This paper studies the link between self-image and behavior among those who face stigma due to poverty and social exclusion. Using a randomized field experiment with sex workers in Kolkata (India), we examine whether a psychological intervention to mitigate adverse effects of internalized stigma can induce behavior change. We find significant improvements in participants’ self-image, their savings

This paper shows robust effects of trade shocks on within-firm wage inequality through changes in firm hierarchies. It uses two distinct research designs—one considering firm-level shocks to foreign demand and transportation costs, the other analyzing the Muslim boycott of Danish exports after the 2006 “Cartoon Crisis”. Consistent with knowledge-based and incentive-based hierarchy models, trade shocks

We exploit inheritance episodes to provide novel causal evidence on the long-run effects of a large financial windfall on saving behavior. For identification, we combine a longitudinal panel of administrative wealth reports with variation in the timing of sudden, unexpected parental deaths. We show that after inheritance net worth converges towards the path established before parental death, with only

I study the effects of prison quality on recidivism using individual-level data from Colombia. To estimate causal effects, I leverage the quasi-random assignment of inmates to newer, less crowded, and higher service prisons. For inmates assigned to newer facilities, I find that the probability of returning to prison within one year is 36% lower. Criminal capital, access to rehabilitation programs,

Using data on adults’ cognitive skills from 19 countries, this paper shows that labor market conditions during the education-to-work transition impact workers’ long-term skill development. Workers who faced higher unemployment rates at ages 18-25 have lower skills at ages 36-59. Unemployment rates at ages 26-35 do not have such an effect. Skill inequality is affected: those with less educated parents

We present evidence consistent with time-varying risk preferences among automobile drivers. Exploiting a unique dataset of agents’ high-frequency driving behavior collected by a mobile phone application, we show that drivers drive more conservatively following “near-miss” accidents. In a preferred specification, a nearmiss triggers a reduction in driving distance of 12.98 kilometers, in-car cellphone

As in other OECD countries, women in New Zealand earn substantially less than men with similar observable characteristics. In this paper, we use fifteen years of linked employer-employee data to examine different explanations for this gender wage gap. We find an overall gender wage gap between 20 and 28 percent, of which gender differences in sorting across occupations explain 9, across industries

Health-based drinking water violations affect about 1 in 12 Americans annually, the benefits of drinking water regulation are not well understood. I exploit plausibly exogenous variation in water quality violation timing to estimate the impacts on avoidance behavior and child outcomes. Using purchases of bottled water and common stomach remedies, emergency room visits for gastrointestinal illness,

How large is volatility due to large firms? We answer this question through both reduced-form analysis and a calibration exercise. First, we exploit time and spatial variation across German cities and show that i) higher concentration is associated with more persistent local business cycles, ii) local concentration Granger-causes local employment volatility. From a business cycle perspective, we find

This paper introduces forward-looking measures of the network connectedness of fears in the financial system, arising due to the good and bad beliefs of market participants about uncertainty that spreads unequally across a network of banks. We argue that this asymmetric network structure extracted from call and put traded option prices of the main U.S. banks contains valuable information for predicting

The principle that people should be held personally responsible for the consequences of their choices is a fundamental moral ideal in Western societies. We report from a large-scale experimental study of how far-reaching this principle is for inequality acceptance. We show that third-party spectators violate minimal conditions for a morally relevant choice when making redistributive decisions for two

We survey a representative sample of US households to study how exposure to the COVID-19 stock market crash affects expectations and planned behavior. Wealth shocks are associated with upward adjustments of expectations about retirement age, desired working hours, and household debt, but have only small effects on expected spending. We provide correlational and experimental evidence that beliefs about

We evaluate a program that recruited local entrepreneurs to open and operate new schools in 200 underserved villages in Sindh, Pakistan. School operators received a per-student subsidy to provide tuition-free primary education, and in half the villages received a higher subsidy for females. The program increased enrollment by 32 percentage points, and test scores by 0.63 standard deviations, with no

Equal access to voting is a core feature of democratic government. Using data from hundreds of thousands of smartphone users, we quantify a racial disparity in voting wait times across a nationwide sample of polling places during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Relative to entirely-white neighborhoods, residents of entirely-black neighborhoods waited 29% longer to vote and were 74% more likely

We assess the role of monetary incentives in a mission-oriented organization by randomly assigning workers to one of two bonus schemes, incentivizing either the performance of a microcredit program (bottom line) or the empowerment of clients (mission). We find that the credit bonus improved credit-related outcomes but undermined the social mission, while the social bonus did not harm the bottom line

