Theory predicts that outsourcing public services to the private sector can reduce costs and improve efficiency, but can also induce cost-cutting and compromise quality. We assess the Brazilian “Organizações Sociais de Saude” model (OSS), which outsources management of public hospital services to the private sector while the state remains the residual claimant. We show that this enhances hospital production and operational efficiency without adverse effects on hospital quality and equity. Increased inpatient production addresses previously unmet demand, expanding local access to hospital care and reducing population mortality. Performance gains arise from improved operational efficiency achieved through increased hospital management capacity. This facilitates staffing adjustments, favoring higher-skilled personnel, dismissing lower-productivity staff, and adopting flexible, performance-tied employment contracts. Effects are larger among private organizations with more management experience, underscoring returns to managerial capacity. Our findings show that incentive-ownership structures can address the quantity-quality trade-off in public service delivery, even when contracts are incomplete and quality is hard to measure.

We study rainmaking as an instrumental religious belief. We present a model in which a religious leader tries to persuade people to believe. Praying for rain can persuade only where the hazard of rainfall during a dry spell is increasing over time, so that prayer is most likely to succeed when people most want rain. We present evidence from prayers for rain in Murcia, Spain, where the hazard rate is increasing, that the church’s prayers for rain predict rainfall over two centuries. To generalize this finding, we gather an original data set of whether ethnic groups around the world traditionally prayed for rain. We find that ethnic groups facing an increasing rainfall hazard are 47% more likely to pray for rain, consistent with our model’s prediction that societies are more likely to pray for rain where prayer is persuasive.

How does proximity to coworkers affect training and productivity? We study software engineers at a Fortune 500 firm from 2019 to 2024, leveraging two shocks to proximity: (i) the office closures in 2020 and (ii) the subsequent return-to-office mandates in 2022 and 2023. In both cases, co-located teams experienced bigger changes in proximity than distributed ones, facilitating difference-in-differences designs. We find that sitting near teammates increases coding feedback by 18.3% and improves code quality. Gains are concentrated among less-tenured and younger employees, who are building human capital. However, there is a tradeoff: experienced engineers write less code when sitting near teammates. In national US data, we find evidence that the rise of remote work has had scarring effects on young college graduates. In remotable jobs, young graduates’ unemployment rate increased relative to older graduates’ post-pandemic (2022−2024) compared to pre-pandemic (2017−2019), a pattern we do not observe in non-remotable jobs.

This paper investigates how a government should manage international reserves when it faces the risk of a rollover crisis. We ask, should the government accumulate reserves or reduce debt to make itself less vulnerable? We show that the optimal policy entails initially reducing debt, followed by a subsequent increase in both debt and reserves as the government approaches a safe zone. Furthermore, we find that issuing additional debt to accumulate reserves can lead to a reduction in sovereign spreads. Evidence from a panel of emerging economies is consistent with these predictions: increases in reserves financed by public external borrowing are associated with lower spreads, and reserve holdings are not systematically drawn down during crisis episodes.

We study the effect of risk on how firms organize their supply chains. We use transaction-level data on U.S. manufacturing imports to construct a novel measure of input sourcing risk based on the historical volatility of ocean shipping times. Our measure isolates the unexpected component of shipping times that is induced by weather conditions along more than 331,000 maritime routes. We first document that unexpected shipping delays significantly reduce importers’ sales, profits, and employment. We then show that firms actively diversify weather risk by using more routes and foreign suppliers, although their import values decline. To rationalize these findings, we introduce shipping time risk into a general equilibrium model of importing with firm heterogeneity. Our quantitative analysis predicts substantial costs for the U.S. economy associated with supply chain risk.

Multiple hypothesis testing (MHT) practices vary widely, without consensus on which are appropriate when. This article provides an economic foundation for these practices designed to capture leading examples, such as regulatory approval on the basis of clinical trials. MHT adjustments are appropriate in our framework to the extent that research costs are invariant to the number of hypotheses. Control of average size, as for example via a Bonferroni correction, emerges in the limit case where all costs are fixed; in the opposite limit, where costs vary in proportion to the hypothesis count, no correction is needed. We illustrate implications by calculating explicit critical values using data on actual costs in the drug approval process and in program evaluation research; these suggest that some MHT adjustment is warranted in these applications, but not as much as implied by standard practice.

