Economic Inquiry最新文献

Conventional wisdom suggests that competition in the modern digital environment pushes media outlets toward the early release of less accurate information. We show that this is not necessarily the case. Two opposing forces determine the resolution of the speed-accuracy tradeoff: preemption and reputation. Although competition exacerbates preemption concerns, it provides additional information to the audience by allowing them to compare publication times. Hence, more competitive environments may be more conducive to reputation building, which may lead to better reporting. However, we show that the audience may be worse off due to the outlets' better initial information.

This paper analyzes paternalistic capital subsidy policies to tackle the undersaving issue among present-biased consumers with varying levels of naivete. We demonstrate that age-independent subsidy policies achieve optimal savings for sophisticated consumers but only secondary outcomes for naive ones. As naivete intensifies, lower capital subsidy rates are required, despite naive consumers' higher undersaving tendencies in the absence of policy interventions. Increasing the capital subsidy rate for naive consumers can correct short-term present bias but distorts long-term savings, as they misinterpret such policy nudges as unnecessary in the future due to ignorance of future present bias.

This paper examines the economic impact of uncertainty surrounding U.S. regulatory policies of the energy sector. We first construct a monthly-frequency measure of regulatory uncertainty related to oil and gas production using natural language processing on over 600,000 U.S. newspaper articles published from 1985 to 2021. We then conduct empirical analysis via structural VAR models with the constructed oil regulatory uncertainty index, oil market variables, and aggregate economic data. The impulse response functions suggest that an increase in oil regulatory uncertainty reduces oil production and drilling activity and negatively affects national and state-level economic outcomes.

Social cooperation often requires individuals to exhibit restraint for the greater good, incurring costs for maintaining public goods or establishing them through generosity. Will cooperative behaviors differ between maintenance and provision dilemmas? We replicate findings showing that low cooperation is more likely in maintenance than provision scenarios among a non-student sample with reciprocity being the main reason behind cooperative differences. A separate experiment reports similar effects in the case of income inequality, also suggesting dilemma-specific reciprocity is vital in averting the 'tragedy of the commons'. Our findings reinforce and broaden previous conclusions in the literature.

We conduct a laboratory experiment to explore how benefit-eligibility stigma drives subsequent decisions to enter competition. We induce a stigma associated with a low-status benefit and then introduce “plausible deniability” to reduce this stigma by expanding benefit eligibility to a middle-status group. When newly-eligible individuals qualify for the benefit, their rate of entry into a subsequent and unrelated tournament is reduced by 17–20 percentage points compared to the treatment in which they do not qualify. A potential interpretation of our results would suggest expanding for certain government assistance programs may produce unintended consequences for the newly eligible.

Why do peers influence people's choices? Is it for information (social learning) or for socializing (social utility)? Exploiting unique data and natural experiments from the United States Naval Academy (USNA), we analyze data on major selections of USNA students. We find peers influence students into selecting different academic paths than they would have chosen independently. Through random reassignments, “shot-guns”, of students into new peer groups along with random assignments into courses, we explore the reasons why herding occurs. Evidence suggests that social learning, as opposed to social utility, is an important driver for herding behavior.

This paper investigates whether interconnectivity among local housing markets influences the effectiveness of the (United States) U.S. monetary transmission mechanism. We construct measures of housing market connectedness and employ a state-dependent local projection method to estimate nonlinear impulse responses of macroeconomic variables to monetary policy (MP) shocks. The findings show that MP has a greater impact when regional housing markets are more synchronized. Higher interconnectivity amplifies spillover effects across local markets, enhancing MP effectiveness. Additionally, we find that MP is particularly effective when highly connected states experience economic expansion.

This study replicates and extends Baker and Wurgler's (2006) analysis on investor sentiment's impact on stock returns. We confirm their findings by demonstrating the significant cross-sectional effect of sentiment in both their original sample (1963–2002) and a new sample (2002–2023). Expanding the scope, we introduce a monthly sentiment measure and analyze the U.S. market (2002–2023) and the Chinese market. Our results show that the predictive strength of sentiment indicators can shift or invert over time. In the Chinese market, sentiment's expected cross-sectional effects disappear when foundational conditions, such as stock valuation variance, are not met.

Using enrollment lotteries for over-subscribed school-based sites in Georgia's universal pre-K program, we analyze the impact of participation on elementary school outcomes. We find that lottery-winning school-based Georgia Pre-K enrollees enter kindergarten more prepared in both math and reading than non-winning peers. Gains fade by the end of kindergarten, and some negative achievement effects emerge by grade 4. Free-and-reduced-price meal (FRPM) students benefit more compared to non-FRPM students in later grades, suggesting greater benefits from attendance for disadvantaged students. Although we found no effects on discipline, school-based pre-K enrollees had one fewer absence each grade after kindergarten.