Medicare reimburses health care providers for the drugs they administer. Since 2005, it has reimbursed based on the past price of the drug. Reimbursement on past prices could motivate manufacturers to set higher launch prices because providers become less sensitive to price and because provider reimbursement is higher if past prices were higher. Using data on drug launch prices between 1999 and 2010

We show that academics with experience in government jobs generate spillovers for their early-career colleagues. Our template is the National Science Foundation rotation program in which the agency employs academics, called rotators, on loan from their university. Within two years after the rotator's return, fresh assistant professors in her department increase their research resources materially and

We examine the macroeconomic effects of forward guidance shocks at the zero lower bound. Empirically, we identify forward guidance shocks using unexpected changes in futures contracts around monetary policy announcements. We then embed these policy shocks in a vector autoregression to trace out their macroeconomic implications. Forward guidance shocks that lower expected future policy rates lead to

We study how career and wage incentives affect labor productivity through self-selection and incentive effect channels using a two-stage field experiment in Malawi. First, recent secondary school graduates were hired with either career or wage incentives. After employment, half of the workers with career incentives randomly received wage incentives, and half of the workers with wage incentives randomly

We provide new evidence on the cyclicality of employers' real labor costs using BLS establishment job data for the 1982–2018 period. Average straight-time wages have become countercyclical since the financial crisis and the subsequent Great Recession. So have benefit expenditures and overall labor costs, as well as major benefit expenditures, including health insurance and Social Security. Consistent

This paper proposes a method to estimate unconditional quantile treatment effects (QTEs) given one or more treatment variables, which may be discrete or continuous, even when it is necessary to condition on covariates. The estimator, generalized quantile regression (GQR), is developed in an instrumental variable framework for generality to permit estimation of unconditional QTEs for endogenous policy

Each new radial highway serving large U.S. metropolitan areas decentralized 14% to 16% of central city working residents and 4% to 6% of jobs in the 1960–2000 period. Model calibrations yield implied elasticities of central city total factor productivity to central city employment relative to suburban employment of 0.04 to 0.09, meaning a large fraction of agglomeration economies operates at submetropolitan-area

This paper measures gender bias in discussions about women versus men in an online professional forum. I study the content of posts that refer to each gender and the transitions in the topics between consecutive posts once attention turns to one gender or the other. Discussions about women tend to emphasize their personal characteristics instead of professional accomplishments. Posts about women are

The most commonly employed paradigms for decision making under risk are expected utility, prospect theory, and regret theory. We examine the simple heuristic of maximizing the probability of being ahead, which in some natural economic situations may be in contradiction to all three of the above fundamental paradigms. We test whether this heuristic, which we call probability dominance (PD), affects

In this paper, we analyze how the physical layout of cities affects innovation by influencing the organization of knowledge exchange. We exploit a novel data set covering all census block groups in the contiguous United States with information on innovation outcomes, street infrastructure, as well as population and workforce characteristics. To deal with concerns of omitted variable bias, we apply

We examine price negotiation in the payment card industry by exploiting a unique merchant-, industry-, and city-level dataset. Motivated by the substantial variation in acquirer fees and the heterogeneous merchant card transactions, we use Nash bargaining to model the negotiation over the acquirer fee between an acquirer and a merchant. We find that the merchants secure a larger incremental surplus

We investigate the effects of early-life medical treatments on the treated children and their families. We use a regression discontinuity design that exploits changes in medical treatments across the very low birth weight (VLBW) cutoff. Using administrative data from Denmark, we establish that VLBW children have better health and higher test scores. We find that these benefits spill over to other family

We introduce NLK, a model that connects the Nash equilibrium (NE) and Level-K. It allows a player in a game to believe that her opponent may be either less or as sophisticated as, she is, a view supported in psychology. We apply NLK to data from five published papers on static, dynamic, and auction games. NLK provides different predictions than those of the NE and Level-K; moreover, a simple version

We develop a Bayesian latent factor model of the joint long-run evolution of GDP per capita for 113 countries over the 118 years from 1900 to 2017. We find considerable heterogeneity in rates of convergence, including rates for some countries that are so slow that they might not converge (or diverge) in century-long samples, and a sparse correlation pattern (“convergence clubs”) between countries.

Local pollution exposures disproportionately impact minority households, but the root causes remain unclear. This study conducts a correspondence experiment on a major online housing platform to test whether housing discrimination constrains minority access to housing options in markets with significant sources of airborne chemical toxics. We find that renters with African American or Hispanic/LatinX

Prior to the racial integration of schools in the southern United States, predominantly African American schools were staffed almost exclusively by African American teachers as well, and teaching constituted an extraordinarily large share of professional employment among southern Blacks. The large-scale desegregation of southern schools occurring after passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act represented