Applied economists often wish to measure the effects of managerial decisions or policy changes on plant-level productivity patterns. But plant-level data on physical quantities of output, capital, and intermediate inputs are usually unavailable. Therefore, when constructing productivity...

We discuss a method aimed at reducing the risk that spurious results are published. Researchers send their datasets to an independent third party who randomly generates training and testing samples. Researchers perform their analysis on the former and once the paper is accepted for publication...

New ideas no longer fuel economic growth the way they once did. A popular explanation for stagnation is that good ideas are harder to find, rendering slowdown inevitable. We present a simple model of the lifecycle of scientific ideas that points to changes in scientist incentives as the cause of...

An ever increasing share of human interaction, communication, and culture is recorded as digital text. We provide an introduction to the use of text as an input to economic research. We discuss the features that make text different from other forms of data, offer a practical overview of relevant...

We elaborate a model of the incentives of scientists to perform activities of control and criticism when these activities, just like the production of novel findings, are costly, and we study the strategic interaction between these incentives. We then use the model to assess policies meant to...

Choices are frequently made from lists where there is by necessity some ordering of options. In such situations individuals can exhibit both primacy bias towards the first option and recency bias towards the last option. We examine this phenomenon in a particularly interesting context: consumer...

Toys. The impact of computers on productivity has been examined directly on macro data and indirectly (on wages) using microeconomic data. This study examines the direct impact on the productivity of scholarship by considering how high technology might alter patterns of coauthoring of articles...

Despite the concern that student plagiarism has become increasingly common, there is relatively little objective data on the prevalence or determinants of this illicit behavior. This study presents the results of a natural field experiment designed to address these questions. Over 1,200 papers...

Early life experiences are likely to be important for the formation of preferences. Religiosity is a key dimension of preferences, affecting many economic outcomes. This paper examines the effect of college major on religiosity, and the converse effect of religiosity on college major, using...

New graduates of elite MBA programs flock to Wall Street during bull markets and start their careers elsewhere when the stock market is weak. Given the transferability of MBA skills, it seems likely that any effect of stock returns on MBA placement would be short-lived. In this paper, I use a...