American Economic Review 2024年 12月刊 目录与摘要

刊发卷期：Vol. 114, Issue 12

刊发时间：December 2024

期刊等级：ABS 4*

出版厂商：American Economic Association

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目录

1. Decisions under Risk Are Decisions under Complexity

Ryan Oprea

2. Curbing Leakage in Public Programs: Evidence from India's Direct Benefit Transfer Policy

Prabhat Barnwal

3. Aiming for the Goal: Contribution Dynamics of Crowdfunding

Joyee Deb, Aniko Öry, and Kevin R. Williams

4. Political Correctness, Social Image, and Information Transmission

Luca Braghieri

5. Loans for the "Little Fellow": Credit, Crisis, and Recovery in the Great Depression

Sarah Quincy

6. Beliefs in Repeated Games: An Experiment

Masaki Aoyagi, Guillaume R. Fréchette, and Sevgi Yuksel

7. The Real State: Inside the Congo's Traffic Police Agency

Raúl Sánchez de la Sierra, Kristof Titeca, Haoyang (Stan) Xie, Aimable Amani Lameke, and Albert Jolino Malukisa

8. Contamination Bias in Linear Regressions

Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, Peter Hull, and Michal Kolesár

9. Measuring Science: Performance Metrics and the Allocation of Talent

Sebastian Hager, Carlo Schwarz, and Fabian Waldinger

10. Bias and Sensitivity under Ambiguity

Zhen Huo, Marcelo Pedroni, and Guangyu Pei

摘要

1. Decisions under Risk Are Decisions under Complexity

Ryan Oprea

We provide evidence that classic lottery anomalies like probability weighting and loss aversion are not special phenomena of risk. They also arise (and often with equal strength) when subjects evaluate deterministic, positive monetary payments that have been disaggregated to resemble lotteries. Thus, we find, e.g., apparent probability weighting in settings without probabilities and loss aversion in settings without scope for loss. Across subjects, anomalies in these deterministic tasks strongly predict the same anomalies in lotteries. These findings suggest that much of the behavior motivating our most important behavioral theories of risk derive from complexity-driven mistakes rather than true risk preferences.

2. Curbing Leakage in Public Programs: Evidence from India's Direct Benefit Transfer Policy

Prabhat Barnwal

Targeted price subsidies create a gap between subsidized and unsubsidized prices. The resulting dual pricing can lead to arbitrage opportunities where intermediaries divert subsidized goods to unintended beneficiaries via the black market. I study India's Direct Benefit Transfer policy for cooking fuel subsidies, which altered the existing subsidy program by transferring subsidies directly to beneficiaries' bank accounts. The policy decreased subsidized fuel purchases, indicating a reduction in diversion to the black market. Changes in unsubsidized fuel sales and black market prices provide supporting evidence that leakage was reduced. These results suggest that addressing the underlying perverse incentives in welfare delivery can improve efficiency by curbing leakages.

3. Aiming for the Goal: Contribution Dynamics of Crowdfunding

Joyee Deb, Aniko Öry, and Kevin R. Williams

We study a dynamic contribution game where investors seek private benefits offered in exchange for contributions, and a single, publicly minded donor values project success. We show that donor contributions serve as costly signals that encourage socially productive contributions by investors who face a coordination problem. Investors and the donor prefer different equilibria, but all benefit in expectation from the donor's ability to dynamically signal his valuation. We explore various contexts in which our model can be applied and delve empirically into the case of Kickstarter. We calibrate our model and quantify the coordination benefits of dynamic signaling in counterfactuals.

4. Political Correctness, Social Image, and Information Transmission

Luca Braghieri

A prominent argument in the political correctness debate is that people feel pressure to publicly espouse sociopolitical views they do not privately hold, and that such misrepresentations might render public discourse less vibrant and informative. This paper formalizes the argument in terms of social image and evaluates it experimentally in the context of college campuses. The results show that (i) social image concerns drive a wedge between the sensitive sociopolitical attitudes that college students report in private and in public; (ii) public utterances are indeed less informative than private utterances; and (iii) information loss is exacerbated by (partial) audience naïveté.

