10 Economic Trivia Questions

A fun little article

1. One of this person’s early papers, with Olivier Blanchard, explored how production networks amplified economic decline after the fall of the Soviet Union. Another paper, with Charles Morcom, proposed an elegant solution for preventing the extinction of endangered species. This economist spent time in Kenya, which inspired his O-Ring Theory of Economic Development. He would also conduct many randomized controlled trials there, including “Worms”. For ten points, name this frequent co-author of Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, and winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics.

2. This economist, with Amy Finkelstein and Heidi Williams, used the migration of medicare patients to estimate the causes of differences in healthcare spending across regions. This person, often with Isaiah Andrews, has contributed to measuring the robustness of structural estimates. It’s not Andrei Shleifer or Sendhil Mullainathan, but this economist proposed an explanation for media bias, and tested whether it is due to supply or demand. For ten points, name this frequent co-author of Jesse Shapiro, and winner of the 2014 John Bates Clark Medal?

3. This can occur in a game with a rational sender and receiver who share a correct prior, so long as the receiver’s action is non-linear and only the distribution of posteriors, but not the average, changes. Matthew Gentzkow and Emir Kamenica, in a 2011 paper, introduced the Bayesian version of this action. Paul Milgrom and John Roberts show that, if there are multiple parties competing to do this, all information will be disclosed in equilibrium. This action will not be possible if talk is cheap. For 10 points, Deidre McCloskey and Arjo Klamer argue that “One quarter of GDP is” this phenomenon, which is the effort to change other’s behavior?

4. When utilizing this econometric approach, it is possible to use if either the shocks are exogenous, or the prior distribution was exogenous. This approach is commonly used to study labor market impacts in large data sets. The standard treatment of this is given by Borusyak, Hull, and Jaravel. These are also known as Bartik instruments. For 10 points, what approach was used by Autor, Dorn, and Hanson to study the ‘China Shock”?

5. A model which assumed constant elasticity of substitution, and hence constant markups, will show that the gains from this come from reallocation between firms. If you assume a Pareto distribution of firms, then the gains from this can be given by the share of expenditure raised by 1 over the elasticity with respect to costs. The Dixit-Stiglitz model was used to describe how this phenomenon occurs when there are increasing returns, for which Paul Krugman won the Nobel Prize in 2008. For 10 points, name this practice, which Ricardo argued was being comparative advantage?

6. It’s not technology, but in Solow’s model, this was taken to be exogenously given. In Romer’s original endogenous growth paper, this was irrelevant to economic growth. In 1993, Michael Kremer would relate the discovery of new ideas to this, and argued that growth in this was slowly accelerating over time. Chad Jones argued in 1995 that there was no consistent relation between this and the rate of new idea discovery in cross-sectional data. For 10 points, name this, commonly denoted by n in statistics?

7. This economist showed that, counterintuitively, any positive search cost combined with sequential search is sufficient to cause the maximum monopolistic distortion. They would later show how search frictions can lead to many equilibrium unemployment rates in the “coconut” model. This economist incorporated a neoclassical production function in an overlapping generations model, giving us the textbook version we use today. With James Mirrlees, this economist wrote the foundational work on optimal public taxation, and showed that taxes on intermediate goods are never optimal. For 10 points, name this MIT economist, whose 2011 nomination to the Federal Reserve Board was blocked in Congress?

8. Egger et al won the Frisch medal for studying the effects of cash transfers in this. Walras proposed that this might be reached through “tatonnement”, or the successive announcing of new price vectors until all markets cleared. Kenneth Arrow and Gerard Debreu used Kakutani’s fixed point theorem to prove that this exists. For 10 points, name this word for all markets, commonly opposed to its partial version?

9. Timothy Roughgarden and Eva Tardos proved that, with linear cost function, the worst that this paradox can increase travel times by is 4/3rds of the original value. This is referred to as the price of anarchy. This paradox is why partial equilibrium estimates of transportation improvements value need not correspond to general equilibrium decreases in travel time. For 10 points, name this paradox, where adding an edge between two nodes leads to an inefficient Nash equilibrium?

10. The early form of this model was created by Daniel McFadden in 1973. This does not require continuous data, but can handle discrete choice. It was popularized by Berry, Levinsohn, and Pakes in their 1995 paper “Automobile Prices in Market Equilibrium”. For 10 points, name this method of estimating demand equations for a variety of products from market data.