We survey undergraduate students at a large public university to understand the pecuniary and non-pecuniary factors driving their college major and career decisions with a focus on K-12 teaching. While the average student reports there is a 6% chance they will pursue teaching, almost 27% report...

The United Nations Human Development Index (HDI) is arguably the most widely used alternative to gross domestic product for measuring national development. This is in large part due to its multidimensional nature, as it incorporates not only income, but also education and health. However, the...

Income is simultaneously one of the most important variables used by economists and the variable most likely to be missing due to item non-response. While observations that are missing income responses are often dropped from analyses, such treatment is usually inappropriate. More appropriate...

Are speculators driving up oil prices? Should we raise energy prices to slow global warming? The present study takes a small number of such questions and compares the views of economic experts with those of the public. This comparison uses a panel of more than 2000 respondents from YouGov with...

We study the distribution of political speech across U.S. firms. We develop a measure of political engagement based on firms' communications (earnings calls, regulatory filings, and social media), by training a large language model to identify statements that contain political opinions. Using...

Primary historical sources are often by-passed for secondary sources due to high human costs of accessing and extracting primary information-especially in lower-resource settings. We propose a supervised machine-learning approach to the natural language processing of Chinese historical data. An...

What do machines learn, and why? To answer these questions we import models of human cognition into machine learning. We propose two ways of modeling machine learners based on this join: feasibility-based and cost-based machine learning. We evaluate and estimate our models using a deep learning...

For decades credit rating agencies were viewed as trusted arbiters of creditworthiness and their ratings as important tools for managing risk. The common narrative is that the value of ratings was compromised by the evolution of the industry to a form where issuers pay for ratings. In this paper...

We propose a general equilibrium model where two special interest groups (SIGs) compete to influence public opinion. Citizens with heterogeneous priors over a binary state of the world receive reports drawn from a continuous message space by a variety of sources. The two opposite SIGs attempt to...

Economics has long studied how consumers respond to the disclosure of information about firms. We study a case in which the disclosed information is unrelated to the product or firm leadership, but which could still potentially affect consumer patronage through the mechanism of repugnance, as...