Related papers: Institutions and China's comparative development
Toward explaining the persistence of biased inferences, we propose a framework to evaluate competing (mis)specifications in strategic settings. Agents with heterogeneous (mis)specifications coexist and draw Bayesian inferences about their…
We analyze the implications of transboundary pollution externalities on environmental policymaking in a spatial and finite time horizon setting. We focus on a simple regional optimal pollution control problem in order to compare the global…
This expository paper discusses Bayesian decision analysis perspectives on problems of constrained forecasting. Foundational and pedagogic discussion contrasts decision analytic approaches with the traditional, but typically inappropriate,…
Numerous urban indicators scale with population in a power law across cities, but whether the cross-sectional scaling law is applicable to the temporal growth of individual cities is unclear. Here we first find two paradoxical scaling…
Observational studies of causal effects require adjustment for confounding factors. In the tabular setting, where these factors are well-defined, separate random variables, the effect of confounding is well understood. However, in public…
Epidemic models study the spread of an undesired agent through a population, be it infectious diseases through a country, misinformation in online social media, or pests infesting a region. In combating these epidemics, we rely neither on…
Understanding the statistical dynamics of growth and inequality is a fundamental challenge to ecology and society. Recent analyses of wealth and income dynamics in contemporary societies show that economic inequality is very dynamic and…
Determining policy priorities is a challenging task for any government because there may be, for example, a multiplicity of objectives to be simultaneously attained, a multidimensional policy space to be explored, inefficiencies in the…
Using data from the Web of Science (WoS), we analyze the mutual information among university, industrial, and governmental addresses (U-I-G) at the country level for a number of countries. The dynamic evolution of the Triple Helix can thus…
Although wage inequality has evolved in advanced countries over recent decades, it remains unknown the extent to which changes in wage inequality and their differences across countries are attributable to specific capital and labor…
Transport infrastructure systems operate in, and are shaped by, the specific context in which they are expected to perform and contribute to the system-of-systems that support civilised life; they must strive to be sustainable and…
We consider the problem of estimating causal effects of interventions from observational data when well-known back-door and front-door adjustments are not applicable. We show that when an identifiable causal effect is subject to an implicit…
We use a controlled laboratory experiment to study the causal impact of income decreases within a time period on redistribution decisions at the end of that period, in an environment where we keep fixed the sum of incomes over the period.…
This paper develops a simple two-stage variational Bayesian algorithm to estimate panel spatial autoregressive models, where N, the number of cross-sectional units, is much larger than T, the number of time periods without restricting the…
Methods that rely on proxies, without imposing strong parametric structure, are increasingly used to deal with unobserved variables in causal inference. One influential line of this work reconstructs latent distributions used to identify…
Why do maladaptive perceptions and norms, such as zero-sum interpretations of interaction, persist even when they undermine cooperation and investment? We develop a framework where bounded rationality and heterogeneous cognitive biases…
There are several theories in economics regarding the roots or causes of prosperity in a society. One of these theories or hypotheses -- named geography hypothesis -- mentions that the reason why some countries are prosperous and some…
Drawing on work spanning economics, public health, education, sociology, and law, I formalize theoretically what makes systemic discrimination "systemic." Injustices do not occur in isolation, but within a complex system of interdependent…
This study investigates the relationship between innovation activities and firm-level productivity among early-stage high-tech startups in China. Using a proprietary dataset encompassing patent records, R&D expenditures, capital valuation,…
Many previous causal inference studies require no interference, that is, the potential outcomes of a unit do not depend on the treatments of other units. However, this no-interference assumption becomes unreasonable when a unit interacts…