ABSTRACT This paper examines the extent and persistence of numerological superstitions in China's housing market. We focus on the numbers “4” and “8,” given the strong negative and positive cultural beliefs associated with them. Using an extensive dataset of new apartment transactions from 2004 to 2015, we assess pricing patterns by floor level and unit number. We find that numerological preferences and aversions associated with superstitious beliefs have non‐negligible price effects. Exploiting the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake as an exogenous shock, we show that these effects adjust in response to a major disruptive event. After the tremor, numerological preferences tied to unit numbers appear to have intensified, consistent with heightened uncertainty and increased salience of numerological cues, whereas those linked to floor levels weakened, plausibly reflecting increased perceived risks of living on upper floors that reduced the weight placed on prior numerological associations.
We examine the impact of Brazil's "Mother-Friendly Care" accreditation program on hospital choice. Using administrative data on births in the Brazilian public health system from 2008-2019, we estimate a nested logit demand model that allows for differential substitution patterns based on existing Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative (IHAC) accreditation. We find that "Mother-Friendly Care" accreditation significantly increases hospital utility, raising the aggregate market share of accredited hospitals by an average of 4.1 percentage points (p.p.) across municipalities. Counterfactual analysis reveals that restricting accreditation to IHAC hospitals substantially limited the program's impact on hospital choice: distributing accreditation across both IHAC and non-IHAC hospitals would have resulted in aggregate market share gains of 10.2 p.p., demonstrating how existing IHAC certification shapes substitution patterns and limits policy reach.
ABSTRACT The Allais Paradox is often attributed to the strong attraction of a certain option that avoids a downside risk, i.e., a small chance of a low payoff. In contrast, there is clear evidence from laboratory and field data that people are attracted to the upside risk of obtaining a relatively high payoff. Examples of upside risk include investments in risky tech stocks, participation in rent‐seeking contests, or savings in lottery‐based retirement accounts. The experiment reported in this paper shows a tendency for the same people to exhibit both downside risk aversion and upside risk preference. The analysis uses nonlinear probability weighting to connect the upside/downside risk preference distinction with the standard behavior observed in an Allais paradox. The results are illustrated by Chernoff faces with features that are pulled down by risk aversion and up by risk preference.
ABSTRACT Despite significant advances since 2023 in large language model (LLM) capabilities and the introduction of web‐enabled search functionality, citation hallucination remains a persistent problem in AI‐generated academic content. We test GPT‐4o, DeepSeek V3, web‐enabled GPT‐4o, and web‐enabled GPT‐5.1 across prompts derived from Journal of Economic Literature categories. Using a hierarchical citation validation framework, we find that even an advanced web‐enabled model produces non‐existent citations. While web‐enabled models show improvement over their predecessors, the error rates remain high for scholarly applications. Our findings suggest that the fundamental challenge of citation hallucination persists despite technological advances, with implications for academic integrity and the reliable use of AI in research contexts. We provide an online tool for researchers to run LLMs through the benchmark test using our prompts.
We create a new dataset that characterizes studies of product market reforms implemented from 1932 to 2011. We examine the size and origins of differences in estimated impacts based on an OECD classification scheme for potentially competitive restrictions of regulation. The median impact from switching to a pro-competitive environment is a 19% price decline. Competition-restricting regulations that are directed at specific societal objectives, such as health, safety, education, the environment, and financial stability, have lower price increases than the price declines from regulatory changes creating greater competition. The findings support the view that special interests obtain large benefits from favorable regulation. These findings can help policymakers when balancing the effects of competition-enhancing regulatory reform against other societal objectives.
