Political Economy and Public Economics

Title: Random Choice and Differentiation

Authors: Junnan He and Paulo Natenzon

Abstract: Differentiation determines the comparability of different options and can be crucial to predict how choice architecture elicits behavioral responses. To facilitate the measurement of differentiation, we develop a flexible yet tractable model of random choice in a multi-attribute setting. We show the analyst can separately identify vertical and horizontal differentiation from binary comparison data alone. We characterize the binary choice rules that arise from our model using four easily understood postulates. In multinomial choice, we show that the intersection of our model with the classic random utility framework yields random coefficients with an elliptical distribution. We provide applications to consumer demand with differentiated products and to measuring the complexity faced by an agent in individual decision-making problems.

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Title: Living Large or Long? Preference Estimates from Completed-Life Stories (joint with Joshua Schwartzstein, Tomáš Jagelka, Amitabh Chandra)

The paper will not be ready for sharing prior to the seminar, an abstract is as follows:

———Extended Abstract ———

The value of a year of life plays a crucial role in informing policy decisions related to healthcare, the environment, innovation, and safety regulations. Given the significance of a life year’s value for policymaking, estimates should accurately reflect people’s preferences. Currently, estimates are derived from individuals’ observed choices involving small risks of death and monetary compensation, such as their willingness to take riskier jobs for higher pay. However, these estimates have significant limitations: individuals may not correctly perceive small risks, may deviate from rationality for choices involving small probabilities, and those making such choices, like soldiers or firefighters, represent a non-representative sample. Furthermore, unobserved job characteristics related to risk can bias these estimates. Our paper introduces an alternative method for estimating the value of a life year, attempting to overcome these limitations. We present a broadly representative sample of U.S. respondents with choices between pairs of “completed-life stories,” asking which life they would prefer for themselves. By randomizing lifetime earnings and ages of death in each story, we estimate how the probability of choosing a particular story increases with higher lifetime earnings versus a later age of death. We find that a 7% increase in lifetime earnings increases the choice probability as much as a 1% increase in longevity, implying a Life Year Value (LYV) elasticity of 7. Consequently, a typical individual with median earnings of $80,000 annually values an additional life year at age 80 as equivalent to receiving an additional $5,700 per year for all working years, totaling approximately $225,000 over their lifetime. We validate our estimates by demonstrating high test-retest reliability across survey waves and establishing their robustness through a series of specification checks and additional randomizations. Furthermore, we estimate markedly higher LYV elasticities for individuals whose subjective attitudes indicate that they place an above-average value on an additional life year. A key methodological advantage of our approach is that respondents engage in a natural task—assessing whether a life was desirable—which avoids triggering cultural or social norms about paying for life extension. Moreover, our method does not entail decisions under uncertainty, thereby avoiding many known behavioral biases. An important substantive advantage of our approach is that it allows us to estimate how the Life Year Value varies with respondent characteristics, age of death, and lifetime earnings in a broadly representative population. We find that the LYV increases with lifetime earnings and decreases with later life years. Even when holding constant lifetime earnings and age of death, there is notable heterogeneity in the LYV across individuals. This suggests that tailoring policies to individual preferences can result in welfare improvements.

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Title: Informational Roots of Support for Right-Wing Populists: Evidence from Argentina

Abstract: Support for populist and authoritarian regimes is rising worldwide, despite evidence that they tend to underperform economically. To examine the role of (mis)perceptions of regime performance as drivers of political attitudes, we conducted a survey experiment with 11,400 subjects during Argentina's 2023 presidential elections. At baseline, optimistic beliefs about the performance of populist and non-democratic regimes were widespread, and correlated with support for those regimes. When exposed to randomly assigned informational treatments challenging optimistic views about right-wing populism or autocracies, individuals significantly adjusted their beliefs and their support for candidates associated with populist and authoritarian regimes. We explore the impact of different information sources, showing that academic sources and newspapers are more influential than social media. Although individuals appear to adjust their beliefs and attitudes in response to credible information, we find that information countering people's beliefs reduces their demand for additional information on regime performance, consisted with an important role for motivated reasoning.

Title: The Role of Teaching and Scholarship Contracts in Higher Education: Reflections and Realities

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Title: Flora, Cosmos, Salvatio: Pre-modern Academic Institutions and the Spread of Ideas

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Title: Distributional treatment effect with latent rank invariance 

Draft of paper is here: https://myungkoushin.com/research/dtelri.pdf.

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Title: The impact of assessment design on student attainment: an empirical ivestigation across dimensions of equality, diversity and inclusion.

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