Choosing Your Pond: Location Choices and Relative Income

Abstract

We propose that, when individuals are deciding where to live, they care about the position in the income distribution in their prospective location. To test this hypothesis, we develop a new methodology to estimate preferences over location characteristics that combines choice data, survey data and information-provision experiments. We implement this methodology with a sample of 1,080 senior medical students who participated in the National Resident Matching Program. These subjects were choosing the cities to which they would move and live in for the next five years. We provide suggestive evidence that individuals care about what their relative income would be in a prospective city, and that those preferences have substantial heterogeneity by relationship status. Using a separate subject pool, we replicate our findings and provide tests for the underlying mechanisms.

The Economics of Content Moderation: Theory and Experimental Evidence from Hate Speech on Twitter

“…There are two outcomes of interest. Based on the results of section 2, the main outcome is the willingness to accept (WTA) to stop using social media, that 46 This finding is similar to what other studies obtain, such as Bottan and Perez-Truglia (2017), who argue that changing the source of information does not have an impact on participants who do not have expertise on the data. is, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, TikTok, and Reddit, for one week.…”

“…A third contribution is combining an information-provision design with a welfare elicitation of social media. Haaland et al (2020) and Bursztyn and Yang (2021) provide overviews of information-provision designs, and Bottan and Perez-Truglia (2017) and are some applications. The WTA that I elicit is in the ballpark of other social-media welfare studies such as Mosquera et al (2020), andAllcott et al (2020); the median and mean WTA per week were $15 and $34, respectively.…”