Linear instrumental variable estimators, such as two-stage least squares (TSLS), are commonly interpreted as estimating non-negatively weighted averages of causal effects, referred to as local average treatment effects (LATEs). We examine whether the LATE interpretation actually applies to the types of TSLS specifications that are used in practice. We show that if the specification includes covariates—which most empirical work does—then the LATE interpretation does not apply in general. Instead, the TSLS estimator will, in general, reflect treatment effects for both compliers and always/never-takers, and some treatment effects for the always/never-takers will necessarily be negatively weighted. We show that the only specifications that have a LATE interpretation are “saturated” specifications that control for covariates nonparametrically, implying that such specifications are both sufficient and necessary for TSLS to have a LATE interpretation, at least without additional parametric assumptions. This result is concerning because, as we document, empirical researchers almost never control for covariates nonparametrically, and rarely discuss or justify parametric specifications of covariates. We apply our results to thirteen empirical studies and find strong evidence that the LATE interpretation of TSLS is far from accurate for the types of specifications actually used in practice. We offer concrete recommendations for practice motivated by our theoretical and empirical results.

This paper reconsiders the question of optimal labor income taxes for the very rich in the context of a flexible moral hazard (FMH) model. In this setting, risk is not exogenous. Rather, each agent can affect the probabilities of all possible income outcomes by allocating a fixed time endowment across a variety of distinct tasks. I prove that the optimal income tax rates on high-end earners and the optimal Pareto tail index of the pre-tax labor income distribution are both endogenously determined by agent preferences. In particular, a society with less risk-averse agents will find it optimal to impose a lower tax rate on the rich, even though its members’ choices give rise to a smaller Pareto right tail index. In contrast, this kind of negative co-movement between inequality and optimal tax rates is a suboptimal response in the classical Mirrlees (1971)-Diamond (1998)-Saez (2001) setup to changes in the exogenous distribution of skills.

Discrete choice data allow researchers to recover differences in utilities, but these differences may not suffice to identify policy-relevant counterfactuals of interest. In fact, in the case of dynamic discrete choice models, only a narrow set of counterfactuals are point-identified. In this paper, we explore how much one can learn about counterfactual outcomes of interest within this framework. We focus on the partial identification of counterfactuals, while allowing for (mild) model restrictions that can gradually shrink the identified set. We derive bounds for low-dimensional objects (such as average welfare) as arguments of optimization programs, along with a uniformly valid inference procedure. Furthermore, we develop new and tractable computational tools and algorithms suitable for dealing with high-dimensional problems like this. Finally, we illustrate in Monte Carlos, as well as an empirical exercise of firms’ export decisions, the informativeness of the identified sets, and we assess the impact of (common) model restrictions on results.

An agent samples projects over time, observing quality for each, while a principal can select at most one. The principal values quality, whereas the agent only wants a project chosen. Transfers are unavailable, but the principal can verify quality by paying a cost. We fully characterize the dynamics of verification by determining optimal mechanisms for this problem. With a low verification cost and a long horizon, the optimal mechanism involves a deterministic selection rule that initially discriminates on quality but chooses a project irrespective of its quality at a deadline. Verification occurs with an intermediate probability before the deadline, declining over time. We show how these conclusions change if the verification cost is high or the horizon is short, and under certain forms of imperfect commitment. Our analysis provides guidelines on how dynamics interact with the benefits of verification.

We analyse discontinuous Markovian strategies for differential games. The best response correspondence uniquely maps almost all profiles of opponents' strategies back to the strategy space. We thus make Markov-perfect equilibria in a wide class of differential games well-behaved, resolving a long-standing open problem. We provide a readily applicable necessary and sufficient condition for best responses and Markov-perfect Nash equilibria. We demonstrate our methods in a canonical model of non-cooperative mitigation of climate change. Our approach provides novel, economically important results: we obtain the entire set of symmetric Markov-perfect equilibria, and demonstrate that the best equilibria can yield a major welfare improvement over the equilibrium which previous literature has focused on. International climate negotiations can be seen as being about coordination on good equilibria, rather than about bargaining over the limited surplus available in a dynamic prisoner's dilemma.

The seminal paper by Baron and Ferejohn (1989) leaves significant gaps in our understanding of open rule bargaining. We aim to fill these gaps by providing a fresh analysis of open rule bargaining. Our approach relies on an appealing class of stationary equilibria. In this class, we show that delays tend to be longer and allocations tend to be less egalitarian than originally predicted by Baron and Ferejohn. Our results shed new light on the efficiency and fairness implications of using an open vs. closed rule in legislatures and of bargaining processes in general.

