Knowledge that Transforms

Trade costs are often additive. Well-known examples are quotas, per unit tariffs, and, in part, transportation costs. In spite of this, we have no broad and systematic evidence of the magnitude of these costs. In this paper, we develop a new empirical framework for estimating additive trade costs from standard firm-level trade data. Our results suggest that additive barriers are on average 14%, expressed relative to the median price. The point estimates are strongly correlated with common proxies for trade costs. Using our microestimates, we show that an additive import tariff reduces welfare and trade by more than an equal-yield multiplicative tariff.

While innovation matters for competitiveness, it may expose firms to survival risks. Using plant-product data for Chile and discretetime hazard models, we show that innovating plants have a lower hazard of exit. However, risk has a strong impact on the innovation-exit relationship: only innovators that retain diversified sources of revenue or face lower market risk are less likely to die. Single-product innovators are at greater risk of exiting. Exposure to technical risk does not affect exit probabilities differentially. We provide tentative evidence that singleproduct innovators have higher profits, which helps to rationalize their innovation decision despite the increased risk of exit.

We analyze insurance-pricing regulation under imperfect competition on the Massachusetts health insurance exchange. Differential markups lead to price variation apart from cost variation. Coarse insurer pricing strategies identify consumer demand. Younger consumers are twice as price sensitive as older consumers. Older consumers thus face higher markups over costs. Modified community rating links prices for consumers differing in both costs and preferences, and changes the marginal consumer firms face. Stricter regulations transfer resources from low-cost to high-cost consumers, reduce firm profits, and increase overall consumer surplus.

The introduction of automatic bill payment (ABP) programs in 2005 eliminated the need for consumers to view recurring bills. If those enrolled in ABP programs offered by utilities and other service providers forgo inspection of their recurring bills, then price salience declines, prices perceived by boundedly rational agents fall, and consumption increases. This paper considers the impact of such programs on consumer demand and welfare and empirically tests whether enrollment in such programs increases demand. Results show ABP enrollment increases residential electricity consumption by 4.0% and commercial electricity consumption by as much as 8.1%. Enrollment in programs designed to smooth seasonal variation in monthly utility bills of low-income customers results in 6.7% greater electricity use.

Using data from employer-provided health insurance and Medicare Part D, we investigate whether healthcare utilization responds to the dynamic incentives created by the nonlinear nature of health insurance contracts. We exploit the fact that, because annual coverage usually resets every January, individuals who join a plan later in the year face the same initial ("spot") price of healthcare but a higher expected end-of-year ("future") price. We find a statistically significant response of initial utilization to the future price, rejecting the null that individuals respond only to the spot price. We discuss implications for analysis of moral hazard in health insurance.

We report results from a large, randomized field to study how access to formal microinsurance affects production and economic development. We induce exogenous variation in insurance coverage at the village level by randomly assigning performance incentives to the village animal husbandry worker who is responsible for signing farmers up for the insurance. We find that promoting greater adoption of insurance significantly increases farmers' sow production, and this effect seems to persist in the longer run; moreover, the increase in sow production in response to the sow insurance does not seem to be the result of the substitution of other livestock.

We implemented a randomized field experiment that tested ways to stimulate migrants’ savings in their origin country. We find that migrants value opportunities to exert greater control over financial activities in their home countries. We offered U.S.-based migrants bank accounts in El Salvador, randomly varying migrant control over El Salvador–based savings by offering different accounts across treatments. Migrants offered the greatest degree of control accumulated the most savings. Impacts likely represent increases in total savings; there is no evidence that savings increases were simply reallocated from other savings mechanisms. Enhanced control over home country savings does not affect remittances sent home.

The Fair Trade (FT) coffee initiative attempts to channel charity from consumers to poor producers via increased prices. We show that the rules of the FT system permit this rent to be eliminated due to free entry and costly excess certification of output. Using data from an association of coffee cooperatives in Central America, we verify that expected producer benefits are close to 0 when we take into account the output that is certified but not sold as FT. Our results illustrate how free entry undermines the attempt at extending charity via a price distortion in an otherwise competitive market.

Using geographically disaggregated data and exploiting an instrumental variable strategy, we show that contrary to conventional wisdom, the benefits of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments (CAAA) were progressive. The CAAA created incentives for local regulators to target the initially dirtiest areas for cleanup, creating heterogeneity in the incidence of air quality improvements that favored lower-income households. Based on house price appreciation, households in the lowest quintile of the income distribution received annual benefits from the program equal to 0.3% of their income on average during the 1990s, over twice as much as those in the highest quintile.

Regression discontinuity models are commonly used to nonparametrically identify and estimate a local average treatment effect (LATE).We show that the derivative of the treatment effect with respect to the running variable at the cutoff, referred to as the treatment effect derivative (TED), is nonparametrically identified, easily estimated, and has implications for testing external validity and extrapolating the estimated LATE away from the cutoff. Given a local policy invariance assumption, we further show this TED equals the change in the treatment effect that would result from a marginal change in the threshold, which we call the marginal threshold treatment effect (MTTE). We apply these results to Goodman (2008), who estimates the effect of a scholarship program on college choice. MTTE in this case identifies how this treatment effect would change if the test score threshold to qualify for a scholarship were changed, even though no such change in threshold is actually observed.