Related papers: Credit and Voting
Connections appear to be helpful in many contexts, such as obtaining a job, a promotion, a grant, a loan, or publishing a paper. This may be due either to favoritism or to information conveyed by connections. Attempts at identifying both…
A recently proposed graph-theoretic metric, the influence gap, has shown to be a reliable predictor of the effect of social influence in two-party elections, albeit only tested on regular and scale-free graphs. Here, we investigate whether…
We compare two scenarios in a model where politicians offer local public goods to heterogeneous voters: one where politicians have access to data on voters and thus can target specific ones, and another where politicians only decide on the…
We study the associations between everyday economic decision-making quality and people's emotional states. Using high-frequency, highly disaggregated consumer "scanner" data, we show that the cost of poor decision-making is substantial, on…
Consider the the problem of maximizing the relative social welfare of truthful single-winner voting schemes with cardinal preferences compared to the classical range voting scheme. The range voting scheme is a simple and straightforward…
Politicians world-wide frequently promise a better life for their citizens. We find that the probability that a country will increase its {\it per capita} GDP ({\it gdp}) rank within a decade follows an exponential distribution with decay…
Empirical evidence suggests that the rich have higher propensity to save than do the poor. While this observation may appear to contradict the homotheticity of preferences, we theoretically show that that is not the case. Specifically, we…
This paper provides the first causal evidence that credit supply expansion caused the 1999-2010 U.S. business cycle mainly through the channel of household leverage (debt-to-income ratio). Specifically, induced by net export growth, credit…
We use causal inference to study how designing ballots with and without party designations impacts electoral outcomes when partisan voters rely on party-order cues to infer candidate affiliation in races without designations. If the party…
Political affiliation has emerged as a potential risk factor for COVID-19, amid evidence that Republican-leaning counties have had higher COVID-19 death rates than Democrat-leaning counties and evidence of a link between political party…
The question of how to best serve the student populations of our country is a complex topic. Since public funding is limited, we must explore the best ways to direct the money to improve student outcomes. Previous research has suggested…
The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) was the largest targeted business support program in the United States, yet its firm-level effects remain contested. I link administrative PPP and SBA 7(a) records to a near-universe panel of U.S.…
A key promise of democratic voting is that, by accounting for all constituents' preferences, it produces decisions that benefit the constituency overall. It is alarming, then, that all deterministic voting rules have unbounded distortion:…
In the context of computational social choice, we study voting methods that assign a set of winners to each profile of voter preferences. A voting method satisfies the property of positive involvement (PI) if for any election in which a…
People's privacy sentiments influence changes in legislation as well as technology design and use. While single-point-in-time investigations of privacy sentiment offer useful insight, study of people's privacy sentiments over time is also…
This paper proposes a new measure of relative intergenerational mobility along the educational trait as a proxy of inequality of opportunity. The new measure is more suitable for controlling for the variations in the trait distributions of…
We examine the effects of introducing a political outsider to the nomination process leading to an election. To this end, we develop a sequential game where politicians -- insiders and outsiders -- make a platform offer to a party, and…
Much of the theoretical work on strategic voting makes strong assumptions about what voters know about the voting situation. A strategizing voter is typically assumed to know how other voters will vote and to know the rules of the voting…
Adjustments to public health policy are common. This paper investigates the impact of COVID-19 policy ambiguity on specific groups' insurance consumption. The results show that sensitive groups' willingness to pay (WTP) for insurance is…
In an election in which each voter ranks all of the candidates, we consider the head-to-head results between each pair of candidates and form a labeled directed graph, called the margin graph, which contains the margin of victory of each…