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Working Paper
We Are All Behavioral, More or Less: Measuring and Using Consumer-Level Behavioral Sufficient Statistics
Can a behavioral sufficient statistic empirically capture cross-consumer variation in behavioral tendencies and help identify whether behavioral biases, taken together, are linked to material consumer welfare losses? Our answer is yes. We construct simple consumer-level behavioral sufficient statistics??B-counts??by eliciting seventeen potential sources of behavioral biases per person, in a nationally representative panel, in two separate rounds nearly three years apart. B-counts aggregate information on behavioral biases within-person. Nearly all consumers exhibit multiple biases, in ...
Working Paper
Time Use and the Efficiency of Heterogeneous Markups
What are the welfare implications of markup heterogeneity across firms? In standard monopolistic competition models, such heterogeneity implies inefficiency even in the presence of free entry. We enrich the standard model with heterogeneous firms so that preferences are non-separable in off-market time and market consumption and show that this changes the welfare implications of markup heterogeneity. In this context, homogeneity of markups is neither necessary nor sufficient for efficiency. The marginal cost of the marginal firm is weakly inefficiently high when off-market time and market ...
Working Paper
The Great Reshuffle: Remote Work and Residential Sorting
This paper studies the significance of migration in evaluating the welfare impacts of remote work. By analyzing individual location history data, we first document an increase in net migration towards suburbs and smaller cities in the US since 2020. We demonstrate that the migration wave has been disproportionately fueled by high-income individuals, who were more likely to move due to remote work. Consequently, regions with substantial in-migration observed the greatest rise in housing expenses. This also led to changes in local demand for services and associated employment. Employing a ...