Damages from tropical storms are enormous and predicted to increase with climate change. This study uses high-frequency data to investigate typhoons’ effects through information channels on Taiwan’s wholesale vegetable market during the 1996-2014 period. We first identify effects on prices and quantities during storms’ striking periods and further separate price effects into those due, respectively, to supply and demand shifts. The results show that for typhoons that make landfall, prices rise significantly during the striking period, and the decomposition results indicate that most of the price effects during periods with warnings but no landfall are due to demand shifts, which supports evidence of precautionary purchases by consumers. However, during the landfall period, the price effect is mainly driven by decreased supply. In addition, we find that typhoon effects differ between specific vegetables, and the magnitude of precautionary purchase is correlated with expected damage to those vegetables. Consumers also make more precautionary purchases when they face higher-intensity typhoons or learn typhoons will make landfall within 24 hours, and such prior information related to intensity or landfall urgency can also amplify early harvest effects by farmers.

An ongoing debate regarding the evolution of morality is whether other species show precursory moral behavior. The veil of ignorance (VOI) paradigm is often used to elicit human moral judgment but has never been tested in other primates. We study the division of resources behind the VOI in Formosan macaques. Monkeys choose the equal division more often than what pure selfishness would imply, suggesting a degree of impartiality. To better understand this impartiality, we measure a monkey’s reactions to two directions of inequity: one regarding inequity to its advantage and the other to its disadvantage. We find that disadvantageous inequity aversion correlates with the degree of impartiality behind the VOI. Therefore, seemingly impartial behavior could result from a primitive negative reaction to being disadvantaged. This suggests a mechanism to explain a tendency toward impartiality.

This research uses a difference-in-differences framework to investigate the effect of new risk information on housing prices in Taiwan. The results show that this information changed individuals’ subjective risk perceptions, so that housing prices in the highest-risk areas dropped, but only temporarily in the first three months after the disclosure. This information effect happened for those apartments lacking certain earthquake-resistant characteristics. In addition, we investigate the dynamics of the effect around the boundary. We demonstrate that individuals were able to form continuous risk beliefs based on discrete information, and the housing prices dropped more sharply for apartments located closer to the center of the highest-risk area. Furthermore, individuals had updated their risk beliefs differently for apartments with different levels of earthquake resistance. For apartments with the least earthquake resistance, the immediate price drops were larger, and the housing prices returned to normal more slowly, relative to the safer apartments. Most notably, the effect did not disappear at all for those apartments with the least earthquake resistance that were also located in the center of the highest-risk area.

This paper examines the effects of incentivizing industrial users to reduce their electricity consumption using demand response auctions, in which the opportunity costs of electricity consumption depend on auction outcomes. Using data on bids, auction outcomes, and hourly electricity consumption from steel producers in Taiwan, this paper shows that failing to consider firms' strategic bidding behavior can lead to an overestimation of electricity reduction by at least 50%. We show that the overestimation works mainly through an adverse selection effect, in which firms bid low to win auctions when they anticipate low electricity consumption.

This paper examines the impact of the 2016 tax reform in Taiwan on the housing market, specifically focusing on the transition from transaction-based taxes to capital gains taxes. Before the reform, real estate transaction taxes were determined by the transaction price, whereas post-reform, they were based on capital gains. This study uses a regression discontinuity design to quantify the effects of the tax reform. The results show that this reform led to a reduction in capital gains, indicating a "lock-in" effect for homeowners. For transactions with a holding period of less than two years, the capital gains compared to the original purchase price dropped from 30% to 10%. This change is mainly because the initial purchase price went up, which implies that some homeowners who bought their properties at a lower price chose not to sell them.

We utilize shopping receipt lotteries that almost every shopper participates in and complete administrative data in Taiwan to examine the effect of cash windfalls on stock market participation. We find that each million TWD (around 35,000 USD) windfall gain from winning receipt lotteries increases the stock market participation probability by roughly 0.76%, which is translated into 4.34% of the average level. Windfall gain also increases the number and value of shares winners hold next year. The effect is stronger among winners that are younger, without kids, and with lower wealth, suggesting that financial constraints may still be potential barriers to stock market participation. Finally, we also estimate the windfall effect by utilizing the typical lottery data. Our results suggest that the effect of per million TWD windfall gain from typical lotteries on the stock market participation probability is 22.36% lower than that from shopping receipt lotteries.

This research uses listing prices on StubHub, a secondary market for sports tickets, to show that sellers have reference-dependent preferences, affected by two types of reference points: face values and previous lowest transaction prices within the same section of the stadium. First, I show evidence of the bunching of listing prices at the reference points, which is consistent with the prediction from the theoretical model. Then, I use a structural model to estimate the parameters of the gain-loss utility and simulate results for the case without reference-dependent preferences. Compared with the actual data, the counterfactual results indicate that the listing prices for game tickets will be lower by around 19.30% on the last day before the game if sellers have no reference-dependent preferences. Furthermore, the probability of a typical listing being sold increases from 0.43 to 0.48 during the last two weeks. In addition, I use the number of listings in a season to proxy for the size of sellers, and the results show that big sellers are less likely to be affected by the face value than small sellers, which is consistent with the previous literature’s notion that market experience can eliminate the effect of reference points. However, sellers of different sizes are affected by the previous lowest transaction prices in a similar way, which suggests that market experience might only eliminate the effects of reference points such as the status quo, and not the effects of reference points such as recent outcomes.