We provide the first estimates of intergenerational income mobility using tax data for a large developing country, namely Brazil. We measure formal income from tax and payroll data, and we train machine learning models on census and survey data to predict informal income. We quantify the estimation bias resulting from income imputation and other sources of measurement error, and show that such bias remains negligible in our context. A 10 percentile increase in parental income rank is associated on average with a 5.5 percentile increase in child income rank, with considerable variation across sociodemographic groups and geographical areas.

This paper connects changes in employer characteristics through job transitions to employee earnings following mergers and acquisitions. Using firm balance sheet data linked to individual earnings data in Canada and a matched difference-in-differences design, we find that earnings of workers at target firms decrease after M&As relative to control workers, largely driven by those who move to other firms. Workers leaving targets move to larger and more profitable firms, but still experience wage declines. These decreased earnings are also concentrated among workers with longer tenure. These results are consistent with workers losing valuable match-specific premia after M&A-induced job transitions.

Urban forests are ubiquitous, yet their impacts and values remain largely unknown. We study a massive urban afforestation policy in Beijing that planted 1/3 of a million acres of greenery in less than a decade. We conduct a remote-sensing audit of the program, finding that it contributes to a substantial greening up of the city. This causes significant downwind air quality improvement, reducing average PM2.5 concentration at city population hubs by 4.2%. Rapid vegetation growth unexpectedly led to a 7.4% increase in pollen exposure. Analysis of medical claims data shows that increased aeroallergens triggered emergency room visits, mirroring pollution effects though much less severe. Monetized net health benefits of the program amount to 1.5% of the city’s GDP. Urban forests are only partially capitalized in housing values, with buyers mainly appreciating proximity to green spaces but not the air quality improvements they bring.

After remaining flat for decades, labor productivity at U.S. restaurants surged 15% during the COVID pandemic. The surge has persisted. We explore this using mobile phone data tracking visits and spending at 100,000 limited-service restaurants. It cannot be explained by scale economies, market power, or mechanical consequences of COVID demand fluctuations. However, restaurants’ productivity growth is strongly correlated with the share of their customers visiting for 10 minutes or less, which rose considerably during COVID and persisted. This restaurant-level relationship between labor productivity and customer dwell time is large enough to explain most of the aggregate productivity increase.

Nonprofit organizations rely on donations from large competitive marketplaces to provide key social service goods. Most research focuses on competition in output markets without considering philanthropic markets where nonprofits make decisions about how much effort to put into fundraising. We develop and estimate a model that highlights the strategic nature of fundraising, showing that rival NP’s fundraising responses can be strategic complements or substitutes. We find evidence of strategic substitutes. NPs demonstrate nontrivial strategic responses to rival’s fundraising and, in totality, the across sector impacts are important to consider. Counterfactual exercises show that reducing competition decreases equilibrium fundraising levels.

This paper investigates the long-term impacts of China’s nationwide public health campaigns targeting malaria, measles, and meningitis between the 1960s and 1980s. Exploiting regional variation in precampaign disease prevalence across birth cohorts, we show that these interventions generated sizable improvements in education, cognition, health, and income. As an illustrative case, individuals from high-malaria regions who were fully exposed to the eradication campaign attained about 0.5 additional years of schooling and earned over 10% higher income in adulthood, with cognitive and schooling gains explaining a substantial share of the income effects. Extending the same approach to measles and meningitis vaccination campaigns reveals comparably large benefits, with internal rates of return ranging from 21% to 34%. Together, these findings highlight the lasting socioeconomic returns to early-life health interventions and underscore the role of public health as a foundation for human capital accumulation and long-run economic growth.

Since 1970, the share of Black individuals living in suburbs of large cities has risen from 16% to 36%. We first show that Black suburbanization has led to major changes in neighborhoods, accounting for the majority of recent increases in both the average Black individual’s neighborhood quality and income segregation within the Black population. We then use an accounting exercise to show that changes in relative suburban amenities and housing prices explain a large share of Black suburbanization, while regional reallocation, changing educational attainment, and gentrification of Black city neighborhoods play only minor roles.

