Title: Meritocracy and Its Discontents: Long-run Effects of Repeated School Admission Reforms

Authors: Chiaki Moriguchi, Yusuke Narita, Mari Tanaka
Abstract: What happens if selective colleges change their admission policies? We study this question by analyzing the world's first implementation of nationally centralized meritocratic admissions in the early twentieth century. We find a persistent meritocracy-equity tradeoff. Compared to the decentralized system, the centralized system admitted more high-achievers and produced more occupational elites (such as top income earners) decades later in the labor market. This gain came at a distributional cost, however. Meritocratic centralization also increased the number of urban-born elites relative to rural-born ones, undermining equal access to higher education and career advancement.

Title: Transition Probabilities and Moment Restrictions in Dynamic Fixed Effects Logit Models

Title to be advised.

Title to be advised.

Title: Firm Premia in Pay vs. Amenities: Evidence from a Large-Scale Survey of Job Movers

Title: University-to-work transition and the quality of the work placement experience

Title: The Social Learning Barrier

Abstract: We consider long-lived agents who interact repeatedly in a social network. In each period, each agent learns about an unknown state by observing a private signal and her neighbors’ actions in the previous period before taking an action herself. Our main result shows that the learning rate of the slowest learning agent is bounded independently of the network size and structure and the agents’ strategies. This extends recent findings on equilibrium learning by demonstrating that the limitation stems from an inherent tradeoff between optimal action choices and information revelation, rather than strategic considerations. We complement this result by showing that a social planner can design strategies for which each agent learns faster than an isolated individual, provided the network is sufficiently large and strongly connected.

Link: http://brandlf.com/docs/network-learning.pdf

Title: Unity Makes Strength: Cohesion and Success Among Legislative Groups

Abstract: When does descriptive representation in a governing body lead to substantive benefits for a represented group? While advocates for racial, ethnic, and gender minority advancement often argue that increased representation automatically results in better outcomes, empirical evidence is mixed. I propose that a key factor influencing the effectiveness of these groups is their ability to coordinate. Using new data on roll call votes by state legislators from historically marginalized groups from 1996 to 2020, I reveal clear differences in cohesion among these groups, which impacts their capacity to provide social benefits. Furthermore, drawing on a natural experiment and qualitative interviews with current and former state legislators, I show that identity is not destiny in shaping these individuals' political behavior; rather, institutional design—and its capacity to shape members' incentives—is crucial.

Title to be advised.

Title to be advised.

Title: Memory Rehearsal and Belief Biases

Abstract: We rely on memory to form beliefs, but we also frequently revisit memories in conversation and private reflection. I show experimentally that such rehearsal of past experiences generates systematic belief biases. Participants are given a set of experiences and then randomized to have conversations about a subset of them, either ones that reflect well or poorly on them. Such rehearsal has large effects on which of the original experiences participants can recall a week later. Crucially, participants appear naive about rehearsal effects: they take what they remember at face value when later incentivized to form accurate beliefs about the full set of original experiences. Rehearsal therefore distorts not only future recall but also future beliefs. Participants also make rehearsal choices without regard to their later distortionary effects. Intrinsic preferences for thinking about certain experiences instead drive rehearsal choices and therefore belief biases: in particular, a preference to reflect on positive experiences unintentionally generates a positivity bias in future recall and beliefs. This mechanism provides a new non-strategic channel through which seemingly motivated beliefs arise and generates novel predictions in a range of economic domains.

Title to be advised.

Title to be advised.

Title: The Social Construction of Race after Emancipation: US Census Racial Assignment Based on Skin Tone, Wealth, and Literacy (joint with Anjali Adukia and Daniel Keniston)

Title to be advised.

Title to be advised.

Title to be advised.

Title: Pricing Novel Goods (joint work with Francesco Giovannoni)

The latest draft is available here: http://toomas.hinnosaar.net/novelgoods.pdf

Title to be advised.

The title of presentation will be: An experimental evaluation of the acceptability of meat taxes. Evidence from Denmark, Germany, Netherlands and the UK.

Short bio: Sanchayan Banerjee is an Associate Professor (Sr. Lecturer) in Economics and Public Policy at King’s College London. Before this, he was an Assistant Professor of Environmental Economics at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is a visiting fellow of the London School of Economics and Political Science and an affiliate of Amsterdam Sustainability Institute. His research focuses on developing citizen-oriented, participatory behavioural public policies and testing them in areas of food and energy policy, public health and charitable donations. He is an Editor of Behavioural Public Policy, an editorial member of Scientific Reports and PLOS One, and an Associated Editor of Humanities and Social Sciences Communications journals. He sits on the Steering Committee of the International Behavioural Public Policy Association. He is the founding chair and convener of Behavioural Transformations, an annual workshop of behavioural public policy for early career researchers. Sanchayan holds a PhD (2022) and MSc (2018) from the London School of Economics

Title to be advised.

Title: Set-valued control functionsLink opens in a new window(with Sukjin Han)

Title: International Sourcing, Domestic Labour Costs, and Producer Prices (joint with M. Zanardi, Sussex)

Title to be advised.

Title to be advised.

Title to be advised.

Title to be advised.

Title to be advised.