Knowledge that Transforms

One long-standing motivation for low-income housing programs is the possibility that housing affordability and housing conditions generate externalities, including on children’s behavior and long-term life outcomes. We take advantage of a randomized housing voucher lottery in Chicago in 1997 to examine the long-term impact of housing assistance on a wide variety of child outcomes, including schooling, health, and criminal involvement. In contrast to most prior work focusing on families in public housing, we focus on families living in unsubsidized private housing at baseline, for whom voucher receipt generates large changes in both housing and nonhousing consumption. We find that the receipt of housing assistance has little, if any, impact on neighborhood or school quality or on a wide range of important child outcomes.

Preventives are sold ex ante, before disease status is realized, while treatments are sold ex post. Even if the mean of the ex ante distribution of consumer values is the same as that ex post, the shape of the distributions may differ, generating a difference between the surplus each product can extract. If, for example, consumers differ only in ex ante disease risk, then a monopolist would have more difficulty extracting surplus with a preventive than with a treatment because treatment consumers, having contracted the disease, no longer differ in disease risk. We show that the ratio of preventive to treatment producer surplus can be arbitrarily small, in particular when the distribution of consumer values has a Zipf shape and the disease is rare. The firm’s bias toward treatments can be reversed, for example, if the source of private information is disease severity learned ex post. The difference between the producer surplus earned from the products can result in distorted R&D incentives; the deadweight loss from this distortion can be as large as the entire producer-surplus difference. Calibrations for HIV and heart attacks based on risk factors in the U.S. population suggest that the distribution of disease risk is sufficiently Zipf-similar to generate substantial differences between producer surplus from preventives and treatments. Empirically, we find that proxies for the Zipf-similarity of the disease-risk distribution are associated a significantly lower likelihood of vaccine development but not drug development.

In all markets, firms go through a process of creative destruction: entry, random growth, and exit. In many of these markets there are also regulations that restrict entry, possibly distorting this process. We study the public interest rationale for entry taxes in a general equilibrium model with free entry and exit of firms in which firm dynamics are driven by reputation concerns. In our model firms can produce high-quality output by making a costly but efficient initial unobservable investment. If buyers never learn about this investment, an extreme “lemons problem” develops, no firm invests, and the market shuts down. Learning introduces reputation incentives such that a fraction of entrants do invest. We show that if the market operates with spot prices, entry taxes always enhance the role of reputation to induce investment, improving welfare despite the impact of these taxes on equilibrium prices and total production.

We study legislators who have a present bias for spending: they want to increase current spending and procrastinate spending cuts. We show that disagreement in legislatures can lead to policy persistence that attenuates the temptation to overspend. Depending on the environment, legislators’ decisions to be fiscally responsible may either complement or substitute other legislators’ decisions. When legislators have low discount factors, their actions are strategic complements. Thus, changes of the political environment that induce fiscal responsibility are desirable as they generate a positive responsibility multiplier and reduce spending. However, when the discount factor is high, the same changes induce some legislators to free ride on others’ responsibility which may lead to higher spending.

This article develops a model of unemployment fluctuations. The model keeps the architecture of the general-disequilibrium model of Barro and Grossman (1971) but takes a matching approach to the labor and product markets instead of a disequilibrium approach. On the product and labor markets, both price and tightness adjust to equalize supply and demand. Since there are two equilibrium variables but only one equilibrium condition on each market, a price mechanism is needed to select an equilibrium. We focus on two polar mechanisms: fixed prices and competitive prices. When prices are fixed, aggregate demand affects unemployment as follows. An increase in aggregate demand leads firms to find more customers. This reduces the idle time of their employees and thus increases their labor demand. This in turn reduces unemployment. We combine the predictions of the model and empirical measures of product market tightness, labor market tightness, output, and employment to assess the sources of labor market fluctuations in the United States. First, we find that product market tightness and labor market tightness fluctuate a lot, which implies that the fixed-price equilibrium describes the data better than the competitive-price equilibrium. Next, we find that labor market tightness and employment are positively correlated, which suggests that the labor market fluctuations are mostly due to labor demand shocks and not to labor supply or mismatch shocks. Last, we find that product market tightness and output are positively correlated, which suggests that the labor demand shocks mostly reflect aggregate demand shocks and not technology shocks.