5. Loans for the "Little Fellow": Credit, Crisis, and Recovery in the Great Depression

Sarah Quincy

This paper identifies how bank branching benefited local economies during the Great Depression. Using archival data and narrative evidence, I show how Bank of America's branch network in 1930s California created an internal capital market that diversified away local liquidity shortfalls, allowing the bank to maintain 49 percent higher credit growth from 1929 to 1933 than competing banks. The bank's presence mitigated cites' property value contractions and strengthened their recovery through 1940. Linked individual data show that the bank's proximity to workers hastened the transition from agricultural employment to human-capital–intensive sectors in the 1930s, generating structural change and higher wages.

6. Beliefs in Repeated Games: An Experiment

Masaki Aoyagi, Guillaume R. Fréchette, and Sevgi Yuksel

This paper uses a laboratory experiment to study beliefs and their relationship to action and strategy choices in finitely and indefinitely repeated prisoners' dilemma games. We find subjects' elicited beliefs about the other player's action are generally accurate despite some systematic deviations, and anticipate the evolution of behavior differently between the finite and indefinite games. We also use the elicited beliefs over actions to recover beliefs over supergame strategies played by the other player. We find these beliefs over strategies correctly capture the different classes of strategies played in each game, vary substantially across subjects, and rationalize their strategies.

7. The Real State: Inside the Congo's Traffic Police Agency

Raúl Sánchez de la Sierra, Kristof Titeca, Haoyang (Stan) Xie, Aimable Amani Lameke, and Albert Jolino Malukisa

This paper provides insight into a corruption scheme in Kinshasa's traffic police agency. First, various data collection branches show that the agency's revenue is five times that from fines and is derived from a coalition of traffic police officials, their managers, and judicial police officers scheming to extort drivers. Second, the analysis of an experiment suggests that the scheme subverts service. Third, the scheme appears to be a rational response to the context, but its logic is widespread. The findings suggest that coalitions of officials, while being socially costly, can yield large illicit revenue, nuancing the notion of state weakness.

8. Contamination Bias in Linear Regressions

Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, Peter Hull, and Michal Kolesár

We study regressions with multiple treatments and a set of controls that is flexible enough to purge omitted variable bias. We show these regressions generally fail to estimate convex averages of heterogeneous treatment effects—instead, estimates of each treatment's effect are contaminated by nonconvex averages of the effects of other treatments. We discuss three estimation approaches that avoid such contamination bias, including the targeting of easiest-to-estimate weighted average effects. A reanalysis of nine empirical applications finds economically and statistically meaningful contamination bias in observational studies; contamination bias in experimental studies is more limited due to smaller variability in propensity scores.

9. Measuring Science: Performance Metrics and the Allocation of Talent

Sebastian Hager, Carlo Schwarz, and Fabian Waldinger

We study how performance metrics affect the allocation of talent by exploiting the introduction of the first citation database in science. For technical reasons, it only covered citations from certain journals and years, creating quasi-random variation: some citations became visible, while others remained invisible. We identify the effects of citation metrics by comparing the predictiveness of visible to invisible citations. Citation metrics increased assortative matching between scientists and departments by reducing information frictions over geographic and intellectual distance. Highly cited scientists from lower-ranked departments ("hidden stars") and from minorities benefited more. Citation metrics also affected promotions and NSF grants, suggesting Matthew effects.

10. Bias and Sensitivity under Ambiguity

Zhen Huo, Marcelo Pedroni, and Guangyu Pei

This paper characterizes the effects of ambiguity aversion under dispersed information. The equilibrium outcome is observationally equivalent to a Bayesian forecast of the fundamental with increased sensitivity to signals and a pessimistic bias. This equivalence result takes a simple form that accommodates dynamic information and strategic interactions. Applying the result, we show that ambiguity aversion helps rationalize the joint empirical pattern between the bias and persistence of inflation forecasts conditional on household income. In a policy game à la Barro and Gordon (1983) with ambiguity-averse agents, the policy rule features higher average inflation and increased responsiveness to fundamentals.