Discrimination in the Workplace: Evidence from a Civil War in Peru

Few events give the opportunity to observe the full range of human behavior as wars do. In the case of civil wars in ethnically-mixed societies, the distribution of violence across various segments of the population can provide evidence on the extent and nature of discrimination. As in the case of markets, identifying discrimination in the warplace is challenging. There is uncertainty on the reconstruction of events as well as the rationale behind the violence. We use a unique data set collected by the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission on war crimes during the 1980's to show that there is evidence of taste-based discrimination by agents of the state towards ethnic minorities and women. The evidence is robust to different assumptions on the logic of repression and missing data problems. Working Paper 07-3

Use Permits: A Hedonistic Approach Applied to Farmland in the Southeastern US

In the State of Georgia, any agricultural producer who wishes to pump more than 100,000 gallons of water a day for crop irrigation is required to have an irrigation permit. The permit stays with the land and in the event of sale the permit is transferred with the property. Until recently, permits were essentially granted freely to all applicants in the Flint River water basin, without limit. In 1999, however, with increasing demand for water from growing urban Atlanta and several years of drought in the Southeast, the state of Georgia placed a moratorium on the issuance of agricultural water permits in the Flint River basin. This research exploits this policy change within a hedonic pricing framework to estimate the value of irrigation rights in the Southeast US. While the value of irrigation rights has been studied extensively in the western US, differences in property rights and legal regimes, as well as a lack of established water-rights markets in the East, leave us with little information regarding the value of irrigation rights in this setting. Working Paper 06-4

Deception and Self-Deception

Why are people so often overconfident? We conduct an experiment to test the hypothesis that people become overconfident to more effectively persuade or deceive others. After performing a cognitively challenging task, half of our subjects are informed that they can earn money by convincing others of their superior performance. The privately elicited beliefs of informed subjects are significantly more confident than the beliefs of subjects in the control condition. By generating exogenous variation in confidence with a noisy performance signal, we are also able to show that higher confidence indeed makes subjects more persuasive in the subsequent face-to-face interactions

Estimating the Value of Water Use Permits: A Hedonic Approach Applied to Farmland in the Southeastern United States

Agricultural irrigation permits in the Flint River Basin in Georgia had been routinely granted until a moratorium was placed on permit issuance in 1999. This research exploits this policy change within a hedonic-pricing framework to estimate the value of irrigation rights in the southeastern United States. While the value of irrigation rights has been studied extensively in the western United States, differences in property rights and legal regimes, as well as a lack of established water-rights markets in the eastern United States, leave us with little information regarding the value of irrigation rights in this setting.