ALT This paper analyses the distinction between educational and skill types of labour mismatch and their association with earnings. Drawing on cross-sectional data for 26 countries from the 1st Cycle of the OECD (2012) Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC), I examine educational and skill mismatch using a comprehensive set of education- and skill-based indicators, explore heterogeneity across worker characteristics, and investigate the sources of conflicting country-level correlations with earnings through an error components model. The results show that country-level unobserved heterogeneity induces endogeneity bias, with both its direction and magnitude varying across mismatch measures. Once unobserved heterogeneity is controlled for, over-education and over-skilling are associated with wage penalties, whereas under-education and under-skilling are linked to wage premiums. These findings highlight both conceptual and empirical distinctions between educational and skill mismatch and demonstrate

ALT Who is exposed to generative AI in a developing-country labour market? We map three occupational AI-exposure indices to India's redesigned Periodic Labour Force Survey (2025) and document a steep caste gradient among 83,000 employed graduates: graduates from the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes are 0.24–0.37 standard deviations less exposed than upper-caste graduates within the same district. Two channels drive the gap: one in four SC and one in three ST graduates work in farm or elementary occupations untouched by AI, and those in white-collar work are underrepresented in managerial, software, and finance occupations. Because exposure commands a wage premium of up to 20 per cent, generative AI stands to widen, not narrow, India's caste earnings gap.

ALT In the fall of 2020, neural-network methods produced a large improvement in chess engines that became freely and widely available. By the end of 2021, the monthly draw rate in classical chess had risen by about four percentage points, but the distribution of player ratings, which are commonly read as measures of playing strength, had changed little. Ratings, however, are a relative measure, built from results against other rated players rather than from an absolute scale of play quality, so an improvement shared broadly across players need not change their ratings. Using 3.9 million rated classical games from March 2015 to November 2023, we document that the increased draw rate remains after conditioning on both players' ratings, holds within repeated same-color matchups, is not a continuation of a pre-existing trend, and persists through the end of the sample. A linear transformation that maps post-Covid ratings to higher pre-Covid equivalents, with a larger gap at lower ratings, acco

ALT Artificial intelligence (AI) systems increasingly assist human experts, but the consequences of AI assistance on productivity can be heterogeneous. Caplin, Deming, S. Li, Martin, Marx, Weidmann, and Ye (2025b) provide evidence that two characteristics, ability and belief calibration, help to determine the returns to AI assistance. This note shows that their results replicate to a setting where professional radiologists analyze chest X-rays with access to state-of-the-art machine learning predictions. I leverage the public Collab-CXR data repository described by Moehring, Kutwal, Huang, Banerjee, Jacobi, Eber, Mendoza, Chung, Dayan, Gupta, Bui, Truong, Pareek, Langlotz, Lungren, Agarwal, Rajpurkar, and Salz (2025) and first analyzed for human-AI collaboration by Agarwal, Moehring, Rajpurkar, and Salz (2023). To faithfully reproduce the analysis in Caplin, Deming, S. Li, Martin, Marx, Weidmann, and Ye (2025b), I use the radiologist assessments from the repeated-case designs, which includ

ALT Decarbonising energy systems reduces emissions and fossil fuel dependency, but expanding renewables increases demands for critical raw materials. Most energy system models, however, neglect material demands, putting the material feasibility of energy scenarios at question. We combine a systematic review of 59 highly decarbonised European energy system modelling studies with a quantitative ex-post assessment of material demands for 5 key technologies and 19 materials. We find that material demands exceed Europe's population-based shares of current global reserves for seven materials (Ga, In, Ir, Te; less pronounced for Ag, Se, V), in particular if multiple sectors of the energy system are considered. Competing non-energy demand further amplifies the scarcity, while technological innovation can either alleviate or intensify it. We conclude that energy efficiency, recycling, expanding reserves and technological innovation may only partly address the identified shortages and call for energ

ALT Why do similar funding shocks generate sharply different credit outcomes across countries? We develop and estimate a dynamic structural model in which intermediary credit capacity governs the transmission of funding disruptions to lending. Using supervisory data on U.S. banks and credit unions and Brazilian banks and cooperatives from 2002–2025, we recover institution-level credit capacity and its dynamics across major crisis episodes. Credit capacity is three to six times larger in the United States than in Brazil, while persistence is similar across countries. As a result, funding shocks generate substantially larger and more persistent lending contractions in Brazil. Counterfactual analysis shows that differences in baseline credit capacity, rather than persistence, account for most cross-country variation in crisis propagation and policy effectiveness.

