Knowledge that Transforms

This paper evaluates the impact of three different performance incentive schemes using data from a social experiment that randomized 88 Mexican high schools with over 40,000 students into three treatment groups and a control group. Treatment 1 provides individual incentives for performance on curriculum-based mathematics tests to students only, treatment 2 to teachers only, and treatment 3 gives both individual and group incentives to students, teachers, and school administrators. Program impact estimates reveal the largest average effects for treatment 3, smaller impacts for treatment 1, and no impact for treatment 2.

We derive a formula to determine the degree to which a school choice program may harm public school stayers by luring the best students to other schools. The “cream skimming” effect is increasing in the degree of heterogeneity within schools, the school choice take-up rate of strong students relative to weak students, and the dependence of school outcomes on student body quality. We use the formula to investigate the cream skimming effect of hypothetical voucher programs on the high school graduation rate and other outcomes of the students who would remain in public school. We find small effects across a wide variety of model specifications and types of modest voucher programs.

We model demand for noninstrumental information, drawing on the idea that people derive entertainment utility from suspense and surprise. A period has more suspense if the variance of the next period’s beliefs is greater. A period has more surprise if the current belief is further from the last period’s belief. Under these definitions, we analyze the optimal way to reveal information over time so as to maximize expected suspense or surprise experienced by a Bayesian audience. We apply our results to the design of mystery novels, political primaries, casinos, game shows, auctions, and sports.

This paper studies how private information is incorporated into prices, using a unique setting from the eighteenth century that is closer to stylized models of price discovery than modern-day markets. Specifically, the paper looks at English securities traded in both London and Amsterdam. Private information reached Amsterdam through sailing boats that sailed only twice a week and in adverse weather could not sail at all. Results are consistent with a Kyle model in which informed agents trade strategically. Most importantly, the speed of information revelation in Amsterdam depended on the expected time until the private signal would become public.

I study the role of social security in providing insurance when there is adverse selection in the annuity market. I calculate welfare gain from mandatory annuitization in the social security system relative to a laissez-faire benchmark, using a model in which individuals have private information about their mortality. I estimate large heterogeneity in mortality using the Health and Retirement Study. Despite that, I find small welfare gain from mandatory annuitization. Social security has a large effect on annuity prices because it crowds out demand by high-mortality individuals. Welfare gain would have been significantly larger in the absence of this effect.

Thomas Piketty’s recent book Capital in the Twenty-First Century is a timely and important contribution that turns our attention to striking long-run trends in economic inequality. A large part of the book is thus a documentation of historical data, going further back in time, and focusing more on the very richest in society, than have most existing economic

This study investigates the antipoverty efficacy of minimum wage policies. Proponents of these policies contend that employment impacts are negligible and suggest that consumers pay for higher labor costs through imperceptible increases in goods prices. Adopting this empirical scenario, the analysis demonstrates that an increase in the national minimum wage produces a value-added tax effect on consumer prices that is more regressive than a typical state sales tax and allocates benefits as higher earnings nearly evenly across the income distribution. These income-transfer outcomes sharply contradict portraying an increase in the minimum wage as an antipoverty initiative.

We study the internal organization of French manufacturing firms. We divide the employees of each firm into “layers” using occupational categories. Layers are hierarchical in that the typical worker in a higher layer earns more, and the typical firm occupies less of them. The probability of adding/dropping a layer is positively/negatively correlated with value added. Reorganization, through changes in layers, is essential to understanding how firms grow. Firms that expand substantially add layers and pay lower average wages in all preexisting layers. In contrast, firms that expand little and do not reorganize pay higher average wages in all preexisting layers.

We consider infinite-horizon economies populated by a continuum of agents subject to idiosyncratic shocks. This framework contains models of saving and capital accumulation with incomplete markets in the spirit of works by Bewley, Aiyagari, and Huggett; models of entry, exit, and industry dynamics in the spirit of Hopenhayn’s work; and dynamic models of occupational choice and search models as special cases. Robust and easy-to-apply comparative statics results are established with respect to exogenous parameters as well as various kinds of changes in the Markov processes governing the law of motion of the idiosyncratic shocks.

The literature on treatment effects focuses on gross benefits from program participation. We extend this literature by developing conditions under which it is possible to identify parameters measuring the cost and net surplus from program participation. Using the generalized Roy model, we nonparametrically identify the cost, benefit, and net surplus of selection into treatment without requiring the analyst to have direct information on the cost. We apply our methodology to estimate the gross benefit and net surplus of attending college.