We study social learning between spouses using an experiment in Chennai, India. We vary whether individuals discover information themselves or must instead learn what their spouse discovered via a discussion. Women treat their 'own' and their husband's information the same. In sharp contrast,...

The recent withdrawal of Cox-2 Inhibitors has generated debate on the role of information in drug diffusion: can the market learn the efficacy of new drugs, or does it depend solely on manufacturer advertising and FDA updates? In this study, we use a novel data set to study the diffusion of...

Learning or experience curves are widely used to estimate cost functions in manufacturing modeling. They have recently been introduced in policy models of energy and global warming economics to make the process of technological change endogenous. It is not widely appreciated that this is a...

In a very broad class of dynamic linear models, if agents possess knowledge of current endogenous variables in a least-squares learning process, determinacy of a rational expectations (RE) equilibrium is sufficient but not necessary for learnability of that equilibrium. Thus, since learnability...

We study the problem of a policymaker who seeks to set policy optimally in an economy where the true economic structure is unobserved, and he optimally learns from observations of the economy. This is a classic problem of learning and control, variants of which have been studied in the past, but...

Married women's labor force participation has increased dramatically over the last century. Why this has occurred has been the subject of much debate. This paper investigates the role of culture as learning in this change. To do so, it develops a dynamic model of culture in which individuals...

Most economic analyses presume that there are limited differences in the prior beliefs of individuals, as assumption most often justified by the argument that sufficient common experiences and observations will eliminate disagreements. We investigate this claim using a simple model of Bayesian...

This paper is the first to explore the effects of school accountability systems on high-achieving students' long-term performance. Using exceptional data from a large highly-selective state university, we relate school accountability pressure in high school to a student's university-level grades...

Previous research has demonstrated that attending center care is associated with cognitive benefits for young children. However, little is known about the ideal age for children to enter such care or the quot;rightquot; amount of time, both weekly and yearly, for children to attend center...

This paper develops a theory of expectations-driven business cycles based on learning. Agents have incomplete knowledge about how market prices are determined and shifts in expectations of future prices affect dynamics. In a real business cycle model, the theoretical framework amplifies and...