I combine personnel records with vital statistics for 1910 to 1925 to study how bureaucratic representation affected mortality in 1,271 Indian towns during the 1918 influenza pandemic. Exploiting the rotation of senior colonial officers across districts and a cross-border comparison, towns headed by Indian (as opposed to British) district officers experienced 15 percentage points lower deaths. The lower mortality effects extended beyond the urban areas and coincided with greater responsiveness in relief provision. Bureaucratic representation can thus be a powerful way to increase state responsiveness during times of crisis.

This study uses survey data of fund managers' views on prospects for international equity markets to shed light on why investment portfolios are significantly biased towards domestic equities. We find that fund managers from the United States, the United Kingdom, continental Europe, and Japan show a significant relative optimism towards their home equity market. Where institutional factors have largely failed to explain the puzzle, our evidence lends support to behavioral explanations of the bias.

Using rapid expansion of the Beijing subway from 2000 to 2018, we analyze its impact on collaborative matches in innovations. We find that an hour reduction in travel time between a pair of locations in Beijing brought 14.85% to 37.69% increase in collaborated patents. Far-apart location pairs were more affected, and the local average causal response is approximately 34.92% to 82.29%. The effect is mainly driven by increased matches among highly productive innovators. The entry of new innovators, relocation of existing innovators, and collaborations among low-productive innovators also contribute to the increase in collaborative matches, especially in the long run.

This paper extends Brock and Durlauf's (2001a, 2001b) binary choice complete network (or group interaction) model with homogeneous rational expectations to a general network model with heterogeneous rational expectations. In our model, individuals will form expectations regarding peers' behaviors taking into account their characteristics. Endogenous, contextual, and correlated effects are all identifiable. Conditions for unique equilibrium are established. For a complete network with heterogeneous rational expectations, multiple equilibria can be characterized by an aggregate scalar index. The empirical results on adolescents' smoking behaviors show significant endogenous and contextual effects, even after controlling for school-grade random effects and school fixed effects.

We examine price negotiation in the payment card industry by exploiting a unique merchant-, industry-, and city-level data set. Motivated by the substantial variation in acquirer fees and heterogeneous merchant card transactions, we use Nash bargaining to model the negotiation over the acquirer fee between an acquirer and a merchant. We find that the merchants secure a larger incremental surplus than the acquirer on average. Moreover, merchants might face upward pressure on acquirer fees as the card penetration rate rises over time, and policies that weaken the acquirer's bargaining power could relieve the upward fee pressure.

This paper examines the effects of work experience acquired while youth were in high school (and college) on young men's wage rates. Previous studies have found sizeable and persistent rates of return to working while enrolled in school, especially high school, on subsequent wage growth. We evaluate the extent to which these estimates represent causal effects by assessing the robustness of prior findings to controls for unobserved heterogeneity and sample selectivity. We explore more-general econometric methods for dealing with the dynamic of selection and apply them to data on young men from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79). We find that the estimated returns to working while in high school or college are dramatically diminished in magnitude and are not statistically significant when one applies dynamic selection methods.

Using over 11,000 unlicensed loans to over 1,000 borrowers in Singapore, we provide basic information about an understudied market: illegal moneylending. Borrowers and lenders interact frequently and rely primarily on relational contracts to enforce their agreements. Borrowers have high discount rates, often have gambling and/or substance abuse problems, and often repay late. While lenders sometimes resort to nonfinancial punishments, the primary cost of late repayment is the compounding of a very high interest rate. Consistent with our view that lenders cannot extract all surplus, a crackdown on illegal lending raised interest rates and lowered the size of loans.

Individualism has long been linked to economic growth. Using the COVID-19 pandemic, we show that such a culture can hamper the economy's response to crises, a period with heightened coordination frictions. Exploiting variation in U.S. counties' frontier experience, we show that more individualistic counties engage less in social distancing and charitable transfers and are less willing to receive COVID-19 vaccines. The effect of individualism is stronger where social distancing has higher externality and holds at the individual level when we exploit migrants for identification. Our results suggest that individualism can exacerbate collective action problems during economic downturns.

International transactions are costly because they require investments in logistics, contracts, and the acquisition of local institutional knowledge. We posit that a portion of the fixed cost of entering a specific export market can be used toward covering the cost of acquiring imported inputs from that same market, and vice versa. Using dis-aggregated transactions data for Chinese firms from 2000 to 2015, we document firm-level trading patterns suggesting such bilateral economies of scope. Through a structural model, we estimate that the simultaneous export and import in a given country reduce export and import fixed costs by around 42 and 35 percent, respectively.

Urban forests are ubiquitous, yet their impacts and values remain largely unknown. We study a massive urban afforestation policy in Beijing that planted 1/3 of a million acres of greenery in less than a decade. We conduct a remote-sensing audit of the program, finding that it contributes to a substantial greening up of the city. This causes significant downwind air quality improvement, reducing average PM2.5 concentration at city population hubs by 4.2%. Rapid vegetation growth unexpectedly led to a 7.4% increase in pollen exposure. Analysis of medical claims data shows that increased aeroallergens triggered emergency room visits, mirroring pollution effects though much less severe. Monetized net health benefits of the program amount to 1.5% of the city’s GDP. Urban forests are only partially capitalized in housing values, with buyers mainly appreciating proximity to green spaces but not the air quality improvements they bring.