Knowledge that Transforms

This paper examines how training a ects productivity across hierarchical layers within organizations. After a randomized training program for frontline employees at a government agency, trained workers' output increased while their requests for managerial assistance fell. This freed managers to focus on strategic tasks particularly managers with the strongest connections to trained employees. A structural model of organizational hierarchies shows that spillovers to managers account for approximately 45% of the program's total benefi ts, indicating that evaluations focused solely on individual trainees may substantially understate the full value of training investments.

Mayshar et al. (2022) apply an instrumental variables identification strategy to data from nearly 1,000 societies included in the Ethnographic Atlas to claim that cultivation of cereals (appropriable by elites), rather than increased land productivity following the adoption of agriculture, led to the development of the state. We show two things. (1) Evidence for the appropriability theory holds when moving from a tribe-chiefdom to a state and not more broadly. (2) Conclusions are driven by a handful of outliers with statistical significance at the 10% level lost with winsorization at 2.1% (or trimming at 1.2%) of locations by cereal advantage.

To study long-run large-scale early childhood policies, this paper incorporates early childhood investments into a general equilibrium heterogeneous agent overlapping generations model calibrated using US data. A randomized controlled trial evaluation of a short-run small-scale early childhood program in the model predicts effects on children’s education and income that are similar to the empirical evidence. A long-run large-scale program, however, yields over twice as large welfare gains as those of a short-run small-scale program even after considering general equilibrium and taxation effects. Key to this difference is that investing in a child not only improves her skills but also creates better ancestors for future generations.