When analyzing decision-level data from more than one economic experiment, the pooled ordinary least squares (OLS) estimator is a weighted sum of (i) within-experiment treatment effects, and (ii) an estimate of between-experiment treatment effects. The latter is plausibly biased and receives substantial weight in typical studies. I discuss some implications of this weighting and some remedies to the problem.

We propose a high-dimensional extension of the heteroscedasticity test proposed in Newey and Powell (1987). Our test is based on expectile regression in the proportional asymptotic regime where $n/p \to \delta \in (0,1]$. The asymptotic analysis of the test statistic uses the approximate message passing algorithm, from which we obtain the limiting distribution of the test and establish its asymptotic power. The numerical performance of the test is validated through an extensive simulation study. As real-data applications, we present the analysis based on “international economic growth” data (Belloni et al., 2013), which is found to be homoscedastic, and “supermarket” data (Lan et al., 2016), which is found to be heteroscedastic.

With 70 million dead, World War II remains the most devastating conflict in history. Among the survivors, millions were displaced, returned maimed from the battlefield, or endured years of captivity. We examine the effects of such war exposures on labor market careers, showing that they often become apparent only at certain life stages. While war injuries reduced employment in old age, former prisoners of war prolonged their time in the workforce before retiring. Many displaced workers, especially women, never returned to employment. These responses align with standard life-cycle theory and thus likely hold relevance for other conflicts.

The effectiveness of health recommendations and treatments depends on the extent to which individuals follow them. For each individual, medical adherence involves an inter-temporal trade-off between expected future health benefits and immediate effort costs. Therefore variation in time preferences may help us understand why and not least which people fail to follow health recommendations and treatments. We develop a novel, yet simple real-effort time-preference task implemented via text message among pregnant women in South Africa and show that behavior in the task predicts medical adherence. We find that planning to do the task with delay significantly lowers self-reported adherence to the recommendation of taking daily iron supplements during pregnancy. There is weaker indication that delaying the task longer than initially planned also negatively affects adherence. Together our results suggest that even simple measures of time preferences could help predict medication adherence and is a first step toward designing targeted policies to help improve medication adherence, healthcare outcomes, and welfare.

This special collection entitled ‘Green Transition or Social Transformation? Socio-economic Costs and Challenges of Energy Transition for Working People’ is an invitation to further study the role of labour in the energy transition and the impact of the current form of transition on workers’ lives. Above all, however, it raises fundamental questions about the future trajectory, aims, and scope of the transition. It also suggests that it is worth speaking openly not only about technological change but also about systemic change − one that incorporates economic and political dimensions and must accompany the energy revolution. A transition that leaves hierarchical social structures intact, that fails to critique the economic mechanisms exploiting both people and the environment, or that does not challenge existing relations of power which colonise nature and the working classes, is not a transition at all. It is merely ‘old wine in new bottles,’ designed to ensure the further reproduction of the prevailing system and to create new forms of capital accumulation. This collection presents reflections, analyses, and proposals addressing issues often overlooked in the green transition: the concerns of working people, their anxieties over employment and economic security, and a new form of colonisation under the guise of technological changes in the energy sector. The authors suggest, however, progressive solutions that go beyond the status quo, such as a ‘transformative just transition’, labour environmentalism based on the inseparable relationship between labour and nature, and social–ecological development.

Public investment in the United Kingdom has been persistently low compared to both its post-war levels and other OECD countries, and this shortfall has been widely seen as one of the causes of weak UK productivity growth since the global financial crisis. Although the Labour government elected in 2024 prioritised growth via higher public and private investment, its self-imposed fiscal rules have limited public investment, sparking debate and research on the UK fiscal framework. This Special Issue brings together recent research examining fiscal frameworks and includes contributions from academic and policy-oriented researchers and leading experts on this issue.

I argue that evaluative uncertainty gives rational agents instrumental reasons to abstract from some of their salient preferences when bargaining about social institutions. Because agents cannot assume stability in their future evaluative outlook, it is rational to favour rules that preserve options that may become salient. Building on Kreps (1979), I show how flexibility-driven abstraction expands the bargaining set, enabling convergence on rules while preserving motivational continuity. Since options are endogenous, bargainers also have reason to deliberate about option-generating and option-filtering meta-rules that structure the emergence, appraisal and revision of options over time.

In classical credibility theory, estimation is typically limited to the hypothetical mean, restricting its use for premium principles that depend on higher-order moments. To address this, we develop a credibility-based framework for estimating the process variance under both known and unknown hypothetical means and apply these estimators to a broad class of variance-related premium principles, including the expected value, variance, standard deviation, and modified-variance principles. The estimators are derived via constrained linear projection techniques, minimizing the mean squared error between the estimator and the true process variance. Explicit formulas are obtained that are optimal among affine transformations of the data. The proposed estimators exhibit desirable statistical properties, including conditional unbiasedness, consistency, mean squared error convergence, and asymptotic normality. Numerical studies demonstrate their favorable convergence behavior, and an empirical analysis with real insurance data highlights their practical relevance. This framework extends Bühlmann’s classical credibility theory to second-moment estimation while remaining computationally tractable and requiring only mild moment conditions, without specifying the population or prior distributions.

Between 1910 and 1940, U.S. high school graduation rates rose five-fold, driving twentieth-century economic growth. I explore how the Great Depression’s surge in youth unemployment influenced this trend, emphasizing gender and socioeconomic disparities. Using linked census data and newly digitized city-level unemployment rates, I find that youth unemployment significantly increased high school and post-secondary completion among higher-income boys, while effects on girls and lower-income youths were negligible. These results underscore the role of household resources in leveraging educational opportunities, as financial constraints limited disadvantaged groups from benefiting from reduced opportunity costs.