The Review of Economic Studies is one of the core journals in economics. It is essential reading for economists, consistently ranking among the top five journals.

Quality provision is often low in many developing markets, and firms commonly lack a reputation for quality. This paper examines this issue both theoretically and empirically in the context of retail watermelon markets in China. I first demonstrate the existence of significant asymmetric information on quality between sellers and buyers, as well as the absence of a quality premium at baseline. To explain this, I develop a theoretical model that highlights the role of consumer beliefs and costly signaling in influencing sellers’ reputation incentives.

We estimate impacts of male job loss, female job loss, and male unemployment benefits on domestic violence (DV) in Brazil. We merge individual-level employment and welfare registers with different measures of domestic violence: judicial cases brought to criminal courts, the use of public shelters by victims, and mandatory DV notifications by health providers. Leveraging mass layoffs for identification, we first show that both male and female job loss, independently, lead to large and pervasive increases in DV.

We exploit a unique event to study the extent to which popular attitudes toward trade are driven by economic fundamentals. In 2007, Costa Rica put a free trade agreement (FTA) to a national referendum. With a single question on the ballot, 59% of Costa Rican adult citizens cast a vote on whether they wanted an FTA with the United States to be ratified or not. We merge disaggregated referendum results, which break new ground on anonymity-compatible voting data, with employer-employee, customs, and firm-to-firm transactions data, and data on household composition and expenditures.

I introduce a generic method for inference about a scalar parameter in research designs with a finite number of heterogeneous clusters where only a single cluster received treatment. This situation is commonplace in difference-in-differences estimation but the test developed here applies more broadly. I show that the test controls size and has power under asymptotics where the number of observations within each cluster is large but the number of clusters is fixed. The test combines weighted, approximately Gaussian parameter estimates with a rearrangement procedure to obtain its critical values.

People’s value of their own time is a key input in public policy evaluations – these evaluations should account for time taken away from work or leisure as a result of policy. Measuring this value for the self-employed is challenging, as, by definition, it
is not priced by the market. Using rich choice data collected from farming households in western Kenya, we show that households exhibit non-transitive preferences. As a result, neither market wages nor standard valuation techniques correctly measure participants’ value of time.

We provide a finite sample inference method for the structural parameters of the semiparametric binary response model under a conditional median restriction originally studied by Manski (1975, 1985). This is achieved by exploiting distributional properties of observable outcomes conditional on the observed sequence of exogenous variables. Moment inequalities conditional on the size n sequence of exogenous covariates are constructed, and the proposed test statistic is a monotone function of violations of the corresponding sample moment inequalities.