Department of Economics

[No abstract]

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)

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 growth to real wages is sufficiently weak to permit sustained deviations from the “iron law of wages” prior to the Industrial Revolution.

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.

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 and thus improve research credibility.

We study how human capital and economic conditions causally affect the choice of religious denomination. We utilize a longitudinal dataset monitoring the religious history of more than 5,000 Kenyans over twenty years, in tandem with a randomized experiment (deworming) that has exogenously boosted education and living standards. The main finding is that the program reduces the likelihood of membership in a Pentecostal denomination up to 20 years later when respondents are in their mid-thirties, while there is a comparable increase in membership in traditional Christian denominations. The effect is concentrated and statistically significant among a sub-group of participants who benefited most from the program in terms of increased education and income. The effects are unlikely due to increased secularization, because the program does not reduce measures of religiosity. The results help explain why the global growth of the Pentecostal movement, sometimes described a "New Reformation", is centered in low-income communities.

This article reviews and summarizes current reproduction and replication practices in political science. We first provide definitions for reproducibility and replicability. We then review data availability policies for 28 leading political science journals and present the results from a survey of editors about their willingness to publish comments and replications. We discuss new initiatives that seek to promote and generate high-quality reproductions and replications. Finally, we make the case for standards and practices that may help increase data availability, reproducibility, and replicability in political science.