Protecting the environment during economic growth is a challenge facing every country. This paper focuses on two regulatory measures that China has adopted to incentivize air quality improvement: publishing a daily air pollution index (API) for major cities since 2000 and linking the API to...

In 2004, the Chávez regime in Venezuela distributed the list of several million voters whom had attempted to remove him from office throughout the government bureaucracy, allegedly to identify and punish these voters. We match the list of petition signers distributed by the government to...

Currently, there is insufficient evidence regarding which policies will improve nutrition, reduce BMI, the probability of obesity and the probability of overweight nationwide. This preliminary study investigates the impact of a nutrition-education policy relative to price policy as a means to...

For individuals who experience job loss, enrollment in post-secondary programs may provide an opportunity to improve future employment outcomes. However, decisions to enroll may be hampered by insufficient information about the benefits and costs and the necessary steps and assistance available...

I extend the methods of G ̈urkaynak, Sack, and Swanson (2005) to separately identify the effects of Federal Reserve forward guidance and large-scale asset purchases (LSAPs) during the 2009–15 U.S. zero lower bound (ZLB) period. I find that both forward guidance and LSAPs had substantial and...

We quantify the importance of non-monetary news in central bank communication. Using evidence from four major central banks and a comprehensive classification of events, we decompose news conveyed by central banks into news about monetary policy, economic growth, and separately, shocks to risk...

We study the effect of releasing public information about productivity or monetary shocks when agents learn from nominal prices. While public releases have the benefit of providing new information, they can have the cost of reducing the informational efficiency of the price system. We show that,...

We present a framework for analyzing “model persuasion.” Persuaders influence receivers' beliefs by proposing models (likelihood functions) that specify how to organize past data (e.g., on investment performance) to make predictions (e.g., about future returns). Receivers are assumed to find...

Naturally-occurring yellow sand outbreaks, which are produced by winds flowing to Korea from China and Mongolia, create air pollution. Although there is seasonal pattern of this phenomenon, there exists substantial variation in its timing, strength and location from year to year. Thus, exposure...

We study a propaganda campaign sponsored by the government against the main political challenger in the days preceding the 2015 Argentine runoff presidential election. Subjects in the treatment group watched an “ad” initially aired during soccer transmissions that was part of this campaign...