We perform an incentivized experiment designed to assess the accuracy of beliefs about characteristics and decisions. Subjects are asked to declare some specific choices and characteristics with different levels of observability from an external point of view, and typically formed through real...

In many economic contexts, an elusive variable of interest is the agent's expectation about relevant events, e.g. about other agents' behavior. Recent experimental studies as well as surveys have asked participants to state their beliefs explicitly, but little is known about the causal relation...

We study beliefs and choices in a repeated normal-form game. In addition to a baseline treatment with common knowledge of the game structure and feedback about choices in the previous period, we run treatments (i) without feedback about previous play, (ii) with no information about the...

Instrumental variable estimation requires untestable exclusion restrictions. With policy effects on individual outcomes, there is typically a time interval between the moment the agent realizes that he may be exposed to the policy and the actual exposure or the announcement of the actual...

I evaluate the accuracy of people's subjective probability expectations for using various health services. Subjective expectations closely reflect patterns of observed utilization, are predicted by the same covariates as observed utilization, and correlate with objective measures of risk. At the...

The Australian Government launched the My School website in 2010 to provide standardised information about the quality of schools to the Australian public. This paper combines data from this website with home sales data for the state of Victoria to estimate the effect of the publication of...

We investigate the effects of group identity on hiring decisions with adverse selection problems. We run a laboratory experiment in which employers cannot observe a worker's ability nor verify the veracity of the ability the worker claims to have. We evaluate whether sharing an identity results...

We consider a model of international migration where skills of workers are imperfectly observed by firms in the host country and where information asymmetries are more severe for immigrants than for natives. There are two stages. In the first one, workers in the South decide whether to move and...

A pre-condition for employer learning is that signals at labor market entry do not fully reveal graduates' productivity. I model various distinct sources of signal imperfection such as noise and multi-dimensional types and characterize their implications for the private return to skill...

In his classic article "An Essay on Bargaining" Schelling (1956) argues that ignorance might actually be strength rather than weakness. We test and confirm Schelling's conjecture in a simple take-it-or-leave bargaining experiment where the proposer can choose between two possible offers. Option...