ALT The ability of spouses to commit to future behavior has important implications for the allocation of resources between them and over time. Using a lifecycle collective model for household behavior, we propose new tests that distinguish between full, limited, and no commitment, based on the dynamic impact of wage shocks on household labor supply. A novelty of our approach is its ability to formally reject limited commitment, in addition to the other two types, exploiting sign restrictions from theory. We implement our tests across 15 European countries, drawing data from the EU-SILC over the years 2005-2019. We find that the elasticity of the Pareto weight with respect to favorable past wages is generally positive, consistent with bargaining under limited commitment. Past wage shocks thus induce bargaining effects on labor supply, empowering the recipient spouse and weakening the partner. Formally, we reject full and no commitment in all but 4 countries, but fail to reject limited commi

ALT Current blockchain research and analytics tend to prioritize observable on-chain transactions, obscuring the processes through which cryptocurrencies are created, publicised, retained, and disposed of. In response, this paper considers distributed ledger technologies from records management principles in ISO 15489-1:2016. Setting off by specifying the parallels – that is transactions as "records", crypto-asset units as "information assets", and blockchains as "aggregations" – we introduce a seven-stage lifecycle for blockchain data. We apply the framework to Bitcoin, a fungible token, and a non-fungible token. On this basis, we argue that blockchain systems are not merely transactional infrastructures but record management systems with distinctive characteristics. We discuss how the on-chain/off-chain boundary and privacy-enhancing technologies can complicate lifecycle visibility, with particular relevance for crypto-crime research and investigation. As a meta-level framework, the life

ALT This paper provides a didactic and beginner friendly review of the gravity model and its conceptual translation from classical physics into international economics. After a brief introduction, it begins by establishing the structural and mathematical parallels between Newton's law of universal gravitation and the economic gravity equation, demonstrating how economic mass (GDP) attracts trade flows while geographic distance acts as a source of spatial resistance. The paper then examines the deterministic philosophical framework required to apply rigid natural laws to collective human behavior. Finally, it traces the chronological evolution of the literature, highlighting the historical divergence between the physics rooted approach developed by early demographers and Walter Isard and the utility based econometric adaptations that later emerged. The paper ultimately shows that, despite globalization, spatial friction remains a significant and measurable force shaping international trade

ALT GDP per capita is the default lens through which governibng bodies track the economic prosperity and consequences of economic events, yet it is blind to two first-order determinants of lived prosperity: income/wealth distribution and inflation impact. Inequality-adjusted income measures are themselves not new but What is missing from the macroeconomic monitoring toolkit specifically is not a welfare concept but an operational monitoring trigger: a statistic minimal enough to compute annually from public data, transparent enough to audit without modelling assumptions, and normalised so that year-on-year, cross-country change? the quantity a regulator needs to act on? is legible. We assemble such an instrument, the Gini- Adjusted GDP per Capita Index (GAGI): a reproducible, publicly computable formulation that rescales each country's GDP per capita by its inequality-adjustment factor (1-G) and its price level, normalised to a 2010 baseline. GAGI is a general-purpose welfare index, not in

ALT We release a new dataset of U.S. skill specialization, relatedness, and complexity, derived from 433.6 million job postings between 2010 and 2024. The panel covers 3,194 counties across 15 years and reports 201 variables that describe the volume of job postings (e.g., labor demand), the modality and nature of work (e.g., remote share, internship share), and the structure of employer skill demand by category (e.g., specialized, software, and common). We develop a suite of economic geography variables: skill-based measures of county specialization, relatedness, diversity, complexity, and dynamics. These measures are further decomposed by employer entity type (corporate, university, government, and federal lab), along with entity-pair measures of alignment, overlap, and directional skill gaps. An accompanying interactive dashboard supports both academic research and applied use, with features including spatiotemporal visualization, county rankings and trends, pairwise county comparisons,

ALT Over the past two decades, millions of hectares of land in Africa have been transferred to investors, raising fears of displacement and conflict. This paper estimates the causal impact of large-scale land acquisitions (LSLAs) on local dissent by comparing successfully implemented projects to a control group of exogenously failed deals. Using staggered difference-in-differences estimators across 1,391 geocoded deals, I find that LSLAs cause a sustained increase in civic unrest of 158% relative to the pre-treatment mean. Protest responses are strongest among domestic investors acquiring community or state land for food-crop production, pointing to local dispossession and domestic elite capture. Integrating media, survey, and electoral data consistent with this hypothesis, I document parallel shifts in property-rights media discourse, an erosion of traditional authority, and broader electoral mobilization in affected constituencies.

ALT This paper presents a systematic framework for analyzing the economic parameter sensitivity of a hierarchical spatial economy within economic geography models. Through the hierarchical reduction approach proposed in this study, the original region-level governing equation is condensed into country-level and alliance-level equations. Based on the reduced governing equation, we formulate the sensitivity of economic variables on each country's population. This approach is applied to the analysis of international trade competition – covering both trade liberalization and protectionism around Brexit – among the UK, France, and Germany. We find that both the UK and the EU should focus on reducing domestic transportation costs, whereas tariffs and retaliatory tariffs act as a double-edged sword that can either strengthen or weaken their trade positions.

