arXiv preprints from January 1, 2026 through September 19, 2026 — 00:59:33 EST
Whatever the policy question under consideration, reasoned and realistic evaluation requires credible policy analysis under uncertainty. This holds particularly to the study of climate policy in the United States, where science and ideology have become increasingly entangled. Welfare economics provides a transparent formal framework...
Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) has moved from a novelty product to mainstream consumer finance in the space of a few years. Before 2020, BNPL was a niche offering at the checkouts of online fashion merchants. BNPL then experienced substantial growth (Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, 2022; Salem & Udis, 2025), coinciding with increased...
We recast statistical significance as a choice between making an immediate policy recommendation and deferring it until further evidence is collected. We show that the welfare-optimal decision corresponds, under minimax regret, to a statistical test whose level depends on the cost and precision of additional evidence. Inverting this...
In-group favouritism and out-group hostility are well-documented, but real-world group settings rarely fit a simple dichotomy. Often, a "middle-group" shares some identity markers with the in-group without fully belonging to it. How do people treat such intermediate groups? We address this question using a formal identity marker...
Whether artificial intelligence pays off for the firms that build it into their products is hard to establish, because AI innovation is itself hard to observe. The medical technology sector is a rare exception: an AI-enabled device must obtain clearance from a national health authority before it can reach a patient, leaving a dated,...
When social assistance is scarce, should it prioritize households in greatest need or those expected to benefit most? Using panel data from the China Household Finance Survey, we distinguish allocation principles by combining predicted policy gains with entry into China's Minimum Living Standard Guarantee (Dibao). We estimate...
Spatial treatments are interventions assigned to locations potentially distinct from those of the responding units. We study their optimal design under a general model in which a unit's response diminishes with distance to a treated site. Our estimand of interest is an ``uncontaminated'' effect equal to the average impact of a single...
Bouchaud and Farmer (2023) argue that self-fulfilling beliefs generate a realistic wealth distribution. Their reported Gini coefficient, quantiles, and Pareto exponent are computed from dynasty-level wealth averaged over 250 dates, not from a cross section. Correcting the estimand strengthens their qualitative result: with...
Heavy-tailed and skewed outcomes are common in the randomized experiments and observational studies used to estimate heterogeneous treatment effects, yet the mean-squared-error criterion that guides splitting in honest causal trees is sensitive to the extreme values they generate. Building on the causal forest framework (Athey and...
We study why organizations conduct interim performance reviews when monetary rewards are limited. An interim review creates incentive capacity by allowing future work and career opportunities to serve as rewards for past performance. Optimal review policies map a continuum of performance outcomes into a simple incentive ladder:...
This paper studies the intensity of priority violations in matching markets. An agent is said to have very justified envy if she prefers another agent's match to her own and her priority advantage for the object exceeds $k$ ranks. I show that unless $k$ is prohibitively large, Pareto efficiency is incompatible with the elimination of...
A/B tests are standard in firm decision making. In the standard pipeline, experimental data is converted to a deployment decision by applying a t-test of the difference in means (the lift) and deploying the treatment if lift is positive and statistically significant. This common workflow answers the wrong question. We argue that firms...
Generative AI has become an everyday advisor, and the systems people consult are live and interactive, not pre-scripted. We ask whether access to such a system changes behavior under risk. In an incentivized experiment (N = 158), participants made lottery choices with an optional decision aid presented as a conventional pre-written...
Estimating the first stage of an instrumental variables (IV) model with the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) requires choosing a dictionary of technical instruments and a penalty level. First-order asymptotic theory offers no guidance on these choices, as any consistent implementation yields a structural...
We review the evidence on subsidized job training programs in industrial countries. We provide critical, narrative summaries of randomized studies of major job training in the US; of two "judge randomization" studies in the US and Denmark; and of previous meta-analyses. We then perform a meta-analysis of 56 randomized trials of job...
Sign restrictions on the slopes of supply and demand curves are often used to identify historical decompositions in structural vector autoregressions. I show that the identifying power of these restrictions depends on both reduced-form parameters and realised forecast errors. Consequently, unlike many other structural objects, the...
Roughly fifty thousand families in England appeal their school assignments each year through a centralized and understudied procedure that improves the placement of about one in five claimants. This paper shows that appeals are not an institutional afterthought: they change how parents report preferences to the education authority and...
Although social mobility is widely viewed as desirable, we document an 'inverse-U' shaped relationship with well-being: mobility is positively associated with well-being when low, but the association diminishes as mobility increases and eventually becomes negative. To explain this, we build a model in which agents are embedded in a...
Heterogeneous-agent New Keynesian (HANK) models characterize how entire cross-sectional distributions respond to structural shocks. Traditional representative-agent models are routinely disciplined by impulse responses from aggregate vector autoregressions (VARs). HANK models have no comparable established empirical benchmark because...
We study voluntary disclosure when investors observe firm reports through noisy information intermediaries such as auditors, analysts, rating agencies, or data providers. Any processing noise overturns the standard prediction of a unique partial-disclosure equilibrium. With low disclosure costs, the model unravels to full disclosure...
We develop a filter for time series, defined at each time $t$ as the minimizer of a discounted convex combination of observed and expected losses. The filter can be estimated by simulation to an arbitrary level of accuracy in $O(1)$ flops at each time point $t$ and can be run for all values $t=1,...,T$ in parallel. These methods are...
This paper studies the effects of p-hacking on the bias of published estimates when papers with statistically significant results are selectively published. We show that fast p-hacking---actions that lead to large changes in p-values---always exacerbates the bias from selective publication. On the other hand, slow p-hacking---actions...
Creativity researchers often distinguish between two stages of the creative process: generation versus selection. While much is known about the psychology of idea generation (e.g., the factors that lead to a greater number of novel and useful ideas), less is understood about the nature of selection, or how generation and selection...
Measuring the intergenerational transmission of lifetime economic status is complicated by researchers often only observing snapshots of income at specific ages. Consequently, standard practice estimates intergenerational mobility using income averages, introducing life-cycle bias that compromises reliability and comparability across...
We represent a non-Bayesian agent as one who does not completely trust the information they receive. The behavioral expression of complete trust lies in a homogeneity property of Bayesian updating: posterior beliefs do not change if a signal is made arbitrarily rare by scaling down its likelihood vector. We show that simply dropping...