To paint a fuller picture of economic voters, we combine personal income records with a representative election survey. We examine three central topics in the economic voting literature: pocketbook ...versus sociotropic voting, the effects of partisanship on economic evaluations, and voter myopia. First, we show that voters who appear in survey data to be voting based on the national economy are, in fact, voting equally on the basis of their personal financial conditions. Second, there is strong evidence of both partisan bias and economic information in economic evaluations, but personal economic data is required to separate the two. Third, although in experiments and aggregate historical data recent economic conditions appear to drive vote choice, we find no evidence of myopia when we examine actual personal economic data.
Uncertainty is an inherent part of knowledge, and yet in an era of contested expertise, many shy away from openly communicating their uncertainty about what they know, fearful of their audience's ...reaction. But what effect does communication of such epistemic uncertainty have? Empirical research is widely scattered across many disciplines. This interdisciplinary review structures and summarizes current practice and research across domains, combining a statistical and psychological perspective. This informs a framework for uncertainty communication in which we identify three objects of uncertainty-facts, numbers and science-and two levels of uncertainty: direct and indirect. An examination of current practices provides a scale of nine expressions of direct uncertainty. We discuss attempts to codify indirect uncertainty in terms of quality of the underlying evidence. We review the limited literature about the effects of communicating epistemic uncertainty on cognition, affect, trust and decision-making. While there is some evidence that communicating epistemic uncertainty does not necessarily affect audiences negatively, impact can vary between individuals and communication formats. Case studies in economic statistics and climate change illustrate our framework in action. We conclude with advice to guide both communicators and future researchers in this important but so far rather neglected field.
Bitcoin: Economics, Technology, and Governance Böhme, Rainer; Christin, Nicolas; Edelman, Benjamin ...
The Journal of economic perspectives,
04/2015, Letnik:
29, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Bitcoin is an online communication protocol that facilitates the use of a virtual currency, including electronic payments. Bitcoin's rules were designed by engineers with no apparent influence from ...lawyers or regulators. Bitcoin is built on a transaction log that is distributed across a network of participating computers. It includes mechanisms to reward honest participation, to bootstrap acceptance by early adopters, and to guard against concentrations of power. Bitcoin's design allows for irreversible transactions, a prescribed path of money creation over time, and a public transaction history. Anyone can create a Bitcoin account, without charge and without any centralized vetting procedure—or even a requirement to provide a real name. Collectively, these rules yield a system that is understood to be more flexible, more private, and less amenable to regulatory oversight than other forms of payment—though as we discuss, all these benefits face important limits. Bitcoin is of interest to economists as a virtual currency with potential to disrupt existing payment systems and perhaps even monetary systems. This article presents the platform's design principles and properties for a nontechnical audience; reviews its past, present, and future uses; and points out risks and regulatory issues as Bitcoin interacts with the conventional financial system and the real economy.
This paper undertakes an assessment of a rapidly growing body of economic research on financial literacy. We start with an overview of theoretical research, which casts financial knowledge as a form ...of investment in human capital. Endogenizing financial knowledge has important implications for welfare, as well as policies intended to enhance levels of financial knowledge in the larger population. Next, we draw on recent surveys to establish how much (or how little) people know and identify the least financially savvy population subgroups. This is followed by an examination of the impact of financial literacy on economic decision making in the United States and elsewhere. While the literature is still young, conclusions may be drawn about the effects and consequences of financial illiteracy and what works to remedy these gaps. A final section offers thoughts on what remains to be learned if researchers are to better inform theoretical and empirical models as well as public policy.
Developing economies have found it hard to use natural resource wealth to improve their economic performance. Utilizing resource endowments is a multistage economic and political problem that ...requires private investment to discover and extract the resource, fiscal regimes to capture revenue, judicious spending and investment decisions, and policies to manage volatility and mitigate adverse impacts on the rest of the economy. Experience is mixed, with some successes (such as Botswana and Malaysia) and more failures. This paper reviews the challenges that are faced in successfully managing resource wealth, the evidence on country performance, and the reasons for disappointing results.
Are teachers' impacts on students' test scores (value-added) a good measure of their quality? This question has sparked debate partly because of a lack of evidence on whether high value-added (VA) ...teachers improve students' long-term outcomes. Using school district and tax records for more than one million children, we find that students assigned to high-VA teachers are more likely to attend college, earn higher salaries, and are less likely to have children as teenagers. Replacing a teacher whose VA is in the bottom 5 percent with an average teacher would increase the present value of student's lifetime income by approximately $250,000 per classroom.
We measure the pass-through of emissions costs to electricity prices. We perform both reduced-form and structural estimations based on optimal bidding in this market. Using rich micro-level data, we ...estimate the channels affecting pass-through in a flexible manner, with minimal functional form assumptions. Contrary to many studies in the general pass-through literature, we find that emissions costs are almost fully passed through to electricity prices. Since electricity is traded through high-frequency auctions for highly inelastic demand, firms have weak incentives to adjust markups after the cost shock. Furthermore, the costs of price adjustment are small.
A rapidly growing body of research applies panel methods to examine how temperature, precipitation, and windstorms influence economic outcomes. These studies focus on changes in weather realizations ...over time within a given spatial area and demonstrate impacts on agricultural output, industrial output, labor productivity, energy demand, health, conflict, and economic growth, among other outcomes. By harnessing exogenous variation over time within a given spatial unit, these studies help credibly identify (i) the breadth of channels linking weather and the economy, (ii) heterogeneous treatment effects across different types of locations, and (iii) nonlinear effects of weather variables. This paper reviews the new literature with two purposes. First, we summarize recent work, providing a guide to its methodologies, datasets, and findings. Second, we consider applications of the new literature, including insights for the "damage function" within models that seek to assess the potential economic effects of future climate change.
Most empirical policy work focuses on causal inference. We argue an important class of policy problems does not require causal inference but instead requires predictive inference. Solving these ...“prediction policy problems” requires more than simple regression techniques, since these are tuned to generating unbiased estimates of coefficients rather than minimizing prediction error. We argue that new developments in the field of “machine learning” are particularly useful for addressing these prediction problems. We use an example from health policy to illustrate the large potential social welfare gains from improved prediction.
Abstract The productivity growth slowdown in advanced economies during the early decades of the 21 st century has led to renewed interest in economic measurement. Measured productivity growth has ...largely evaporated, yet in many ways, the average person is better off than at any time in history and technological advance is ever evident. Are we simply, or at least in part, mismeasuring productivity change? More fundamentally, are we measuring an outdated or otherwise less relevant economic concept? What should and can we measure in the interest of developing evidence‐based policy solutions to support productivity growth? This paper reviews some of the recent advances in economic measurement and points to an expanded productivity measurement research agenda arising from these questions.
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