Knowledge that Transforms

Federal research funding is a key input into scientific work, but funding streams can be disrupted. We study how delays in renewed NIH research grants affect lab personnel’s careers, linking grant records to university payroll, tax, Census, and publication data. Using a difference-in-differences design, we find that interruptions of at least 30 days increase nonemployment among personnel in labs supported by a single NIH R01 grant by 3 percentage points, or 40%. Among those who remain employed in the US, earnings decrease by 20%. The results show that short funding gaps can alter career trajectories, especially for trainees.

Many governments use fiscal transfers to reduce regional inequality, yet discretionary allocation may also depend on informal communication among officials. We examine this mechanism in a large central-to-provincial transfer system, using policymakers’ shared workplace, alumni, and hometown backgrounds to measure social ties. Exploiting ministerial turnover and controlling for provincial leadership, we find that prior workplace ties significantly increase transfers. We then embed these estimates in a quantitative spatial model with trade, migration, input-output linkages, and fiscal-productivity effects. Social ties redirect resources toward richer provinces with stronger fundamentals, raising welfare and output while weakening redistribution. Under egalitarian weights, however, removing ties improves welfare.

I propose a model of insurance demand where non-monetary attributes determine which plans an individual considers, and monetary attributes determine an individual's expected utility. This approach reconciles the classic view of insurance as purely financial with the empirical finding that choice is driven by additional attributes. I estimate the model using Medicare Part D data, allowing for unobserved heterogeneity in consideration and preferences. I find the former plays a crucial role: more than 90% of individuals consider 5 or fewer plans, approximately lO°lo of the menu. Additionally, estimates of risk preferences are comparable to existing studies of similar stakes.

Surface water in California is scarce and tightly managed, yet little is traded through a market. This paper studies transaction costs in the existing wholesale water market and estimates the benefits of reducing them. I develop an empirical framework that uses transactions among water districts to analyze welfare, decomposing prices into demand and transaction costs and simulating a market with only physical frictions. Transaction costs are large: median variable costs are 54% of the price, and fixed costs deter many districts from participating. Eliminating them produces gains of several hundred million dollars per year, or 1-3% of statewide water expenditures.

We quantify the benefits of better firm-to-firm matching in an aggregate diffusion model where individuals acquire profitable knowledge from others. We estimate the model using a small-scale program in Kenya that creates new opportunities for firm managers to interact. Aggregate gains from the program depend on the relative importance of meeting a high-knowledge firm versus learning within that meeting. We show how moments from the intervention identify these parameters, demonstrating how easily estimated moments beyond the average treatment effect inform at-scale gains. We provide sufficient conditions extending the identification procedure to a broader class of experiments and aggregate diffusion models.

We study how public disclosure of politicians’ outside income affects their behavior. We exploit a disclosure reform targeting German federal MPs and tax-return data in a difference-indifferences setup using unaffected state MPs as controls. MPs increase their outside income by 24%, driven by likely right-leaning MPs. A representative survey experiment uncovers that right-leaning voters interpret outside income as a signal of competence and hard work, while left-leaning voters associate it with weaker representation. Consistent with this, we show that newspapers cover right-leaning MPs’ outside activities more favorably. Our findings suggest that politicians strategically use public disclosure as a signaling tool.

Developing countries face high pharmaceutical prices despite the presence of multiple generic producers. One key reason is excessive spending on sales and marketing by drug firms. This paper examines how centralized drug procurement can curb such marketing efforts and reduce prices, using a policy experiment in China where certain generics are procured through centralized auctions in pilot cities. Winning firms gain large market shares directly without high marketing costs. We find that the centralized auction significantly reduces both sales costs and prices, with winning firms experiencing notable decreases in marketing-related labor demand.

We study the unintended effects of Fair Access to Insurance Requirements (FAIR) plans developed by 26 states in the 1960s to address insurance redlining in urban neighborhoods. FAIR plans’ problematic features included prohibitions on considering environmental hazards in underwriting, mandatory insurer participation in pools that diluted underwriting incentives, and payouts exceeding market values in declining areas. Using a triple-difference design comparing pre/post-FAIR periods, neighborhoods with/without likely FAIR access, and participating/non-participating states, we find that FAIR inadvertently led to significant housing disinvestment and accelerated declines in neighborhood population, with simultaneous increases in the Black population share.

We study how employer concentration affects job design, focusing on schedule flexibility as a non-wage job attribute. Using the full text of 46 million UK job vacancies from 2014–2019, we construct new measures of flexible work arrangements using supervised machine learning and large-language-model—assisted annotations. Adopting an instrumental variable strategy using a Bartik-style prediction of the change in employer concentration based on nationwide hiring trends, we show that higher concentration reduces the value of worker compensation partly through shifts toward “risky” flexibility that exposes workers to earnings volatility.

This paper reevaluates the longstanding debate on capital-labor substitution by examining the role of external inputs: raw materials, intermediate goods and services, imports, offshoring. Both a meta-analysis (analyzing existing estimates of substitution) and direct estimation (using U.S. data for 1963-2016) indicate that external inputs disproportionately displace labor. These findings imply (1) that the capital-labor ratio responds 40-80% more strongly to the price of labor than to the price of capital, (2) that value added cannot be modeled separably from gross output, and (3) that historical disagreements regarding substitution can be recast as an omitted variable bias involving external inputs.