Abstract: I estimate the effect of being the best in the class} in the early years of schooling on future academic performance. I implement a novel methodology that does not require experimental data. My methodology exploits that some students are the best in the class because better students in the same school are assigned to…
The paper analyzes the interaction between individuals belonging to two distinct populations, who share the same strategy set but differ in their payoff matrices. A two-population evolutionary game describes this interaction, that presents a double dimension. On the one hand, agents in one population play a game against individuals within their own and also the…
We test the turnout predictions of the canonical costly voting model through a large-scale, real effort experiment. We recruit 1,200 participants through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and employ a 2 x 2 between subjects design encompassing small ( N = 30) and large ( N = 300) elections, as well as close and lopsided. As predicted,…
Abstract: Nudges, which are interventions that do not restrict choice, have become widespread in policy applications. I develop a general and tractable framework to analyze the welfare implications of nudges. In this framework, individuals suffer from internalities (their utility when choosing is different from their welfare-determining utility) and choice and welfare depend on the environment,…
Abstract: The consequences that educational underperformance has on both individuals and society as a whole lead policy makers and planners to focus on how to measure it properly. The aim of this paper is to propose an index to measure educational poverty which, taking as a starting point the economic literature on multidimensional poverty measurement,…
Abstract: Are connections to decision makers valuable? Do connections lead to better or worse decisions? And if they do, why is that? We set out to answer these questions by studying connections to the editorial board members of more than 100 economics and finance journals over the period 1990-2011. Departments double their publications in a journal when…
ABSTRACT. Temptation and self-control evolved as single mechanism to make humans behave against their own self-interest. I follow a recent literature in Economics on the evolution of preferences, by modeling the evolution of self-control in a principal-agent framework. The principal can obtain the first best asymptotically by biasing the utility of the agent (from which…
Abstract We consider two families of strategy-proof social choice functions based on the majority principle: extended majority voting rules on the universal domain of preferences over two alternatives and generalized median voter schemes on the domain of single-peaked preferences over a finite and linearly ordered set of alternatives. We characterize their respective subclasses of obviously…
Abstract: By using robustness methods we design HCRs that explicitly include scientific uncertainty. Under scientific uncertainty –when the perceived model can be generated by a nearby operating model– robust HCRs are designed assuming that the (inferred) operating model is more persistent than the perceived model. As a result, a robust HCR has a steeper ratio…
Abstract: El objetivo del seminario es analizar las condiciones de salud en la isla de Cerdeña entre la Unificación italiana y la década de 1920 y documentar la extrema pobreza que afectaba a una parte importante de su población. En este periodo se acentuaron las diferencias de la isla con el resto del país, lo…
