Recent iber_econ_oapdeposits items

Letter from the SIGecom Executive Committee

Wed, 8 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Letter from the SIGecom Executive Committee

Ending publication bias: A values-based approach to surface null and negative results

Fri, 3 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Sharing knowledge is a basic tenet of the scientific community, yet publication bias arising from the reluctance or inability to publish negative or null results remains a long-standing and deep-seated problem, albeit one that varies in severity between disciplines and study types. Recognizing that previous endeavors to address the issue have been fragmentary and largely unsuccessful, this Consensus View proposes concrete and concerted measures that major stakeholders can take to create and incentivize new pathways for publishing negative results. Funders, research institutions, publishers, learned societies, and the research community all have a role in making this an achievable norm that will buttress public trust in science.

Midlife cognitive testing in Africa: validity of the Harmonised Cognitive Assessment Protocol in the Kenya Life Panel Survey

Fri, 29 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

OBJECTIVES: Cohort studies of ageing and cognitive decline typically do not begin fielding comprehensive cognitive assessments until older adulthood. However, for identifying preventable dementia risk factors, there is strong value in beginning at earlier ages. The case is especially compelling in sub-Saharan Africa, where the number of older individuals is expected to triple in the next three decades, and where risk factors may operate more intensively at earlier ages. This study reports on the adaptation and validity of the Harmonised Cognitive Assessment Protocol (HCAP) approach in the Kenya Life Panel Survey (KLPS), collected among middle-aged respondents. DESIGN: To evaluate the validity of the HCAP approach in Kenya, this study assesses model fit statistics from confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) and tests measurement invariance by respondent characteristics. SETTING: Both rural and urban areas in Kenya. PARTICIPANTS: A sample of n=5878 individuals from the KLPS, who have...

Dynamic Concern for Misspecification

Thu, 28 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Dynamic Concern for Misspecification

Women, Wealth Effects, and Slow Recoveries

Fri, 1 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Business cycle recoveries have slowed in recent decades. This slowdown comes entirely from female employment, as women’s employment rates converged toward men’s during the past half-century. But does the slowdown in the growth of female employment rates translate into a slowdown for overall employment rates? We estimate the extent to which women “crowd out” men in the labor market across US states, and find that it is small. Through the lens of a general equilibrium model with home production, we show this statistic implies that 60-75 percent of the slowdown in recent business cycle recoveries can be explained by female convergence.(JEL D13, E24, E32, J16, J21)

Price and Choose

Thu, 19 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We describe a sequential mechanism that fully implements the set of efficient outcomes in environments with quasi-linear utilities. The mechanism asks agents to take turns in defining prices for each outcome, with a final player choosing an outcome for all: Price and Choose. The choice triggers a sequence of payments from each agent to the preceding agent. We present several extensions. First, payoff inequalities may be reduced by endogenizing the order of play. Second, our results extend to a model without quasi-linear utility, to a setting with an outside option, robustness to max-min behavior, and caps on prices. (JEL C72, D11, D44, D71, D82)

An experimental study of decentralized matching

Thu, 19 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We present an experimental study of decentralized two‐sided matching markets with no transfers. Experimental participants are informed of everyone's preferences and can make arbitrary nonbinding match offers that get finalized when a period of market inactivity has elapsed. Several insights emerge. First, stable outcomes are prevalent. Second, while centralized clearinghouses commonly aim at implementing extremal stable matchings, our decentralized markets most frequently culminate in the median stable matching. Third, preferences' cardinal representations impact the stable partners with whom participants match. Last, the dynamics underlying our results exhibit strategic sophistication, with agents successfully avoiding cycles of blocking pairs.

When Did Growth Begin? New Estimates of Productivity Growth in England from 1250 to 1870

Wed, 26 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Abstract: We estimate productivity growth in England from 1250 to 1870. Real wages over this period were heavily influenced by plague-induced swings in the population. Our estimates account for these Malthusian dynamics. We find that productivity growth was zero before 1600. Productivity growth began in 1600—almost a century before the Glorious Revolution. Thus, the onset of productivity growth preceded the bourgeois institutional reforms of seventeenth-century England. We estimate productivity growth of 2% per decade between 1600 and 1800, increasing to 5% per decade between 1810 and 1860. Much of the increase in output growth during the Industrial Revolution is explained by structural change—the falling importance of land in production—rather than faster productivity growth. Stagnant real wages in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—Engels’ Pause—is explained by rapid population growth putting downward pressure on real wages. Yet feedback from population...

Learning about the Long Run

Wed, 26 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Learning about the Long Run

Screening p-hackers: Dissemination noise as bait

Thu, 28 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

We show that adding noise before publishing data effectively screens [Formula: see text]-hacked findings: spurious explanations produced by fitting many statistical models (data mining). Noise creates "baits" that affect two types of researchers differently. Uninformed [Formula: see text]-hackers, who are fully ignorant of the true mechanism and engage in data mining, often fall for baits. Informed researchers, who start with an ex ante hypothesis, are minimally affected. We show that as the number of observations grows large, dissemination noise asymptotically achieves optimal screening. In a tractable special case where the informed researchers' theory can identify the true causal mechanism with very few data, we characterize the optimal level of dissemination noise and highlight the relevant trade-offs. Dissemination noise is a tool that statistical agencies currently use to protect privacy. We argue this existing practice can be repurposed to screen [Formula: see text]-hackers...

Transparency and Reproducibility: Potential Solutions