Knowledge that Transforms

Public interventions in the apprenticeship market often aim to increase demand or returns. We set up a double-sided experiment with youth and firms to analyse a subsidized dual apprenticeship program. This intervention seeks to relax financial constraints for youth by offering a wage subsidy and to make apprenticeship more attractive by providing vocational training in technical skills that complements on-the-job training. We document a large increase in youth participation in apprenticeship, yet the inflow of apprentices induces little crowding out of traditional apprentices in firms. The intervention leads to an increase in youth demand for apprenticeship, enabling firms to fill open apprenticeship positions. The subsidy compensates apprentices for low wages but does not alleviate financial constraints. Consistent with the dual training component contributing to an increase in youth demand for apprenticeship, youth perform more complex tasks and have higher earnings 4 years after the start of the experiment.

Authorities’ support policies shape the location and continuation of industrial and banking activity on their soil. Firms’ locus of activity depends on their prospect of receiving financial assistance in distress and therefore on factors such as countries’ relative resilience. We predict that global firms are global in life and national in death; and that they become less global when competition is more intense, times are turbulent, and international risk sharing (say, through swap lines) weak. We analyse the competitive benefits of industrial and banking policies as well as their limitations, such as currency appreciation.

We study the long-term effects of a randomized intervention targeting children's socio-emotional skills. The classroom-based intervention for primary school children has positive impacts that persist for over a decade. Treated children become more likely to complete academic high school and enrol in university. Two mechanisms drive these results. Treated children show fewer attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder symptoms: they are less impulsive and less disruptive. They also attain higher grades, but they do not score higher on standardized tests. The long-term effects on educational attainment thus appear to be driven by changes in socio-emotional skills rather than cognitive skills.

Historically, large changes in U.S. government spending induced fiscal efforts that were not all alike, with some using more progressive taxes than others. We develop a heterogeneous-agent New Keynesian model to analyse how the distribution of taxes across households shapes spending multipliers. The model yields empirically realistic distributions in marginal propensities to consume and labour elasticities, which result in lower responsiveness to tax changes for higher-income earners. In turn, multipliers are larger when spending is financed with higher tax progressivity—that is, when the tax burden falls more heavily on higher-income earners. This result is historically material. We estimate that, on average, tax rates increased more for top-income than for bottom-income earners after a spending shock. Thus, the typical U.S. spending shock was financed with higher tax progressivity. We further exploit the historical variation in the financing of spending to estimate progressivity-dependent multipliers, which we find consistent with the model.

As utility services expand throughout the developing world, providers must grapple with how to set prices to recover average costs. Data from a multiyear randomised pricing experiment among nearly 1,500 recently connected piped water customers in Vietnam reveal month-to-month demand persistence. Based on structural demand estimation, we document how endogenous preferences, if unaccounted for, can lead to low take-up and thereby threaten the financial viability of the new water utility. We also show that such demand persistence calls for pricing schemes that defer lump-sum payment, effectively allowing future consumers to subsidise their present selves.

After a drug obtains marketing authorisation, the usage depends on the regulation of off-label prescriptions for unapproved indications. We investigate the impact of off-label prescription regulation on physicians’ behaviour, patients’ health, treatment costs, and pharmaceutical firms’ pricing with a structural demand and supply model. Exploiting rich panel data on physicians’ activities and office visits in France over 9 years, we use a model of prescription choice and health outcomes with unobserved patient-level heterogeneity. We identify the demand for on-label and off-label drugs and the effect of prescription choice on health outcomes. On the supply side, we use a Nash-in-Nash bargaining model between the government and the pharmaceutical companies that allows the partial identification of the marginal costs of drugs. Counterfactual simulations show that when we remove off-label drugs from the choice set of physicians, substitution to on-label drugs at constant prices would lead to an increase of 15% in the expenditure on prescription drugs. If we allow bargaining adjustment on drug prices under a ban on off-label prescriptions, the ban would further increase the treatment cost, by 26%, without improving health outcomes.

Can the judiciary help root out government corruption? This article exploits the random assignment of court cases to justices who exhibit varying degrees of strictness to examine how convicting corrupt officials affects local government outcomes in the Philippines. I document that convictions improve the management of local public finances and reduce associated corruption. An exploration of mechanisms suggests that legal deterrence effects contribute to these findings. The results further indicate that convictions are effective at stifling corruption among bureaucrats, but not politicians. Consistent with this heterogeneity, convictions reduce electoral competition and consequently weaken accountability for incumbent politicians.

We show that in a canonical model with heterogeneous entrepreneurs, financial frictions, and an imperfectly elastic supply of capital, a fall in the interest rate has an ambiguous effect on aggregate economic activity. In partial equilibrium, a lower interest rate raises aggregate investment both by relaxing financial constraints and by prompting relatively less productive entrepreneurs to invest. In general equilibrium, however, this higher demand for capital raises its price and crowds out investment by more productive entrepreneurs. When this reallocation is strong enough, a fall in the interest rate reduces aggregate output. A numerical exploration of the model suggests that this reallocation effect is quantitatively significant and—in response to persistent changes in the interest rate—stronger than the traditional balance-sheet channel. We provide evidence of the reallocation effect using U.S. firm-level data.

We present a novel algorithm called Dynamic Perturbation for solving large-scale macroeconomic models. Our approach involves computing first-order Taylor expansions of the policy functions along the entire equilibrium path. This method applies to a wide range of models and offers significantly higher accuracy than traditional perturbation approaches. Remarkably, even when utilising first-order approximations, our method can effectively handle models with strong nonlinearities and occasionally binding constraints, such as the zero lower bound.

In theory, market-based regulatory instruments correct market failures at least cost. However, evidence on their efficacy remains scarce. Using administrative data, we estimate that, on average, the European Union Emissions Trading System (EU ETS)—the world’s first and largest market-based climate policy—induced regulated manufacturing firms to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 14–16% with no detectable contractions in economic activity. We find no evidence of outsourcing to unregulated firms or markets; instead, firms made targeted investments, reducing the emissions intensity of production. These results indicate that the EU ETS induced global emissions reductions, a necessary and sufficient condition for mitigating climate change. We show that the absence of any negative economic effects can be rationalized in a model where pricing the externality induces firms to make fixed-cost investments in energy-saving capital that reduce marginal variable costs.