This paper provides novel evidence on how dietary habits – a key health behavior – are transmitted across generations, exploiting unique grocery transaction data linked with administrative records. We document strong intergenerational persistence in dietary habits, exceeding that of income, and consider several channels that might explain this pattern. Specifically, we find that socioeconomic status and geography account for only a small share of the transmission. Combined with the absence of a dietary response following a parent’s unexpected lifestyle-related death, these findings underscore the importance of early-life influences and habit formation.

Market power is costly to build and, once established, is typically persistent and difficult to change. This paper investigates the impact of large economic shocks (serious epidemics) on the redistribution of market power in manufacturing industries. Using a model of firms’ dynamic decisions on production, pricing, and inventory holding, we demonstrate the importance of inventory stock and demand uncertainty in understanding market power and propose a new measure of market power. We find that the 2003 SARS shock in China significantly reduced the market power of firms in SARS-impacted areas. This effect is long lasting. SARS also substantially increased the inventory of affected firms, which partially contributed to the redistribution of market power.

Against a backdrop of sharply rising inequality, the Tokyo Round of the GATT resulted in a 1.6 percentage point reduction in average US tariffs – larger than CUSFTA, NAFTA, and the liberalization accompanying the granting of PNTR to China. We construct a novel IV based on the so-called “Swiss formula” that governed the Tokyo Round tariff liberalization to provide evidence of its effects on imports and inequality. Instrumented tariff reductions explain approximately 20% of the rise in income inequality between non-production and production workers between 1979 and 1988. This effect is largest among women, workers in routine occupations, and workers in more technology-intensive industries, suggesting a complementarity between trade liberalization and skill-biased technological change.

We examine firm responses to state hiring and investment subsidies. We leverage institutional features of the California Competes Tax Credit (CCTC), a large-scale business incentive program that incorporates best practices from prior job creation policies. The CCTC award selection procedure combines formula-based and discretionary components. Leveraging applicant score eligibility cutoffs in a regression discontinuity design and taking advantage of rich longitudinal microdata on establishments and their parent firms, we find that businesses expand employment in California in response to CCTC awards. There is little evidence that these expansions come at the expense of firms’ operations in other states. Our results suggest that targeted and audited hiring and investment subsidies can be effective in promoting local business expansions without inducing significant cross-state displacement effects.

We study the role of war bonds and inflation in post-WWII federal elections. After WWII, major bouts of inflation in 1946-48 and 1950-51 depressed the real returns of the bonds sold to households during the war. In a difference-in-differences framework, we find that counties with higher war bond purchases shifted their votes towards the Republican Party in postwar elections. To address the endogeneity of war bond purchases, we use an instrumental variables design, and obtain similar results. Bond ownership raised the saliency of inflation, and the severe rise in prices after the war triggered a backlash against the incumbent Democrats.

We document that in response to intensified competition from China in the U.S., poor countries reduce their export prices relative to rich countries, consistent with conventional wisdom. Interestingly, however, the opposite is true for export quantities. To reconcile these facts, we develop and estimate a general equilibrium model of trade featuring (i) cross-country heterogeneity in the ability to produce high-quality goods and (ii) a two-dimensional Bertrand competition on price and quality. Our model explains the empirical facts by showing that rich countries have a comparative advantage in quality upgrading, whereas a nested model without quality cannot do so.

We study how regional housing market disruptions spill over across US local markets through multimarket firm networks. Using granular barcode-level data linked to producer information, we exploit variation in firms’ exposure to local house price declines. A firm’s local sales respond more strongly to indirect housing price declines in its other markets than to direct local declines. The barcode-level data reveal a novel uniform product replacement mechanism: Firms respond to adverse shocks by replacing higher-value products with lower-value alternatives uniformly across all markets. This propagates regional demand shocks through the supply side, with new implications for regional economics.

How do import tariffs affect employment? We develop an empirical strategy to identify the effects of tariffs using a difference-in-differences strategy, comparing antidumping (AD) investigations resulting in AD tariffs to those not resulting in AD tariffs. We find that an AD tariff decreases imports and increases employment in the protected sector. Moreover, employment in downstream firms decreases, while upstream firms are unaffected because the protected sector sources inputs abroad. Using a model to quantify the aggregate effects, we find that the Brazilian AD policy increased employment by 0.06% at a welfare loss of 2.4%.

