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This dissertation studies the effects and elicitation of beliefs. In the first chapter we estimate the effects of macroeconomic expectations on consumer decisions. We examine this question using an experiment with 2,872 credit card customers at a large commercial bank. We provide participants with expert forecasts of inflation and the nominal exchange rate and measure the consumption response to this information using detailed data on individual credit card transactions. We find that forecasts strongly affect inflation and exchange rate expectations, but do not change spending or self-reported consumption plans as predicted by standard models of intertemporal choice. Results from a supplementary survey experiment suggest that consumers are sophisticated enough to anticipate nominal rigidities that lower expected real income and reduce spending on durables for precautionary reasons, counteracting the effects predicted by standard models of intertemporal optimization. The absence of a link between consumer expectations and behavior has potentially important implications for macroeconomic policies such as forward guidance.The counter-intuitive results motivate development of more flexible method of belief elicitation, which could facilitate understanding of the subjects' decision making. While the elicitation of numerical variables, such as inflation, is well understood, certain beliefs, such as action plans during an inflation hike, cannot be represented numerically and require verbal elicitation. Verbal elicitation forces the researcher either to use open-ended questions or know the most important answers in advance. We propose a method to crowdsource potential answers to open-ended questions. This ensures that the survey is adaptive and does not miss important answers while maintaining a low-cost, multiple-choice format. We propose two measures of information loss to evaluate the quality of multiple-choice questions: the semantic similarity of selected answers to th

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics, 2016., Cataloged from PDF version of thesis., Includes bibliographical references (pages 149-156)., This thesis studies gender differences in educational and occupational outcomes. Chapter 1 examines whether the long work hours required by high-paying professions are a barrier to entry for women, who may face a tradeoff between market time demands and family formation. I study the introduction of a policy that capped the average workweek for medical residents. I find that a reduction in a specialty's weekly residency hours induced women to enter, but yielded little change in men's entry. To shed light on why women and men responded differently to the reduction in hours, I analyze the effect of the reform on residents' fertility. I find that a reduction in a specialty's weekly hours increased the specialty's female fertility rate in California, and had no effect in Texas. I discuss these results using a model in which physicians choose between career and family investments during residency, trading off long term incomes, investments in children, and leisure. In Chapter 2, coauthored with David Autor, David Figlio, Krzysztof Karbownik, and Jeffrey Roth, we use birth certificates matched to schooling records for Florida children in order to assess whether family disadvantage disproportionately impedes the pre-market development of boys. We find that, relative to their sisters, boys born to disadvantaged families have higher rates of disciplinary problems, lower achievement scores, and fewer high-school completions. Evidence supports that this is a causal effect of the post-natal environment; family disadvantage is unrelated to the gender gap in neonatal health. We conclude that the gender gap among black children is larger than among white children in substantial part because black children are raised in more disadvantaged families. Chapter 3 explores why women remain underrepresented in elective offices, by investigating whether there are gender differences in the persistence of politicians in response to an electoral loss. Using California local election returns an, by Melanie Wasserman., Ph. D.

Recent evidence indicates that boys and girls are differently affected by the quantity and quality of family inputs received in childhood. We assess whether this is also true for schooling inputs. Using matched Florida birth and school administrative records, we estimate the causal effect of school quality on the gender gap in educational outcomes by contrasting opposite-sex siblings who attend the same sets of schools--thereby purging family heterogeneity--and leveraging within-family variation in school quality arising from family moves. Investigating middle school test scores, absences and suspensions, we find that boys benefit more than girls from cumulative exposure to higher quality schools.