查看更多>>摘要：Understanding how the degree of information frictions varies among economic agents is of utmost importance for macroeconomic dynamics. We document and compare the frequency of forecast revisions and cross-sectional disagreement in inflation expectations among five categories of agents: households, firms, professional forecasters, policymakers and participants to laboratory experiments. First, we provide evidence of a heterogeneous frequency of forecast revisions across categories of agents, with policymakers revising more frequently their forecasts than firms and professional forecasters. Households revise less frequently. Second, all categories exhibit cross-sectional disagreement. There is however a strong heterogeneity: while policymakers and professional forecasters exhibit low disagreement, firms and households show strong disagreement. Our analysis suggests that the nature of information frictions is closer to noisy information model features. We also explore the external validity of experimental expectations.
查看更多>>摘要：Merit requirements in need-based student aid may exacerbate inequality in higher education but at the same time improve efficiency of aid expenditure by increasing on-time graduation, for instance. Disentangling the effect of the two building blocks of student aid ("need" and "merit") is therefore of key interest to policy makers. In this paper, we seek to estimate the causal effect of tightening the academic requirements embodied in need-based student aid on short-term and long-term student academic performance. This is done leveraging a reform in an Italian region that increased by 40% (i.e. from 25 to 35 out of a maximum of 60) the number of credits to be earned in the first academic year to maintain aid eligibility. Using administrative data from an Italian public university mainly offering STEM degrees, this study reveals that tightening merit requirements had a statistically significant, positive effect on various dimensions of performance of the "average" aid recipient. However, an analysis of treatment heterogeneity unveils winners and losers from the policy: the positive effects are indeed concentrated among higher and medium-ability students, while lower-ability students receiving financial assistance are discouraged from continuing in their studies.
查看更多>>摘要：We provide novel evidence on the effect of smartphone use on road accidents. We exploit variation in phone usage fees in the Netherlands following a change in European Union (EU) roaming regulations implemented in 2017. The growth rate of mobile data roaming increased substantially after the change, while vehicle kilometres travelled remained stable. This allows us to estimate a difference-in-differences model where non-Dutch drivers from the EU are treated, while Dutch drivers serve as control group. Our results suggest that around 10% of vehicles involved in accidents can be explained by the use of smartphones, and that these accidents mainly happen on urban roads.
查看更多>>摘要：Using proprietary data from a Chilean online job board, we compute sorting between workers and job positions during the application stage (ex ante) and predict sorting in the flow and stock of created matches (ex post) for different type measures. We find strong evidence for positive and procyclical correlations between workers and job types. Since ex ante and ex post sorting are very similar, we conclude that sorting is largely generated at the application stage. This suggests that theoretical models of sorting with directed search are a promising path for future research.
NSTL
Elsevier