We present experimental evidence on the impact of a school choice program in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh that provided students with a voucher to finance attending a private school of their choice. The study design featured a unique two-stage lottery-based allocation of vouchers that created both student-level and market-level experiments, which allows us to study the individual and the aggregate effects of school choice (including spillovers). After two and four years of the program, we find no difference between test scores of lottery winners and losers on Telugu (native language), math, English, and science/social studies, suggesting that the large cross-sectional differences in test scores across public and private schools mostly reflect omitted variables. However, private schools also teach Hindi, which is not taught by the public schools, and lottery winners have much higher test scores in Hindi. Furthermore, the mean cost per student in the private schools in our sample was less than a third of the cost in public schools. Thus, private schools in this setting deliver slightly better test score gains than their public counterparts (better on Hindi and same in other subjects), and do so at a substantially lower cost per student. Finally, we find no evidence of spillovers on public school students who do not apply for the voucher, or on private school students, suggesting that the positive effects on voucher winners did not come at the expense of other students.

A rising share of employees now regularly engage in working from home (WFH), but there are concerns this can lead to “shirking from home.” We report the results of a WFH experiment at Ctrip, a 16,000-employee, NASDAQ-listed Chinese travel agency. Call center employees who volunteered to WFH were randomly assigned either to work from home or in the office for nine months. Home working led to a 13% performance increase, of which 9% was from working more minutes per shift (fewer breaks and sick days) and 4% from more calls per minute (attributed to a quieter and more convenient working environment). Home workers also reported improved work satisfaction, and their attrition rate halved, but their promotion rate conditional on performance fell. Due to the success of the experiment, Ctrip rolled out the option to WFH to the whole firm and allowed the experimental employees to reselect between the home and office. Interestingly, over half of them switched, which led to the gains from WFH almost doubling to 22%. This highlights the benefits of learning and selection effects when adopting modern management practices like WFH.

A fundamental implication of standard moral hazard models is overuse of low-value medical care because copays are lower than costs. In these models, the demand curve alone can be used to make welfare statements, a fact relied on by much empirical work. There is ample evidence, though, that people misuse care for a different reason: mistakes, or "behavioral hazard." Much high-value care is underused even when patient costs are low, and some useless care is bought even when patients face the full cost. In the presence of behavioral hazard, welfare calculations using only the demand curve can be off by orders of magnitude or even be the wrong sign. We derive optimal copay formulas that incorporate both moral and behavioral hazard, providing a theoretical foundation for value-based insurance design and a way to interpret behavioral "nudges." Once behavioral hazard is taken into account, health insurance can do more than just provide financial protection - it can also improve health care efficiency.

We examine causes and consequences of relative income within households. We show that the distribution of the share of income earned by the wife exhibits a sharp drop to the right of 12 , where the wife’s income exceeds the husband’s income. We argue that this pattern is best explained by gender identity norms, which induce an aversion to a situation where the wife earns more than her husband. We present evidence that this aversion also impacts marriage formation, the wife’s labor force participation, the wife’s income conditional on working, marriage satisfaction, likelihood of divorce, and the division of home production. Within marriage markets, when a randomly chosen woman becomes more likely to earn more than a randomly chosen man, marriage rates decline. In couples where the wife’s potential income is likely to exceed the husband’s, the wife is less likely to be in the labor force and earns less than her potential if she does work. In couples where the wife earns more than the husband, the wife spends more time on household chores; moreover, those couples are less satisfied with their marriage and are more likely to divorce. These patterns hold both cross-sectionally and within couples over time.

We develop a model of policy experimentation in federal systems in which heterogeneous districts choose both whether to experiment and the policies to experiment with. The prospect of informational spillovers implies that in the first best the districts converge in their policy choice. Strikingly, when authority is decentralized, the equilibrium predicts the opposite. The districts use their policy choice to discourage other districts from free-riding on them, thereby inefficiently minimizing informational spillovers. To address this failure, we introduce a dynamic form of federalism in which the central government harmonizes policy choices only after the districts have experimented. This progressive concentration of power induces a policy tournament that can increase the incentive to experiment and encourage policy convergence. We compare outcomes under the different systems and derive the optimal levels of district heterogeneity.