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- August 5, 2025
- Article
Data-driven Equation Discovery Reveals Nonlinear Reinforcement Learning in Humans
By: Kyle J. LaFollette, Janni Yuval, Roey Schurr, David Melnikoff and Amit Goldenberg
Computational models of reinforcement learning (RL) have significantly contributed to our understanding of human behavior and decision-making. Traditional RL models, however, often adopt a linear approach to updating reward expectations, potentially oversimplifying the... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Emotional Manipulation by AI Companions
By: Julian De Freitas, Zeliha Oğuz-Uğuralp and Ahmet Kaan-Uğuralp
AI-companion apps such as Replika, Chai, and Character.ai promise relational benefits—yet many boast session lengths that rival gaming platforms while suffering high long-run churn. What conversational design features increase consumer engagement, and what trade-offs... View Details
- 2025
- Article
Difference-in-Differences Subset Scan
By: Will Stamey, Sriram Somanchi and Edward McFowland III
Difference-in-differences (DiD) has been extensively applied in the literature to elicit the average causal effect of an intervention or policy. Though researchers explore heterogeneity in the treatment effect with respect to time or some observed covariate (usually... View Details
- Article
Faith and Assimilation: Italian Immigrants in the U.S.
By: Stefano Gagliarducci and Marco Tabellini
How do ethnic religious organizations influence immigrant assimilation? To answer this question, we assemble novel data from the Catholic directories to measure the presence of Italian Catholic churches in the US between 1890 and 1920, when four million Italians moved... View Details
- July 2025
- Article
Economic Integration and the Transmission of Democracy
By: Marco Tabellini and Giacomo Magistretti
In this paper, we study the effects of economic integration with democratic partners on democracy. We assemble a large country-level panel dataset from 1960 to 2015, and exploit improvements in air, relative to sea, transportation to derive a time-varying instrument... View Details
- July 2025
- Article
On the Economic Origins of Concerns Over Women’s Chastity
By: Anke Becker
This paper studies the origins and function of customs and norms that intend to keep women from being promiscuous. Using large-scale survey data from more than 100 countries, I test the anthropological theory that a particular form of preindustrial... View Details
- Working Paper
Shifting Work Patterns with Generative AI
By: Eleanor W. Dillon, Sonia Jaffe, Nicole Immorlica and Christopher T. Stanton
We present evidence on how generative AI changes the work patterns of knowledge workers using
data from a 6-month-long, cross-industry, randomized field experiment. Half of the 7,137 workers
in the study received access to a generative AI tool integrated into the... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Race, Rental Yields, and Housing Decay in Manhattan
By: Tom Nicholas and Christophe Spaenjers
We develop a new dataset on real estate transactions in Manhattan (1912–1939), linked to federal Census records (1930 and 1940) and property images used for tax assessment purposes (around 1940 and 1980). We analyze investor returns and incentives to maintain... View Details
- April 2025
- Article
The Disappearing Index Effect
By: Robin Greenwood and Marco Sammon
The abnormal return associated with a stock being added to the S&P 500 has fallen from an average
of 7.4% in the 1990s to 0.3% over the past decade. This has occurred despite a significant increase in the
share of stock market assets linked to the index. A similar... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
The Hidden Costs of Flexible Labor Models: How Working Multiple Jobs Affects Employees
By: Paige Tsai and Ryan W. Buell
As operations increasingly rely upon flexible labor models—such as gig, part-time, and remote work—it has become commonplace for individuals to work multiple jobs. Across three studies, relying on a combination of transaction-level data from 90,548 customers of a... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Causes and Extent of Increasing Partisan Segregation in the U.S. – Evidence from Migration Patterns of 212 Million Voters
By: Jacob R. Brown, Enrico Cantoni, Vincent Pons and Emilie Sartre
Using data on the residential location and migration for every voter in U.S. states recording partisan registration between 2008–2020, we find that residential segregation between Democrats and Republicans has increased year over year at all geographic levels, from... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Markups and Cost Pass-through Along the Supply Chain
By: Santiago Alvarez-Blaser, Alberto Cavallo, Alexander MacKay and Paolo Mengano
We study markups and pricing strategies along the supply chain. Our unique dataset combines detailed price and cost information from a large global manufacturer with matched retail prices collected online for the period July 2018 through June 2023. We show that total... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Patent Hunters
By: Lauren Cohen, Umit Gurun, Katie Moon and Paula Suh
Analyzing millions of patents granted by the USPTO between 1976 and 2020, we find a pattern where specific patents only rise to prominence after considerable time has passed. Amongst these late-blooming influential patents, we show that there are key players (patent... View Details
- August 2024
- Article
Partisans neither Expect nor Receive Reputational Rewards for Sharing Falsehoods over Truth Online.
By: Isaias Ghezae, Jillian J. Jordan, Izzy Gainsburg, Mohsen Mosleh, Gordon Pennycook, Robb Willer and David Rand
A frequently invoked explanation for the sharing of false over true political information is that partisans are motivated by their reputations. In particular, it is often argued that by indiscriminately sharing news that is favorable to one’s political party,... View Details
- July 2024
- Article
Demographic 'Stickiness': The Demographic Identity of Departing Group Members Influences Who Is Chosen to Replace Them
By: Edward H. Chang and Erika Kirgios
People tasked with replacing a departing group member are disproportionately likely to choose a replacement with the same demographic identity, leading to demographic “stickiness” in group composition. We examine this effect in 2,163 U.S. federal judge appointments... View Details
- July 2024
- Article
JUE Insight: Infrastructure and Finance: Evidence from India's GQ Highway Network
By: Abhiman Das, Ejaz Ghani, Arti Grover, William Kerr and Ramana Nanda
We use data from Reserve Bank of India to study the impact of India's Golden Quadrilateral (GQ) highway project on finance-dependent activity. Loan volumes increase by 20-30% in districts along GQ and are stronger in industries more dependent upon external finance.... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
The Golden Revolving Door
By: Ling Cen, Lauren Cohen, Jing Wu and Fan Zhang
Using both the onset of the US-China trade war in 2018 and the most recent Russia-Ukraine war and associated trade tensions, we show a counterintuitive pattern in global trade. Namely, while the average firm trading with these nations significantly decreases their... View Details
- June, 2024
- Book Review
Debunking Immigration Myths: A Review Essay of 'Streets of Gold: America’s Untold Story of Immigrant Success' (PublicAffairs, 2022) by Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan
By: Marco Tabellini
This essay reviews Streets of Gold: America’s Untold Story of Immigrant Success by Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan. This elegantly written book, highly accessible to both economists and non-economists, is a must-read for anyone interested in the topic of... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Health, Human Capital Development and the Longevity of Japanese Elites Since 710
By: Tom Nicholas and Hiroshi Shimizu
We examine the lifespan of over 40,000 elites in Japan born between 710 and 1912, including samurai warriors, feudal lords, business, political, cultural, and religious leaders at the apex of the social hierarchy. Japanese elites experienced increases in lifespan about... View Details
- June 2024
- Article
Inflation with COVID Consumption Baskets
By: Alberto Cavallo
The Covid-19 pandemic led to changes in expenditure patterns that introduced significant bias in the measurement of Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation. Using publicly-available data on card transactions, I updated the official CPI weights and re-calculated inflation... View Details