This study explores the relationship between legalized sports gambling, unexpected emotional cues stemming from NFL home team upset losses and reported intimate partner violence (IPV). Using 1995–2022 crime data from NIBRS, replicating and extending Card and Dahl (2011)’s model, we find that legalized gambling increases the impact of upset losses on IPV by 10 percentage points. The e!ect is larger in states with mobile betting, where higher bets were placed, around paydays, and for teams on a winning streak. These results suggest that financial losses from gambling amplify emotional reactions to unexpected team losses.

Pharmacy benefit managers dominate the U.S. pharmaceutical market but are controversial and poorly understood. We analyze PBMs as market intermediaries that operate formulary contests in which on-patent brand-drug makers compete for favorable placement by offering rebates off list price. These formulary contests deliver efficiency gains compared to drug makers selling directly to consumers; PBMs capture some of these gains. Our approach answers key questions regarding the determinants of efficiency, rebates, list prices, and PBM market power in the pharmaceutical market. Our analysis also explains how common contracting practices, federal regulations, and incentives within formulary contests can undermine market efficiency.

Counterfactuals in quantitative trade and spatial models are functions of the current state of the world and the model parameters. Common practice treats the current state of the world as perfectly observed, but there is good reason to believe that it is measured with error. This paper provides tools for quantifying uncertainty about counterfactuals when the current state of the world is measured with error. I recommend an empirical Bayes approach to uncertainty quantification, and show that it is both practical and theoretically justified.

We investigate the role financial conditions play in the composition of U.S. growth-at-risk. We document that, by a wide margin, growth-at-risk is investment-at-risk. That is, if financial conditions indicate U.S. real GDP growth will be in the lower tail of its conditional distribution, we know that quantitatively, the main contributor is a decline in investment. Consumption contributes under extreme financial stress. Government spending and net exports do not play a role. We show that leverage plays a key role in determining both consumption- and investment-at-risk, which provides support to the financial accelerator mechanism proposed by Bernanke et al. (1999).

This paper uncovers that input tariff reductions result in less domestic innovation, but standard models of trade ensure a positive correlation between importing and innovation. Hence, the paper develops a dynamic framework with a task-specific laboraugmenting productivity and a non-homothetic import demand system to rationalize this finding. The model implies that input liberalization enables firms to use cheaper intermediate imports as a substitute for self-made inputs, a strategy that decreases marginal production costs but also discourages firms from investing in their own inhouse varieties. Finally, the paper compares the effectiveness of trade and innovation policies in boosting aggregate productivity growth.

We use administrative data to measure sibling spillovers on academic performance before and after the introduction of Free Secondary Education (FSE) in Tanzania. Prior to FSE, students whose older siblings narrowly passed the secondary school entrance exam were less likely to go to secondary school themselves; with FSE, the effect became positive. A triple-differences analysis, using geographic variation in FSE exposure, shows that FSE caused the reversal. Mechanism analyses suggest that changes in parental investments were a more likely channel for this reversal than direct sibling interactions. By alleviating financial constraints, FSE allowed households to invest in more children.

In 2001, Germany abolished public occupational disability insurance (ODI)—the second tier of its public DI system—for cohorts born after 1960. Using administrative data, we first document that, in the long run, overall DI inflows declined by roughly one-third. Second, using representative survey data, we document at best modest ODI insurance take-up responses in the private individual, risk-rated market, which lacks guaranteed issue. Third, an equilibrium model incorporating interactions between the public safety net, the first-tier public DI, and the private market reveals that coverage denials and weak insurance demand, driven by complementary social insurance, can explain the modest private ODI take-up response. Coverage gradients by income and health are thus substantial. Finally, counterfactual simulations highlight the limited scope of incremental reforms.

This paper investigates fairness perceptions of extreme income inequality generated in winner-take-all competitions. Two large-scale experiments with more than 7,000 participants from the general population of the U.S. show that extreme earnings inequality is widely accepted, even when the winner only slightly outperforms the runner-up. The effect of the winning margin on inequality acceptance is modest compared to the effect of shifting the source of inequality from luck to winning by the smallest possible margin. The experimental choices are systematically associated with broader fairness attitudes and policy preferences, including support for higher taxation of top earners and redistributive economic policy.

