We test for stereotyping—the exaggeration of representative traits—in a high-stakes economic environment. Using both surveys administered among undergraduates at the Ohio State University and large-scale nationally representative data, we measure how US freshmen perceive the relationship between college majors and occupations. We show that students greatly overestimate the likelihood that majors lead to their representative jobs (e.g., counselor for psychology, journalist for journalism). Using an implicit association test, we show that students associate majors with their representative careers and that these associations strongly predict belief biases, in line with a stereotyping mechanism. A simple equilibrium model of the labor market predicts that stereotyping reduces welfare by increasing misallocation, which correlational evidence on job/major mismatch corroborates. In a field experiment, we test a light-touch policy to reduce stereotyping and find significant effects on students’ intentions about what to study as well as the classes and majors they enroll in.

We study the role of public risk-sharing in markets where firms face substantial cost uncertainty, focusing on public reinsurance in health insurance. We develop a model where insurers internalize cost uncertainty through risk charges that raise effective marginal costs, and create a role for reinsurance. Public reinsurance lowers both expected costs and cost volatility, particularly for smaller insurers, reducing prices and enhancing competition. Using an event study of staggered state-level reinsurance programs, we show that public reinsurance leads insurers to lower prices and private reinsurance purchases, benefiting financially constrained insurers the most. Structural estimates indicate that risk charges account for a substantial share of the premium-cost wedge, and highlight public reinsurance's comparative advantage over premium subsidies by providing risk protection and enhancing competition. Our results underscore the importance of accounting for firms’ risk exposure in policy design and provide a general framework for understanding public risk-sharing policies.

I develop a unified theoretical framework with schools and residential choices to study the welfare consequences of public schools’ switching from the traditional neighborhood assignment to the deferred acceptance mechanism. I find that when families receive higher priorities at neighborhood schools, the deferred acceptance mechanism creates higher aggregate or utilitarian welfare than neighborhood assignment. Under a common school ranking assumption, I also show that the deferred acceptance creates higher aggregate welfare with neighborhood priorities than without them.

This paper develops a novel method to estimate inequality within a country based on what the country imports. If preferences are non-homothetic, rich and poor individuals of a country have different consumption profiles. Imports can thus inform about the income distribution in a country. The global availability of trade data allows us to estimate inequality using a single transparent and comparable method for a large sample of countries over time. Compared to conventional data, we feature an especially good coverage of developing countries. We provide a number of robustness checks and cross-validation exercises that show the good performance of our method.

I combine newly digitized data on confidence votes, party switches, and tax returns of Italian MPs from 2001 to 2022 to study how tenure-dependent benefits influence politicians’ behaviour and government stability. Using a difference-in-discontinuities design, I find that a tenure requirement for parliamentary pensions introduced in 2008 increased confidence votes for the government, switches to majority parties, and legislative effort. Consistent with agency model predictions, the policy discouraged internal party defiance that could jeopardize reelection chances and pension eligibility for a second term. Tenure requirements increase government stability but also strengthen party control, with ambiguous effects on voters’ welfare.

Rising polarisation heightens concerns about politicising regulatory agencies, prompting reassessment of the accountability–independence trade-off. We study whether perceived out-group oversight affects trust in regulation and market behaviour. Using US television transcripts, we show that media link agencies with presidents. We then conduct a field experiment (N=5,566) using a case where the EPA endorsed antibiotic spraying on citrus crops during both Trump’s and Biden’s presidencies. Holding science constant, out-group oversight reduces support for spraying by 26%, lowers trust in EPA’s evaluation, and increases donations to an opposing NGO by 15%. In an obfuscated follow-up, citrus demand is unchanged, but effects differ by consumption habits.

Reducing gender-specific commuting barriers in developing countries can have heterogeneous effects on women’s labor outcomes. We study a program that offers free bus rides for women in several Indian states (the Pink Slip program) using a synthetic difference-in-differences approach to examine impacts on transportation expenditures, time use, and labor supply. We find that the program substantially reduces bus-related expenditures. However, when considering all women together, we find no significant changes in travel time, household production, or labor supply. Beneath these aggregate effects, responses vary sharply by employment, marital status, and education. Unmarried women employed prior to the policy increase labor supply, while married women with low and medium levels of education reallocate time away from paid work toward household chores. Overall employment rates remain unchanged in the short run, highlighting that reducing commuting costs does not uniformly improve women’s labor market outcomes.

Ten years of idiosyncratic variation in school closure dates for all secondary schools in England are combined with administrative records of educational and criminal trajectories linked at the individual level to study the impact of the school schedule on the dynamics of youth crime. When school is not in session, students commit more property offences, more serious violent offences and fewer minor violent offences. Increased thefts, robberies and violent assaults drive these effects. This is novel evidence of strong multiple crime effects that arise from the protective factor of schooling and which affect not only the incidence of violence, but also its severity and its targets.