Contributions in Merlin

We study the impact of research collaborations in coauthorship networks on total research output. Through the links in the collaboration network researchers create spillovers not only to their direct coauthors but also to researchers indirectly linked to them. We characterize the interior equilibrium when multiple agents spend effort in multiple, possibly overlapping projects, and there are interaction effects in the cost of effort.

Laboratory experiments provide insights into the drivers of cheating behaviour, but it is unclear to what extent cheating in the lab generalizes to the field. We conducted an experiment with middle and high school students to test whether a common laboratory measure of cheating predicts three types of school misconduct: (i) disruptiveness in class, (ii) homework non-completion, and (iii) absenteeism. We find that students who cheat in the experimental task are more likely to misbehave at school, suggesting that experimental measures of cheating generalize to rule violating behaviour in naturally occurring environments.

Relative performance evaluation (RPE) is, at least on paper, enjoying widespread popularity in determining the level of executive compensation. Yet existing empirical evidence of RPE is decidedly mixed. Two principal explanations are held responsible for this discord. A constructional challenge arises from intricacies of identifying the correct peers. And on a simpler note, corporate commitments to RPE could be mere exercises in empty rhetoric. We address both issues and test the use of RPE in a new sample of large international non-U.S. banks. Taken as a whole, the banks in our sample show moderate evidence consistent with RPE. We report stronger evidence once we investigate the subsample of banks that disclose the use of peers in their compensation schemes. This finding lends support to the credibility and thus informational value of RPE commitments. Digging deeper, we conclude that RPE usage is driven by firm size and growth options.

We study whether employment history provides information about a worker’s “work attitude,” i.e., the tendency to act cooperatively and reliably in the workplace. We conjecture that, holding all else equal, frequent job changes can indicate poor work attitude and that this information is transmitted through employment histories. We find support for this hypothesis across three studies that employ complementary lab, field, and survey experiments, as well as in labor market panel data. First, a tightly controlled laboratory labor market experiment demonstrates that prior employment information allows employers to screen for reliable and cooperative workers and that these workers obtain better employment outcomes. Second, we conduct a field experiment that varies the frequency of job changes in applicants’ resumes and find that those with fewer job changes receive substantially more callbacks from prospective employers. Third, a survey experiment with Human Resources professionals confirms that the resume manipulations in the field study create different perceptions of work attitude and that these largely account for the callback differences. Finally, we find evidence consistent with our hypothesized relationships in empirical labor market data. Our work highlights the potential importance of job history as a signal of work attitude in labor markets, and points to a potential cost of frequent job changes.

Public agencies mainly rely on two modes to procure goods and services: auctions and direct negotiations. We study a 1994 policy change in Germany that introduced the possibility to procure rail services in auctions as well as in direct negotiations with the incumbent. We analyze the effect of the procurement mode on service frequency and procurement price. Our analysis relies on self-collected data on the frequency of rail service on about 500 rail lines. We first develop a theoretical framework to study an agency’s decision on the procurement mode. We then use this framework to guide our empirical analysis on rail service, procurement price, and choice of procurement mode. Results indicate that, compared with negotiations, auctions improve service levels and reduce prices. As a result, surplus on auctioned lines increased by about 30%. Interestingly, surplus would also have increased by 16% on negotiated lines had auctions been used. We argue that the predominance of non-competitive modes reflects (actual or perceived) administrative costs of carrying out auctions.

This study investigates how well weekly Google search volumes track and predict bank failures in the United States between 2007 and 2012, contributing to the expanding literature that exploits internet data for the prediction of events. Different duration models with time-varying covariates are estimated. Higher Google search volumes go hand in hand with higher failure rates, and the coefficients for the Google volume growth index are highly significant. However, Google’s predictive power quickly dissipates for future failure rates.

We investigate the welfare effects of vertical integration of regional sports networks (RSNs) with programming distributors in U.S. multichannel television markets. Vertical integration can enhance efficiency by reducing double marginalization and increasing carriage of channels, but can also harm welfare due to foreclosure and raising rivals' costs incentives. We estimate a structural model of viewership, subscription, distributor pricing, and affiliate fee bargaining using a rich dataset on the U.S. cable and satellite television industry (2000-2010). We use these estimates to analyze the impact of simulated vertical mergers and de-mergers of RSNs on competition and welfare, and examine the efficacy of regulatory policies introduced by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to address competition concerns in this industry.

Conceptual priming has become an increasingly popular tool in economics. Here, we review the literature that uses priming in incentivized experiments to study economic questions. We mainly focus on the role of social identity, culture, and norms in shaping preferences and behavior. We also discuss recently raised objections to priming research and conclude with promising avenues for future research.

In many multiple testing problems, the individual null hypotheses (i) concern univariate parameters and (ii) are one-sided. In such problems, power gains can be obtained for bootstrap multiple testing procedures in scenarios where some of the parameters are 'deep in the null' by making certain adjustments to the null distribution under which to resample. In this paper, we compare a Bonferroni adjustment that is based on finite-sample considerations with certain 'asymptotic' adjustments previously suggested in the literature.

We study the differential impact of large exchange rate devaluations on the cost of living at different points on the income distribution. Across product categories, the poor have relatively high expenditure shares in tradeable products. Within tradeable product categories, the poor consume lower-priced varieties. Changes in the relative price of tradeables and the relative prices of lower-priced varieties following a devaluation will affect the cost of the consumption basket of the low-income households relative that of the high-income households. We quantify these effects following the 1994 Mexican peso devaluation and show that their distributional consequences can be large. In the two years that follow the devaluation, the cost of the consumption basket of those in the bottom decile of the income distribution rose between 1.46 and 1.6 times more than the cost of the consumption basket for the top income decile.