Knowledge that Transforms

This paper develops a model of the interaction between the supply of hate-creating stories from politicians and the willingness of voters to listen to hatred. Hatred is fostered with stories of an out-group's crimes, but the impact of these stories comes from repetition not truth. Hate-creating stories are supplied by politicians when such actions help to discredit opponents whose policies benefit an out-group. Egalitarians foment hatred against rich minorities; opponents of re-distribution build hatred against poor minorities. Hatred relies on people accepting, rather than investigating, hate-creating stories. Hatred declines when there is private incentive to learn the truth. Increased economic interactions with a minority group may provide that incentive. This framework is used to illuminate the evolution of anti-Black hatred in the United States South, episodes of anti-Semitism in Europe, and the recent surge of anti-Americanism in the Arab world.

We present a model in which setting up and running a regulatory institution takes a fixed cost. As a consequence, the supply of regulation is limited by the extent of the market. We test three implications of this model. First, jurisdictions with larger populations affected by a given regulation are more likely to have it. Second, jurisdictions with lower incremental fixed costs of introducing and administering new regulations should regulate more. This implies that regulation spreads from higher to lower population jurisdictions, and that jurisdictions that build up transferable regulatory capabilities should regulate more intensely. Consistent with the model, we find that higher population U. S. states have more pages of legislation and adopt particular laws earlier in their history than do smaller states. We also find that the regulation of entry, the regulation of labor, and the military draft are more extensive in countries with larger populations, as well as in civil law countries, where we argue that the incremental fixed costs are lower.

This paper formalizes a widely discussed peer effect titled “acting White.” “Acting White” is modeled as a two-audience signaling quandary: signals that induce high wages can be signals that induce peer group rejection. Without peer effects, equilibria involve all ability types choosing different levels of education. “Acting White” alters the equilibrium dramatically: the (possibly empty) set of lowest ability individuals and the set of highest ability individuals continue to reveal their type through investments in education; ability types in the middle interval pool on a common education level. Only those in the lower intervals are accepted by the group. The model's predictions fit many stylized facts in the anthropology and sociology literatures regarding social interactions among minority group members.

Birth weight has emerged as the leading indicator of infant health and welfare and the central focus of infant health policy. This is because low birth weight (LBW) infants experience severe health and developmental difficulties that can impose enormous costs on society. But would the prevention of LBW generate equally sizable cost savings and health improvements? Estimates of the return to LBW-prevention from cross-sectional associations may be biased by omitted variables that cannot be influenced by policy, such as genetic factors. To address this, we compare the hospital costs, health at birth, and infant mortality rates between heavier and lighter infants from all twin pairs born in the United States. We also examine the effect of maternal smoking during pregnancy n the leading risk factor for LBW in the United States n on health among singleton births after controlling for detailed background characteristics. Both analyses imply substantially smaller effects of LBW than previously thought, suggesting two possibilities: 1) existing estimates overstate the true costs and consequences of LBW by at least a factor of four and by as much as a factor of 20;

We develop a novel model of campaigns, elections, and policymaking in which the ex ante objectives of national party leaders differ from the ex post objectives of elected legislators. This generates a distinction between “policy rhetoric ” and “policy reality” and introduces an important role for “party discipline ” in the policymaking process. We identify a protectionist bias in majoritarian politics. When trade policy is chosen by the majority delegation and legislators in the minority have limited means to influence choices, the parties announce trade policies that favor specific factors, and the expected tariff or export subsidy is positive. Positions and expected outcomes monotonically approach free trade as party discipline strengthens.

This paper studies the political viability of free trade agreements (FTAs). The key element of the analysis is the "rent destruction" that these arrangements induce: by eliminating intrabloc trade barriers, an FTA lowers the incentives of import-competing industries to lobby for higher external tariffs, thereby inducing a reduction of the rents created in the lobbying process. Using a conventional competitive model, I show that the prospect of rent destruction can critically undermine (and in some cases rule out entirely) the political viability of welfarereducing FTAs. This result contrasts sharply with findings from the earlier regionalism literature.

We examine the impact of air pollution on infant death in California over the 1990s. Our work offers several innovations: first, most previous studies examine populations subject to far greater levels of pollution. Second, many studies examine a single pollutant in isolation. We examine three “criteria” pollutants in a common framework. Third, we use rich individual-level data and pollution measured at the weekly level. Our most novel finding is a significant effect of CO on infant mortality: we find that reductions in carbon monoxide over the 1990s saved approximately 1000 infant lives in California.

Forty million people are infected with HIV worldwide; twenty-five million of them are in Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper addresses the question of why Africa has been so heavily affected by HIV, and what explains the variation within Africa. I present a model that decomposes epidemic level into differences in sexual behavior and differences in viral transmission rates. I argue, using evidence drawn from the existing medical literature, that Africa has very high HIV transmission rates, likely due to high rates of other untreated sexually transmitted infections, while transmission rates in the United States are low. The difference in transmission rates is large enough to explain the observed difference in prevalence between the United States and Sub-Saharan Africa. The model also provides a good fit to cross-country data within Africa and suggests that, in contrast to the intra-continental results, differences within that continent can be attributed to differences in sexual behavior and epidemic timing. The results suggest that cost-effective policy interventions would focus on decreasing transmission rates within Africa, possibly by treating other untreated sexually transmitted infections.

Corruption by the politically connected is often blamed for economic ills, particularly in less developed economies. Using a loan-level data set of more than 90,000 firms that represents the universe of corporate lending in Pakistan between 1996 and 2002, we investigate rents to politically connected firms in banking. Classifying a firm as “political” if its director participates in an election, we examine the extent, nature, and economic costs of political rent provision. We find that political firms borrow 45 percent more and have 50 percent higher default rates. Such preferential treatment occurs exclusively in government banks—private banks provide no political favors. Using firm fixed effects and exploiting variation for the same firm across lenders or over time allows for cleaner identification of the political preference result. We also find that political rents increase with the strength of the firm's politician and whether he or his party is in power, and fall with the degree of electoral participation in his constituency. We provide direct evidence against alternative explanations such as socially motivated lending by government banks to politicians. The economy-wide costs of the rents identified are estimated to be 0.3 to 1.9 percent of GDP every year.

This paper investigates whether individuals feel worse off when others around them earn more. In other words, do people care about relative position, and does “lagging behind the Joneses” diminish well-being? To answer this question, I match individual-level data containing various indicators of well-being to information about local average earnings. I find that, controlling for an individual's own income, higher earnings of neighbors are associated with lower levels of self-reported happiness. The data's panel nature and rich set of measures of well-being and behavior indicate that this association is not driven by selection or by changes in the way people define happiness. There is suggestive evidence that the negative effect of increases in neighbors' earnings on own well-being is most likely caused by interpersonal preferences, that is, people having utility functions that depend on relative consumption in addition to absolute consumption.