizes Monte Carlo tests to incomplete models. The test…
In an infinitely repeated general-sum pricing game, independent reinforcement learners may exhibit collusive behavior without any communication, raising concerns about algorithmic collusion. To better understand the learning dynamics, we…
We propose novel methods for change-point testing for nonparametric estimators of expected shortfall and related risk measures in weakly dependent time series. We can detect general multiple structural changes in the tails of marginal…