This study examines the impact of school choice on academic achievement. I use differences in the number of schools across similar Romanian towns, generating variation in school choice for local students, who compete for seats via test scores. I find that more school choice results in increased sorting of students by admission scores across different schools. Sorting widens achievement gaps between high- and low-admission score students. High-scorers having access to better teachers and peer effects are the primary factors explaining these widening gaps. Last, between-school competition via school choice does not increase average achievement levels.

We study treatment-effect estimation using panel data. The treatment may be nonbinary, nonabsorbing, and the outcome may be affected by treatment lags. We make a parallel-trends assumption and propose event-study estimators of the effect of being exposed to a weakly higher treatment dose for ℓ periods. We also propose normalized estimators that estimate a weighted average of the effects of the current treatment and its lags. We also analyze commonly used two-way, fixed-effects regressions. Unlike our estimators, they can be biased in the presence of heterogeneous treatment effects. A local-projection version of those regressions is biased even with homogeneous effects.

In 2001 a large and sustained supply shock halted a heroin epidemic in Australia. We use drug offenses to identify individual opioid users and examine how the shock affected their mortality risks and criminal activity over the next eight years. Initially, gains from fewer overdoses are offset by drug substitution and more crime, including homicides. Most adverse effects dissipate over time, whereas persistent mortality reductions save the lives of around one in 48 individuals in our sample. Our results demonstrate that reducing the supply of illicit opioids can lead to meaningful longer-term improvements, even when the short-term effects are ambiguous.

P-hacking is prevalent in reality but absent from classical hypothesis-testing theory. We therefore build a model of hypothesis testing that accounts for p-hacking. From the model, we derive critical values such that, if they are used to determine significance, and if p-hacking adjusts to the new significance standards, then spurious significant results do not occur more often than intended. Because of p-hacking, such robust critical values are larger than classical critical values. In the model calibrated to medical science, the robust critical value is the classical critical value for the same test statistic but with one-fifth of the significance level.

This paper describes how to reparametrize low-dimensional factor models with one or two factors to fit weak identification theory developed for generalized method of moments models. Some identification-robust tests, here called “plug-in” tests, require a reparametrization to distinguish weakly identified parameters from strongly identified parameters. The reparametrizations in this paper make plug-in tests available for subvector hypotheses in low-dimensional factor models with one or two factors. Simulations show that the plug-in tests are less conservative than identification-robust tests that use the original parametrization. An empirical application to a factor model of parental investments in children is included.

Between 1883 and 1919, Andrew Carnegie funded the construction of more than 1,500 public libraries across the United States, reducing the costs of accessing knowledge for millions. We study the effect of these libraries on innovation. Patenting in recipient places increased on average by 10%–12% in the 20 years following library construction relative to a novel control group of cities that applied for but did not build libraries. We show that access to scientific knowledge and increased collaboration opportunities are possible mechanisms.

In markets with asymmetric information between sellers and buyers, feedback mechanisms are important to increase market efficiency and reduce the informational disadvantage of buyers. Feedback mechanisms might work because of self-selection of more trustworthy sellers into markets with such mechanisms or because of reputational concerns of sellers. We show in a field experiment how to disentangle self-selection from reputation effects. Based on 476 taxi rides with four different types of taxis, we find strong evidence for reputation effects but little support for self-selection effects. We discuss policy implications of our findings.

We study the influence of workplace peers on a high-stakes, irreversible retirement plan choice. Midcareer U.S. military personnel choose between higher future pension payouts or an immediate bonus plus lower future payouts. With peers defined as those who have locked in their choices and personnel assignment rules ensuring that peer groups are exogenously formed, we capture the causal impact of peers. Greater peer take-up of the bonus, which is difficult to compare to the alternative plan but often extremely costly over one’s lifetime, discourages choosers from selecting the bonus. Peers have special impact within professional, race, and gender groups.

We propose a quantitative spatial model featuring heterogeneous worker groups and their travel to consume nontradable goods and services. We consider the opening of the Downtown Line in Singapore, which connected regions where high-income households have residential amenities to where nontraded sectors are productive. Leveraging transit farecard data, we show that high-income workers saw large welfare gains but low-income workers gained little. Everyone enjoyed improved access to consumption opportunities, but low-income jobs in nontradables moved to less attractive workplaces. Abstracting from consumption travel understates the disparate impact across worker groups threefold.