ALT Despite growing concerns over energy security, infrastructure planning and modelling for emerging green fuel supply chains often neglect risks from supply disruptions. Using a stochastic optimisation model of EU hydrogen imports, we show that 'naive' infrastructure planning results in welfare losses of 12 % (24 billion EUR) compared to risk-aware planning that anticipates supply disruptions. Despite requiring higher upfront investments, anticipatory planning achieves welfare levels close to those of an idealised system without disruptions, but entails a markedly different infrastructure configuration. Two complementary resilience strategies emerge: diversification across import corridors and strategic over-investment. This leads to increased intra-European transport capacity, a broader set of import pipelines, and investments in costly shipping terminals for hydrogen carriers. Our results show that incorporating supply risk considerations into infrastructure planning helps prevent the

ALT Real-world asset (RWA) tokenization has emerged as a prominent application of blockchain technology, enabling off-chain financial and non-financial assets to be represented through blockchain-based instruments. However, deployed RWA systems remain difficult to compare because legal claims, custody arrangements, token mechanics, verification processes, and on-chain integrations are often described separately. This paper develops a systems-level taxonomy of RWA tokenization to classify how off-chain assets are legally, economically, and technically represented on-chain. Following an iterative taxonomy-development method, we organize twenty-three dimensions into five components: governance, asset structure, token properties, distributed ledger technology, and economy. We apply the taxonomy to twenty major RWA systems selected by market capitalization and compare their design choices across asset classes and implementation models. The classification shows that current RWA tokenization is p

ALT We study common-value auctions in which bidders have horizontally differentiated preferences. In a specific two-bidder parameterization, winning conveys good news about the object's value to the winner, a phenomenon we call the winner's bliss in contrast to the conventional winner's curse. Additional implications also differ from the conventional analysis. When bidders' preferences are horizontally differentiated, seller revenue is reduced with information disclosure, and advantageous selection sustains bilateral trade under asymmetric information.

ALT Platform content interventions in recommendation systems are typically evaluated as static "nudges", ignoring that the systems adaptively learn from the resulting user behavior. We investigate this dynamic through a large-scale field experiment on a short-video platform. The experiment involves a "sleep reminder" campaign designed to reduce late-night usage. Paradoxically, the intervention increased late-night engagement by 14.75% and overall platform usage by 2.18%, and the effects persisted for weeks even after the experiment. We explain this through a forced-exploration mechanism, showing that by revealing high latent demand for the promoted content, the intervention triggers a recommendation policy update that routine user behavior would not produce. The data generated by the intervention induced the algorithm to update its post-campaign policy, reinforcing the very engagement loops the campaign aimed to mitigate. Our findings demonstrate that user-facing interventions can effectiv

ALT Urban spatial structure is commonly evaluated through the spatial distribution of homes and jobs or through aggregate commuting outcomes. Yet these approaches do not reveal how the opportunities created by urban form are selectively transformed into actual residence-workplace connections. This study introduces opportunity-normalized residence-workplace matching by comparing observed commuting distance distributions with opportunity-based distributions constructed from all within-city residence-workplace pairs weighted by residential and employment mass. Using Output Area-level data for nine British cities, we show that realized pairings are systematically more concentrated at shorter distances than the urban opportunity structure alone would predict. After normalization, matching intensity declines with distance in a recurrent but heterogeneous pattern that is approximately linear in log-log space in many cities and can be summarized by a city-specific distance-decay coefficient. Londo

ALT Museums can serve as policy tools when their content is purposefully curated. We designed a framed field experiment at the Santa Maria della Scala museum in Siena that leveraged the site's historical role offering care and hospitality.Student visitors randomly assigned to a tour emphasizing this function later donated more to an NGO supporting refugee than those who followed a standard artistic itinerary, with effects concentrated among female participants. These results show that thematically targeted museum experiences can measurably boost charitable behavior toward vulnerable groups, underscoring the untapped potential of cultural institutions in behavioral public policy.

ALT This paper develops a binary-gamble framework for characterizing risk sensitivity and loss aversion in Cumulative Prospect Theory (CPT). The proposed probabilistic risk-sensitivity metric is defined as a probability-threshold ratio that determines acceptance and preference thresholds in choice problems involving either a certain outcome and a binary gamble or two binary gambles. We show how standard notions of symmetric and non-symmetric bet aversion can be recovered within this framework, and we compare the resulting threshold-based conditions with utility premia, probability premia, and Arrow–Pratt curvature measures. The analysis clarifies when these criteria coincide and when they diverge, particularly for increasing aversion conditions, binary gambles with unequal probability distributions, and settings involving probability weighting functions. We also identify technical restrictions that arise when CPT-utility functions are used to represent loss aversion at the reference point.