Dennis Alexis Valin Dittrich

@davdittrich.economicscience.net

Interested in bounded rationality, trust, discrimination, fair compensation, labor economics, quantitative methods, dataviz, rstats, open source 1stgen Professor of Economics (2005-2022) Senior Economist at the Stepstone Group https://economicscience.net

#EconSky Firm Pay, Amenities, and Inequality https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35149&r=&r=bec "Non-wage attributes are an important driver of job choice: workers frequently choose lowerpaying offers. Amenity valuations are highly dispersed across firms and approximately orthogonal to 1/4

Firm Pay, Amenities, and Inequality

Sydnee Caldwell Ingrid Haegele Jörg Heining Working Paper 35149 http://www.nber.org/papers/w35149 NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH 1050 Massachus…

nber.org

Is This Why Science Advances One Funeral at a Time? https://nautil.us/is-this-why-science-advances-one-funeral-at-a-time-128065 "What exists at one’s intellectual ‘birth’ feels normal, what appears during early career feels revolutionary, and what emerges after maturity feels suspect." 1/2

Aging and the narrowing of scientific innovation

Aging researchers and the removal of retirement policies yield decreased disruptive innovation in science

nautil.us

Identification and Semiparametric Estimation of Conditional Means from Aggregate Data https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.20194 Ecological inference is the challenge of estimating subgroup behavior using only aggregate data like geographic averages. This paper introduces a new semiparametric method 1/3

Identification and Semiparametric Estimation of Conditional Means from

Often, researchers are interested not just in the global estimand _𝛽_ = 𝔼[ _𝑌_ | _𝑋_ ], but how this relationship varies by geography.

arxiv.org

#EconSky Human–AI Evaluation and Gender Transparency: Application Decisions in Competitive Hiring https://docs.iza.org/dp18517.pdf #AI involvement deters applicants, particularly women, across both pure algorithmic and hybrid human-in-the-loop regimes. This effect is driven by non-competitive 1/3

Human–AI Evaluation and Gender Transparency: Application Decisions in

AI hiring deters high-performing non-competitive women while overconfident men over-apply; gender transparency has no effect.

docs.iza.org

Intelligence Without Integrity: Why Capable LLMs May Undermine Reliability https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.20440 "As LLMs become embedded in empirical workflows and organizational decision infrastructures, analytic reliability depends on more than raw capability. It requires both intelligence 1/4

Intelligence Without Integrity: Why Capable LLMs May Undermine Reliabi

The most capable models may produce conclusions that are less stable across reasonable analytical framings, raising new challenges for replicability …

arxiv.org

Easy A’s, Less Pay: The Long-Term Effects of Grade Inflation https://www.nber.org/papers/w34952 "Being assigned a higher average grade inflating teacher reduces a student's future test scores, the likelihood of graduating from high school, college enrollment, and ultimately earnings. In 1/3

Easy A’s, Less Pay: The Long-Term Effects of Grade Inflation

Average grades continue to rise in the United States, raising the question of how grade inflation impacts students. We provide comprehensive evidence

nber.org

#AI and the Quantity and Quality of Creative Products: Have LLMs Boosted Creation of Valuable Books? https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:34777&r=&r=ind "While the average quality of new #books has fallen with the LLM-induced influxand while much of the new work appears to be of little 1/3

LLMs tripled book releases, lowering average quality but driving a surge in the absolute number of high-quality titles and consumer surplus.

nber.org

What Makes New Work Different from More Work? https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:34986&r=&r=lab “… new work is central to maintaining and augmenting the value of human expertise in the face of automation because, unlike simply more (preexisting) work, new work demands novel expertise 1/4

New work offsets automation not just by creating jobs, but by demanding scarce human expertise that commands significant wage premiums.

nber.org

Do Firms Share their Profits Equally with Women and Men? The Role of Human Capital, Managerial Positions and Unions https://docs.iza.org/dp18388.pdf "… wage-profit elasticity is estimated at 2.8% and is not statistically different for women and men. These non-differing elasticities therefore 1/3

Do Firms Share Their Profits Equally with Women and Men? The Role of H

Men and women share firm profits equally; the gender pay gap instead stems from women's segregation into less profitable firms.

docs.iza.org