infonet-economy

This paper introduces a nonlinear shrinkage estimator of the covariance matrix that does not require recovering the population eigenvalues first. We estimate the sample spectral density and its Hilbert transform directly by smoothing the sample eigenvalues with a variable-bandwidth kernel. Relative to numerically inverting the so-called QuEST function, the main advantages of direct…

This paper provides new evidence on gender bias in teaching evaluations. We exploit a quasi-experimental dataset of 19,952 student evaluations of university faculty in a context where students are randomly allocated to female or male instructors. Despite the fact that neither students' grades nor self-study hours are affected by the instructor's gender, we find that women…

We assess how regional rail service affects air pollution in Germany, where rail service is procured in auctions or negotiations. We argue that the procurement mode is plausibly exogenous, and show that auctions deliver stronger rail service growth than negotiations. Instrumenting rail service growth with procurement mode, we find that increasing rail service by 10% reduces carbon…

Health nudge interventions to steer people into healthier lifestyles are increasingly applied by governments worldwide, and it is natural to look to such approaches to improve health by altering what people choose to eat. However, to produce policy recommendations that are likely to be effective, we need to be able to make valid predictions about the consequences of proposed…

Background: Physicians often do not initiate or intensify treatments when clearly warranted, a phenomenon known as therapeutic inertia (TI). Limited information is available on educational interventions to ameliorate knowledge-to-action gaps in TI.
Objectives: To evaluate the feasibility and efficacy of an educational intervention compared to usual care among practicing…

During competitive interactions, humans have to estimate the impact of their own actions on their opponent's strategy. Here we provide evidence that neural computations in the right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ) and interconnected structures are causally involved in this process. By combining inhibitory continuous theta-burst transcranial magnetic stimulation with model-based…

US regional variation shows a positive correlation between the size of the service economy and female market hours, which is partially driven by different tax regimes. Based on this fact, this paper develops a multi-sector model to: (1) quantify the effect of different tax regimes in incentivizing woman to enter the labor force, and (2) estimate the feedback effect from women…

This paper studies the effect of disclosing conflicts of interest on strategic communication when the sender has lying costs. I present a simple economic mechanism under which such disclosure often leads to more informative, but at the same time also to more biased messages. This benefits rational receivers but exerts a negative externality from them on naive or delegating receivers…

Many researchers seek factors that predict the cross-section of stock returns. The standard methodology sorts stocks according to their factor scores into quantiles and forms a corresponding long-short portfolio. Such a course of action ignores any information on the covariance matrix of stock returns. Historically, it has been difficult to estimate the covariance matrix for a large…