NBER Publications by Daniel J. Benjamin
Working Papers and Chapters
| August 2007 | Social Identity and Preferences
with James J. Choi, A. Joshua Strickland: w13309
Social identities prescribe behaviors for people. We identify the marginal behavioral effect of these norms on discount rates and risk aversion by measuring how laboratory subjects’ choices change when an aspect of social identity is made salient. When we make ethnic identity salient to Asian-American subjects, they make more patient choices. When we make racial identity salient to black subjects, non-immigrant blacks (but not immigrant blacks) make more patient choices. Making gender identity salient has no effect on intertemporal or risk choices. |
| November 2006 | Thin-Slice Forecasts of Gubernatorial Elections
with Jesse M. Shapiro: w12660
We showed 10-second, silent video clips of unfamiliar gubernatorial debates to a group of experimental participants and asked them to predict the election outcomes. The participants' predictions explain more than 20 percent of the variation in the actual two-party vote share across the 58 elections in our study, and their importance survives a range of controls, including state fixed effects. In a horse race of alternative forecasting models, participants' visual forecasts significantly outperform economic variables in predicting vote shares, and are comparable in predictive power to a measure of incumbency status. Adding policy information to the video clips by turning on the sound tends, if anything, to worsen participants' accuracy, suggesting that naïveté may be an asset in some foreca... |
| 1984 | War, Prices, and Interest Rates: A Martial Solution to Gibson's Paradox
with Levis A. Kochin
in A Retrospective on the Classical Gold Standard, 1821-1931, Michael D. Bordo and Anna J. Schwartz, editors
|
Additional information about this author |
|