Knowledge that Transforms

This paper empirically assesses the incidence and efficiency of Round I of the federal urban Empowerment Zone (EZ) program using confidential microdata from the Decennial Census and the Longitudinal Business Database. Using rejected and future applicants to the EZ program as controls, we find that EZ designation substantially increased employment in zone neighborhoods and generated wage increases for local workers without corresponding increases in population or the local cost of living. The results suggest the efficiency costs of first Round EZs were relatively modest.

This paper explores the causes and consequences of regional taste differences. I introduce habit formation into a standard general equilibrium model. Household tastes evolve over time to favor foods consumed as a child. Thus, locally abundant foods are preferred in every region, as they were relatively inexpensive in prior generations. These patterns alter the correspondence between price changes and nutrition. For example, neglecting this relationship between tastes and agro-climatic endowments overstates the short-run nutritional gains from agricultural trade liberalization, since preferred foods rise in price in every region. I examine the model's predictions using household survey data from many regions of India.

Drastic changes in central bank operations and monetary institutions in recent years have made previously standard approaches to explaining the determination of the price level obsolete. Recent expansions of central bank balance sheets and of the levels of richcountry sovereign debt, as well as the evolving political economy of the European Monetary Union, have made it clear that fiscal policy and monetary policy are intertwined. Our thinking and teaching about inflation, monetary policy, and fiscal policy should be based on models that recognize fiscal-monetary policy interactions.

We provide evidence that a tradition of village democracy is associated with the presence of national democracy today. We also show that a tradition of local democracy is associated with attitudes which are more supportive of democracy, with better quality institutions and with higher levels of economic development. Our findings indicate persistence in democratic institutions over time, and suggest the importance of traditional local institutions for well-functioning national-level institutions.

Randomization is commonplace in everyday resource allocation. We generalize the theory of randomized assignment to accommodate multi-unit allocations and various real-world constraints, such as group-specific quotas (“controlled choice”) in school choice and house allocation, and scheduling and curriculum constraints in course allocation. We develop new mechanisms that are ex ante efficient and fair in these environments, and that incorporate certain non-additive substitutable preferences. We also develop a “utility guarantee” technique that limits ex post unfairness in random allocations, supplementing the ex ante fairness promoted by randomization. This can be applied to multi-unit assignment problems and certain two-sided matching problems.

We provide an example that shows that in the Alesina and Angeletos (2005) model one can obtain multiplicity even if luck plays no role in the economy. Thus, it is not critical that the noise to signal ratio be increasing in taxes, or that desired taxes are increasing in the noise to signal ratio.

The purpose of this note is to analyze properties of the risk lovers' utility function beyond the positive sign of its second order derivative. We show that—contrarily to a priori beliefs—risk lovers are prudent and are willing to accumulate precautionary savings.

One in five Zambian children lives with an HIV/AIDS-infected adult. We estimate the effect that the availability of adult antiretroviral therapy (ART) has on the health of such children. Using a triple difference specification, we find that adult access to ART resulted in increased weight-for-age and decreased incidence of stunting among children younger than 60 months who resided with an infected father or other infected adult in an intact household. Because the increased availability of adult ART in sub-Saharan Africa has multigenerational effects, cost-effectiveness estimates restricted to direct recipients understate the economic benefit of the treatment.

We conducted a national survey of department Chairs to investigate whether departments of economics changed course requirements for bachelors degrees since the Siegfried and Bidani (1992) paper using 1980 data. There have been few changes to course requirements. Most notable are a large increase in the number of departments requiring econometrics and a drop in departments requiring courses such as money, banking and economic history--courses once required in many business schools.

The interplay between religion and the economy has long occupied social scientists. We construct a unique panel of income and Protestant church attendance using 175 Prussian counties, presented in six waves from 1886 to 1911. The data reveal a marked decline in church attendance coinciding with increasing income. The cross-section also shows a negative association between income and church attendance. The associations disappear in panel analyses, including first-differenced models of the 1886 to 1911 change, panel models with county and time fixed effects, and panel Granger-causality tests. The results cast doubt on causal interpretations of the religion-economy nexus in Prussian secularization.