Knowledge that Transforms

We evaluate the effect of land use regulation on the value of land and on welfare. Our estimates are based on a decomposition of the effects of regulation into three components: an own-lot effect, which reflects the cost of regulatory constraints to the owner of a parcel; an external effect, which reflects the value of regulatory constraints on one's neighbors; a supply effect, which reflects the effect of regulated scarcity of developable land. Using this decomposition, we arrive at a novel strategy for estimating a plausibly causal effect of land use regulation on land value and welfare. This strategy exploits cross-border changes in development, prices, and regulation in regions near municipal borders. Our estimates suggest large negative effects of regulation on the value of land and welfare in these regions.

We identify the effects of monetary policy on credit risk-taking with an exhaustive credit register of loan applications and contracts. We separate the changes in the composition of the supply of credit from the concurrent changes in the volume of supply and quality, and the volume of demand. We employ a two-stage model that analyzes the granting of loan applications in the first stage and loan outcomes for the applications granted in the second stage, and that controls for both observed and unobserved, time-varying, firm and bank heterogeneity through time*firm and time*bank fixed effects. We find that a lower overnight interest rate induces lowly capitalized banks to grant more loan applications to ex ante risky firms and to commit larger loan volumes with fewer collateral requirements to these firms, yet with a higher ex post likelihood of default. A lower long-term interest rate and other relevant macroeconomic variables have no such effects.

This paper estimates a structural dynamic equilibrium model of the Brazilian labor market in order to study trade-induced transitional dynamics. The model features a multi-sector economy with overlapping generations, heterogeneous workers, endogenous accumulation of sector-specific experience, and costly switching of sectors. The model's estimates yield median costs of mobility ranging from 1.4 to 2.7 times annual average wages, but a high dispersion of these costs across the population. In addition, sector-specific experience is imperfectly transferable across sectors, leading to additional barriers to mobility. Using the estimated model for counterfactual trade liberalization experiments, the main findings are: (1) there is a large labor market response following trade liberalization but the transition may take several years; (2) potential aggregate welfare gains are significantly reduced due to the delayed adjustment; (3) trade-induced welfare effects depend on initial sector of employment and on worker demographics such as age and education. The experiments also highlight the sensitivity of the transitional dynamics with respect to assumptions regarding the mobility of capital.

Hunger during pre-harvest lean seasons is widespread in the agrarian areas of Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. We randomly assign an $8.50 incentive to households in rural Bangladesh to out-migrate during the lean season. The incentive induces 22 % of households to send a seasonal migrant, their consumption at the origin increases significantly, and treated households are 8-10 percentage points more likely to re-migrate 1 and 3 years after the incentive is removed. These facts can be explained qualitatively by a model in which migration is risky, mitigating risk requires individual-specific learning, and some migrants are sufficiently close to subsistence such that failed migration is very costly. We document evidence consistent with this model using heterogeneity analysis and additional experimental variation, but calibrations with forward-looking households that can save up to migrate suggest that it is difficult for the model to quantitatively match the data. We conclude with extensions to the model that

We consider a decision maker who faces dynamic decision situations that involve intertemporal trade-offs, as in consumption–savings problems, and who experiences taste shocks that are transient contingent on the state of the world. We axiomatize a recursive representation of choice over state contingent infinite horizon consumption problems, where uncertainty about consumption utilities depends on the observable state and the state follows a subjective Markov process. The parameters of the representation are the subjective process that governs the evolution of beliefs over consumption utilities and the discount factor; they are uniquely identified from behavior. We characterize a natural notion of greater preference for flexibility in terms of a dilation of beliefs. An important special case of our representation is a recursive version of the Anscombe–Aumann model with parameters that include a subjective Markov process over states and state-dependent utilities, all of which are uniquely identified.