We present a new data set we built based on Swiss rich lists going back to 1989. We show, among other things, that 60% of the super-rich are heirs—a fraction twice as large as in the United States—and that wealth mobility at the very top has declined significantly. We find that top 0.01% wealth shares are higher than what previous estimates based on wealth tax statistics suggest. At the same time, we argue that rich list data lead to overestimating wealth inequality. Although rich lists are valuable to study the super-rich, we recommend using reported wealth figures with caution.

Does monetary policy influence who becomes a homeowner? Lower-income home buyers may be more sensitive to interest rates, at least in part because they more frequently come up against binding payment-to-income ratio constraints in credit decisions. Exploiting the timing of high-frequency observations of individual mortgage rate locks around monetary policy shocks, I find that a 1 percentage point policy-induced increase in mortgage rates lowers the presence of lower-income households in the population of home buyers by 1 to 2 percentage points immediately following the shock. Effects are substantially stronger among first-time home buyers and persist for approximately one year.

Addressing climate change requires individual behavior change and voter support for pro-climate policies, yet surprisingly little is known about how to achieve these outcomes. In this paper, we estimate causal effects of additional education on pro-climate outcomes using new compulsory schooling law data across 20 European countries. We analyze effects on pro-climate beliefs and behaviors, as well as novel data on policy preferences and voting for green parties. Results show that a year of education substantially increases pro-climate beliefs, behaviors, and policy preferences.

This paper reports causal evidence on how the extent of hybrid work—the number of days worked from home relative to days worked from office—affects employee attitudes and performance. Workers who spent around two days in the office each week on average self-reported greater work-life balance, more job satisfaction, and lower isolation from colleagues compared to workers who spent more or fewer days in the office. Employees in the intermediate hybrid condition received no different performance ratings compared to peers who spent more or fewer days in the office.

Women are underrepresented in patenting. In this study, we consider differential responsiveness to rejection as a contributor to the gender gap in invention. Leveraging the prosecution histories of almost one million U.S. patent applications and the quasirandom assignment of applications to examiners, we show that women are 3.6–6.9 percentage points less likely to continue in the application process following an early-stage rejection. Conditional on applying for a patent, male-female disparities in the propensity to abandon applications account for more than half of the overall gender gap in issued patents. We provide suggestive evidence that institutional support can help reduce the attrition gap.

The US tax system allows taxpayers to deduct local taxes from their taxable incomes. Using school district referendum results, we employ a continuous treatment two-way fixed-effects framework to provide causal evidence of a positive relation between the demand for local public goods and the share of residents deducting local taxes. We find that a 1 percentage point decrease in the share of residents deducting property taxes reduces tax and bond referendum approval rates by approximately 0.97 percentage points. Because these federal tax deductions disproportionately benefit higher-income individuals, they potentially widen disparities in public service provision across jurisdictions.

We study the aftermath of the 1968 Washington, D.C. civil disturbance to illuminate the mechanisms that drive urban redevelopment in the presence of low demand and racial tension. Using a within-block identification strategy, we show that destruction caused lots to remain vacant for the next thirty years and only recently converge in terms of structure value. The city acted to preclude for-profit land owners from leaving land vacant until demand conditions improved by purchasing nearly half of all properties in damaged neighborhoods. Despite this and other steps, the city had limited success in speeding up redevelopment.

This paper provides a method to study quantile effects in discrete choice with social interactions. The method is based on a behavioral social interactions model from quantile preference in decision making and demonstrates peer effects on different quantiles of discrete outcomes. The peer effects parameters are estimated by a nested pseudoscore (NPS) approach, which is developed to tackle the computational burden pertaining to the social interactions model. Consistency and asymptotic normality are established for the proposed NPS estimator. We illustrate the finite sample performance of the model and the estimator by Monte Carlo experiments and an application of peer effects among students on exercise decisions, using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health dataset.

We examine how the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) impacts the gender composition at U.S. firms experiencing a negative demand shock. Combining changes in Chinese imports across industries between 2000 and 2003 and a sharp regression discontinuity to identify FMLA status, we find that an increase in import competition decreases the share of female employment, earnings, and promotions at FMLA relative to non-FMLA firms. This effect is driven by women in prime child-bearing ages and without college degrees and is pronounced at firms with all male managers. These results suggest that job-protected leave mandates may exacerbate gender inequalities in response to adverse shocks.

