Knowledge that Transforms

International audience

This article studies the effect of team gender composition and leadership on women’s influence in two field experiments. Study 1 finds that male-majority teams accord disproportionately less influence to women and are less likely to choose women to represent the team externally. We replicate this finding in a new context, where we also vary the gender of an assigned team leader. We find that a female leader substantially increases women’s influence, even in male-majority teams. With a model of discriminatory voting, we show that either increasing women's share or assigning a female leader decreases the penalty women face by more than 50%.

We present results from a large-scale experimental evaluation of a national parenting program in Chile. The program is low cost: it lasts only 6–8 weeks, and it is administered to groups of eight to 12 parents. It is implemented by the national health system, taking advantage of its existing physical infrastructure and human resources. We find that 3 years after the interventions ends, children whose parents are offered the opportunity to participate in this program increase their vocabulary and socioemotional development scores by 0.1 standard deviations, mirrored by similar improvements in caregiver’s parenting behaviors and beliefs.

This paper develops a quantitative theory of how people weigh the risks of infections against the benefits of engaging in social interactions that contribute to the spread of infectious diseases. Our framework takes into account the effects of public policies and private behavior on the spread of the disease. We evaluate the model using a novel micro panel dataset on consumption expenditures of young and older people across the first three waves of COVID-19 in Portugal. Our model highlights the critical role of expectations in shaping how human behavior influences the dynamics of epidemics.

How should successive generations insure each other when the young can default on previously promised transfers to the old? This paper studies intergenerational insurance that maximizes the expected discounted utility of all generations subject to participation constraints for each generation. If complete insurance is unattainable, the optimal intergenerational insurance is history dependent even when the environment is stationary. The risk from a generational shock is spread into the future with periodic “resetting.” If we interpret intergenerational insurance in terms of debt, the fiscal reaction function is nonlinear and the risk premium on debt is lower than the risk premium with complete insurance.

In economies with fixed exchange rates, the adjustment to government-spending shocks is asymmetric. Expansionary shocks are absorbed by the real exchange rate, contractionary shocks by output. This result emerges in a small open-economy model with downward nominal wage rigidity and is supported by new empirical evidence based on panel data from different exchange-rate regimes. The exchange-rate regime, economic slack, inflation, and how spending is financed all matter for the fiscal transmission mechanism in the way predicted by the model. Estimates that fail to distinguish between the effects of positive and negative shocks are subject to a “depreciation bias.”

Governments increasingly use RCTs to test innovations, yet we know little about how they incorporate results into policy-making. We study 30 U.S. cities that ran 73 RCTs with a national Nudge Unit. Cities adopt a nudge treatment into their communications in 27% of the cases. We find that the strength of the evidence and key city features do not strongly predict adoption; instead, the largest predictor is whether the RCT was implemented using pre-existing communication, as opposed to new communication. We identify organizational inertia as a leading explanation: changes to pre-existing infrastructure are more naturally folded into subsequent processes.

We provide the first empirical analysis of the relationship between algorithmic pricing (AP) and competition by studying the impact of adoption in Germany’s retail gasoline market, where software became widely available in 2017. Because adoption dates are unknown, we identify adopting stations by testing for structural breaks in AP markers, finding most breaks to be around the time of widespread AP introduction. Because station adoption is endogenous, we instrument using headquarter adoption. Adoption increases margins but only for nonmonopoly stations. In duopoly and triopoly markets, margins increase only if all stations adopt, suggesting that AP has a significant effect on competition.

National audience

We develop a novel methodology for disentangling the demand and cost drivers of firm heterogeneity when firms sort themselves into different markets, and we apply it to export status differences. Our methodology results in joint estimates of firm-level productivity and of markups in every market, without imposing functional form restrictions on demand. We find that exporters, relative to nonexporters, (i) have flatter domestic demand curves—thicker domestic markets—and (ii) have higher demand conditional on productivity. Finally, (iii) these demand advantages translate to foreign markets, thereby leading to export status differences.