Using a high‐stakes field experiment conducted with a financial brokerage, we implement a novel design to separately identify two channels of social influence in financial decisions, both widely studied theoretically. When someone purchases an asset, his peers may also want to purchase it, both because they learn from his choice (“social learning”) and because his possession of the asset directly affects others' utility of owning the same asset (“social utility”). We randomize whether one member of a peer pair who chose to purchase an asset has that choice implemented, thus randomizing his ability to possess the asset. Then, we randomize whether the second member of the pair: (i) receives no information about the first member, or (ii) is informed of the first member's desire to purchase the asset and the result of the randomization that determined possession. This allows us to estimate the effects of learning plus possession, and learning alone, relative to a (no information) control group. We find that both social learning and social utility channels have statistically and economically significant effects on investment decisions. Evidence from a follow‐up survey reveals that social learning effects are greatest when the first (second) investor is financially sophisticated (financially unsophisticated); investors report updating their beliefs about asset quality after learning about their peer's revealed preference; and, they report motivations consistent with “keeping up with the Joneses” when learning about their peer's possession of the asset. These results can help shed light on the mechanisms underlying herding behavior in financial markets and peer effects in consumption and investment decisions.

Subjects in a laboratory experiment withdraw earnings from a cash reserve evolving according to an arithmetic Brownian motion in near-continuous time. Aggressive withdrawal policies expose subjects to risk of bankruptcy, but the policy that maximizes expected earnings need not maximize the odds of survival. When profit maximization is consistent with high rates of survival (HS parameters), subjects adjust decisively towards the optimum. When survival and profit maximization are sharply at odds (LS parameters), subjects persistently (and sub-optimally) hoard excess cash in an evident effort to improve survival rates. The design ensures that this hoarding is not due to standard risk aversion. Analysis of period-to-period adjustments in strategies suggests instead that hoarding is due to a widespread bias towards survival in the subject population. Robustness treatments varying feedback, parameters, and framing fail to eliminate the bias.

Does Islamic political control affect women's empowerment? Several countries have recently experienced Islamic parties coming to power through democratic elections. Due to strong support among religious conservatives, constituencies with Islamic rule often tend to exhibit poor women's rights. Whether this reflects a causal relationship or a spurious one has so far gone unexplored. I provide the first piece of evidence using a new and unique data set of Turkish municipalities. In 1994, an Islamic party won multiple municipal mayor seats across the country. Using a regression discontinuity (RD) design, I compare municipalities where this Islamic party barely won or lost elections. Despite negative raw correlations, the RD results reveal that, over a period of six years, Islamic rule increased female secular high school education. Corresponding effects for men are systematically smaller and less precise. In the longer run, the effect on female education remained persistent up to 17 years after, and also reduced adolescent marriages. An analysis of long-run political effects of Islamic rule shows increased female political participation and an overall decrease in Islamic political preferences. The results are consistent with an explanation that emphasizes the Islamic party's effectiveness in overcoming barriers to female entry for the poor and pious.

Cities exist because of the productivity gains that arise from clustering production and workers, a process called agglomeration. How important is agglomeration for aggregate growth? This paper constructs a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model of cities and uses it to estimate the effect of local agglomeration on aggregate growth. We combine aggregate time-series and city-level panel data to estimate the model's parameters via generalized method of moments. The estimates imply a statistically and economically significant impact of local agglomeration on the growth rate of per capita consumption, raising it by about 10%.

A wide body of empirical evidence finds that around 25 percent of fiscal stimulus payments (e.g., tax rebates) are spent on nondurable household consumption in the quarter that they are received.To interpret this fact, we develop a structural economic model where households can hold two assets: a low-return liquid asset (e.g., cash, checking account) and a high-return illiquid asset that carries a transaction cost (e.g., housing, retirement account).The optimal life-cycle pattern of portfolio choice implies that many households in the model are "wealthy hand-to-mouth": they hold little or no liquid wealth despite owning sizeable quantities of illiquid assets.They therefore display large propensities to consume out of additional transitory income, and small propensities to consume out of news about future income.We document the existence of such households in data from the Survey of Consumer Finances.A version of the model parameterized to the 2001 tax rebate episode yields consumption responses to fiscal stimulus payments that are in line with the evidence, and an order of magnitude larger than in the standard "one-asset" framework.The model's nonlinearities with respect to the size of the rebate, its degree of phasing-out, and aggregate economic conditions have implications for policy design.