Using panel data on a 20% random sample of Canadian taxpayers, we study behavioral responses to the cancellation of a lifetime capital gains exemption that resulted in increased capital gains taxation for some individuals. We show that the exemption did not change the number of taxpayers reporting positive capital gains, and thus unlikely resulted in increased participation in capital markets. Furthermore, our results suggest that the cancellation increased the long-run capital gains realizations of tax filers with more unused exemption room but had a small, statistically insignificant impact on the capital gains realizations of those with little unused exemption room.

Most comparative analyses explaining the 1970s and 1990s/2000s inflation performance, focusing on good/bad policy versus good/bad luck, assume that price and wage-setting institutions remained constant. While studies acknowledge institutional changes, they typically overlook sources of intrinsic persistence of wage and price inflation. This paper contributes to this ongoing debate by revisiting the U.S. business cycle. We account for time variations in pricing and wage-setting behavior due to institutional changes and for switches in inflation-intrinsic persistence, which we formally represent as changes in the shape of the hazard function. By analyzing how policy and shocks interact within different institutional settings in our model economy, we trace the existing contrasting evidence back to an identification problem that biases regime estimates and leads to misleading interpretations. Once we account for persistence switches, the empirical outcomes strongly support, but refine, the luck interpretation over the policy interpretation. The 1970s were characterized not only by larger shocks but also by more pronounced transmission mechanisms of supply shocks, driven by the price- and wage-setting institutions of the time. Additionally, the data suggest to reinterpret the monetary regimes more in line with the central bankers’ view and show that structural changes in price and wage adjustments play essential and opposite roles in the Great Inflation. Finally, our analysis yields two important general findings. First, it emphasizes the critical role that changes in price and wage-setting institutions play in influencing the propagation of shocks. Second, it validates the use of a generalized time-dependent rule to represent nominal rigidities.

We examine the rise of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in wartime China. Using a spatial regression discontinuity design and several measures as proxies for the rise of the Party during the Sino-Japanese War (middle- to upper-rank party cadres, grassroots party organization, and guerrilla bases), we find that it grew significantly more in counties occupied by the Japanese Army. However, despite its popularity before the war, the same markers were not statistically significant at that time. We identify two primary channels behind the political ascendancy of the CCP. First, the communists took advantage of the militarily weaker “puppet troops” in charge of administering the loosely held occupied areas. Second, support for the CCP was fueled by a strong anti-Japanese sentiment spurred by war suffering, using civilian casualties and rape cases as proxies for the harm inflicted. Finally, the CCP’s wartime influence persisted after the war: former Japanese Occupied Areas exhibited a significantly higher density of party membership between 1950 and 1980.

We study the feasibility of opening new mines in ethnically diverse countries without escalating the risk of conflict. We propose a theoretical model in which ethnic groups can organize themselves to fight at the national or the local level. Our model yields two key insights. First, peace cannot be guaranteed in the presence of ethnic segregation and spatial resource inequality. Second, once the peace-maximizing policies are implemented, local conflict risks depend on local resource rents and local ethnic groups as well as the country’s entire ethnic and mining geography. We validate key concepts from our model using granular spatial data from Sierra Leone and the rest of sub-Saharan Africa and employing a shift-share identification strategy. We then apply these concepts to simulate the potential impact of planned mining projects in Sierra Leone and confirm that projects in the right locations can promote peace. We offer policy recommendations for making the mining industry a facilitator of peace and prosperity.

Direct public funding of R&D investment to stimulate technological innovation has a strong theoretical case and has gained renewed attention in recent times as a way to address the long-term challenges of modern society, such as economic growth, climate change, energy independence, and national security. We estimate the dynamic macroeconomic effects of government R&D investment and we find that it is very effective in fostering the national innovation effort by crowding in private R&D investment and raising aggregate output in the long run, but also that it stimulates a strong expansion from the outset, in particular through anticipation effects.

Dominant platforms like Booking.com have often imposed Price Parity Clauses to prevent lower prices on alternative sales channels. We provide quasi-experimental evidence on the removal of these price restrictions in France in 2015 for three major global hotel groups. Our analysis reveals limited and non-significant price effects for rooms sold through consumer-visible channels, such as hotels’ websites or online travel agencies. However, we document a significant price reduction on sales channels not visible to consumers, such as direct offline bookings. Additionally, we identify a significant shift in the share of bookings from online travel agencies to the hotels’ direct offline channels.