Samiha B. Tariq

When the Federal Reserve surprises markets with a tightening, stocks fall, Treasury yields rise, and gold drops. We ask whether the same surprises reach a very different asset, fine art, and find that they do, with the wrong sign. Using a new lot-level panel of 478,199 Christie’s auction records matched to four published series of Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) policy surprises, we measure how the price a lot fetches relative to its pre-sale estimate moves on the day of the surprise. In the Old Master segment, a hawkish surprise raises prices rather than lowering them, and the effect is largest in New York, where dollar-based bidders compete most directly. The response is identified from thirty FOMC-coinciding sale dates; the wild-cluster bootstrap puts the coefficient at p = 0.099 and a permutation over those dates at 0.190. The same surprises move seven benchmark financial assets in their textbook directions, which leaves Old Master art as the lone asset with the wrong sign. A standard pre-trends test fails in our data, and we show that its leads are identified from three sale dates. We report three corroborative checks: an information-channel decomposition, a New York versus London gradient, and the response across shock-size bins. They narrow the set of alternative explanations without delivering independent identification.

We read the evidence as a store-of-value channel of monetary transmission. When the policy rate surprises hawkishly, a non-yielding, fixed-supply asset held largely by dollar investors can move opposite to financial assets.

JEL: E52, G12, G14, Z11

A majority of Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) users believe that making on-time BNPL payments builds their credit score. The belief was incorrect when measured: BNPL lenders have largely not furnished loan performance to the credit bureaus, and the Federal Reserve reports that at the time of the survey BNPL use would not have affected credit histories or scores at any of the three bureaus. Using the 2025 Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking, this paper asks who holds it, and shows the belief is not held at random but is regressive. Odds of holding it are roughly two to three times higher among users earning $10,000–$50,000 than among those above $150,000, falling about 12% per step up the income ladder, and users aged 60 and over hold it at roughly two and a half times the odds of users aged 18–29. Both gradients survive demographic, financial-fragility and credit-exposure controls and five codings of the belief. An estimated 23.0 million U.S. adults hold the belief, 7.3 million of them in households earning under $50,000, for whom an unrealised credit-building benefit is worth most. The belief tracks no concurrent repayment trouble: the cost it carries falls at adoption, not in repayment. And because what is mispriced is an imagined benefit rather than a hidden cost, no firm has an incentive to correct it and no consumer receives the feedback that would. The misperception is self-sustaining, and densest in the households most exposed to a credit-reporting regime still in incomplete transition.

JEL: D14, D18, D83, G51, G53

This paper develops a theory of accommodation traps in workplace hierarchies. Workers with weak outside options face a higher relational cost of appearing unavailable, resistant, or difficult, and so adopt accommodative communication (extra deference, softened boundaries, visible flexibility) to preserve the employment relationship. This short-run strategy is also an informative signal: a friction-minimizing supervisor rationally infers that an accommodating worker is less likely to resist, and assigns that worker the invisible, low-promotability work. The signal harms the worker who sends it. Unlike agents in ratchet-effect models, who conceal information that would invite heavier demands, dependent workers reveal their low refusal cost, because the relational value of accommodating rises with dependence. The resulting inequality requires no productivity difference and no taste for discrimination, and the supervisor’s beliefs are correct, so correcting beliefs cannot remove it. When visible work builds outside options and invisible work erodes them, the allocation becomes self-reinforcing, and even workers who start out identical are locked into unequal roles with probability one. The equilibrium is privately rational for every party yet socially inefficient whenever diminishing returns to outside options outweigh the supervisor’s friction cost. Attaching recognition to invisible work, rotating it by rule, or limiting managerial discretion each weakens or breaks the link from communication to assignment that sustains the trap.

JEL: C72, D82, D83, J24, M51, M54

A small share of online creators earn fortunes while most earn almost nothing. What separates them: skill, luck, or copying what works? This paper measures what YouTube vloggers actually produce: 3,728 thumbnails, 385 hours of speech (2.9 million words), and video titles and tags, linked to complete view histories of 56,419 videos. Its central sample follows channels from their first upload, including the many that never took off, which most creator statistics miss. The data show that what goes into a video does not predict its success: 36 measures of images, speech and text explain at most 1.1% of the differences in views within a channel, even though they can tell what kind of video it is. Practice does not help either: forty more videos without a hit add nothing. Nothing accumulates except a hit. A channel’s first hit raises the views of everything it publishes afterwards by 164% on average, a result that survives all 17 robustness checks. Creators respond by copying their hit, both its look and its topic, yet only copying the topic pays; copying the look adds nothing measurable. A simple model explains why. A hit is a lasting prize, so entering can make sense despite long odds, and because the platform’s statistics describe a hit without separating its causes, copying everything about it is the sensible response. Platforms could redirect creators’ effort toward what pays by showing whether a hit’s topic or its look drove its success.

JEL: L82, D83, J24, L15, C55

Do online narratives leave a measurable imprint on prices in markets for digital or cultural goods? This paper evaluates how community attention and sentiment relate to valuation in major Ethereum NFT collections after accounting for time effects, market-wide conditions, and persistent visual heterogeneity. Transaction data for large generative collections are merged with Reddit-based discourse measures available for 25 collections, covering 87,696 secondary-market sales from January 2021 through March 2025. Visual differences are absorbed by a transparent, within-collection standardized index built from explicit image traits and aggregated via PCA. Discourse is summarized at the collection-by-bin level using discussion intensity and lexicon-based tone measures, with smoothing to reduce noise when text volume is sparse. A mixed-effects specification with a Mundlak within-between decomposition separates persistent cross-collection differences from within-collection fluctuations. Valuations align most strongly with sustained collection-level attention and sentiment environments; within collections, short-horizon negativity is consistently associated with higher prices, and attention is most informative when measured as cumulative engagement over multiple prior windows.

Happiness is supposed to bring people together. Measured across whole populations it does not. A census counts people who formed unions decades ago alongside people deciding now, and no national mood recorded today can have moved the first group; averaging the two hides any effect on the second. Partnership prevalence is built here from United Nations population counts and matched to the Gallup World Poll and the World Happiness Report. The comparison is between age bands within a single census, so no fixed national characteristic can explain the result. Across 109 countries, a standard deviation of national Positive Affect raises the partnered share of cohorts at the ages of union formation by 1.94 points relative to older ones. That is about two fifths of what national income does, in the opposite direction. The effect is larger where a society sanctions enjoying life, on two independent measurement traditions that share no respondents and no era, and neither scales the response to income. Where consensual unions are consistently enumerated, affect also shifts the balance from marriage toward consensual union. Any transition measured as a stock hides a movement among the people still deciding.

JEL: I31, J12, O15, C25, Z13