Economics Insights @ CBS

I study a single-agent sequential search problem as in Weitzman. Contrary to Weitzman, conditional on stopping, the agent may take any uninspected box without first inspecting its contents. This introduces a new trade-off. By taking a box without inspection, the agent saves on its inspection costs. However, by inspecting it, he may discover that its contents are lower than he anticipated. I identify sufficient conditions on the parameters of the environment under which I characterize the optimal policy.

Unplanned transfers of patients from general medical-surgical wards to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) may occur due to unexpected patient deterioration. Such patients tend to have higher mortality rates and longer lengths of stay than direct admits to the ICU. A new predictive model, the EDIP2, was developed with the intent to identify patients at risk for deterioration, which in some cases could trigger a proactive transfer to the ICU. While it is conceivable that proactive transfers could improve individual patient outcomes, they could also lead to ICU congestion.

This paper documents how life cycle wage growth varies across countries. We harmonize repeated cross-sectional surveys from a set of countries of all income levels and then measure how wages rise with potential experience. Our main finding is that experience-wage profiles are on average twice as steep in rich countries as in poor countries. In addition, more educated workers have steeper profiles than the less educated; this accounts for around one-third of cross-country differences in aggregate profiles.

Engineering design decisions can produce more sustainable civil infrastructure systems, but cognitive barriers to innovative thinking often inhibit such outcomes. Existing research shows how descriptive norms that provide decision-makers with information about how others decide in a given context, can encourage more sustainable choices among users. Research described in this article shows that descriptive norms can encourage more sustainable choices among designers of civil infrastructure.

We examine the effects of financial reporting regulation on firms' banking. Exploiting discontinuous public disclosure and auditing requirements assigned to otherwise similar small and medium-sized private firms, we document that financial reporting regulation reduces firms' reliance on concentrated and local bank relationships and increases banks' reliance on firms' financial reporting, consistent with a shift in firms' banking from relationship toward transactional approaches.