Three essays in economics

This thesis consists of three essays on diverse topics but shared emphasis on statistical models with theory and empirics. The first and third essay examines the role of cognitive limitations in understanding biases in communication and learning. The second essay, joint with Masao Fukui, highlights the role of distributional assumptions of infection rates for epidemiological predictions, responding to the recent COVID-19 outbreak. The first chapter considers the effects of aggregation frictions on scientific communication and shows that publication bias emerges even when researchers are unbiased and communicate their findings optimally for readers. Specifically, when readers are cognitively constrained, they may only consider the binary conclusions rather than the estimates of the papers. Under such aggregation frictions of readers, researchers are shown to omit noisy null results and inflate marginal results.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctoral

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Economics

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• Furukawa, Chishio.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Abhijit V. Banerjee and Stephen Morris.

• Economics.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses may be protected by copyright. Please reuse MIT thesis content according to the MIT Libraries Permissions Policy, which is available through the URL provided.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/129013

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/129013