Knowledge that Transforms

Using the Survey of Consumer Expectations, which asks employed workers to report their salaries and job offers every four months, we find that rejecting an outside offer has no significant effect on a worker's salary with the current employer, the expected probability that the current employer will match an outside offer with a higher salary, and the worker's satisfaction with the current job, both overall and separately for wages and non-wage benefits. The results suggest that wage renegotiation in response to changes in an employed worker's outside option does not play a significant role for individual wages.

We provide evidence that an influx of technical human capital improves regional entrepreneurship, both by increasing firm entry and reducing entrepreneurial failure. The results also indicate negative externalities upon lowtech and competing industries: an influx of inventors in a county shifts the locus of venture capital investment away from low-tech startups to high-tech startups and moreover towards new ventures in the same sector as those inventors' skills. We strengthen causal inference with a shift-share instrument which combines the spatial distribution of surnames in the LM>= U.S. Census with thousands of surnamespecific shifts based on modern inventor mobility.

This paper studies the effects of natural rate shocks on output and inflation. It estimates a semi-structural model inspired by the DSGE literature. A decline in the natural rate is found to lower trend output and to be contractionary and deflationary in the short run. When the economy is constrained by the zero lower bound (ZLB), these results are consistent with the secular stagnation hypothesis. However, negative natural rate shocks are found to depress the trend of output even outside of the ZLB, calling for a more general theory. A model with liquidity scarcity is proposed as a first step.

We examine the impact of biometric monitoring devices placed in tuberculosis treatment centers in Indian slums. The devices record health worker attendance and patient visits. Combining survey data, random center visits, and hospital registers, we find that patients at biometric-equipped centers are 25% less likely to interrupt treatment, reflecting increased efforts by health workers and greater daily adherence by patients. The technology also improves the quality of public data by reducing overreported patient numbers and underreported treatment interruptions. Overall, our results suggest that real-time monitoring of service delivery can strengthen the state’s capacity to serve poor and marginalized populations.

This paper examines the authorship of postpublication criticisms in the scientific literature, with a focus on gender differences. Bibliometrics from journals in the natural and social sciences show that comments that criticize or correct a published study are 20% to 40% less likely than regular papers to have a female author. In preprints in the life sciences, prior to peer review, women are missing by 20% to 40% in failed replications compared to regular papers, but they are not missing in successful replications. In an experiment, I then find large gender differences in willingness to point out and penalize a mistake in someone's work.

This paper uses a manager-firm-worker matched dataset covering the entire Danish population to identify manager effects on worker wages. We show that manager-specific wage premiums are almost as important as firm-specific wage premiums in explaining betweenfirm wage inequality. Managers who pay higher wages are more likely to be replaced through acquisitions. Manager-specific wage premiums are uncorrelated with productivity and seem to stem from managers' traits and fairness views. Our results highlight the role of managers in understanding between-firm wage inequality and suggest that the managerial labor market tends to select low-paying managers and redistribute wealth from workers to shareholders.

This paper presents evidence that autocrats use state-owned firms to prevent unrest via employment provision, a role that helps explain these low-productivity firms' favorable treatment and persistence across settings. I use variation in a regional conflict in Xinjiang to establish that Chinese state firms respond to threats of ethnic unrest by hiring minority men. Concurrently, wages rise and private employment falls among this group. These patterns are consistent with a theoretical framework of governmentsubsidized, pacification-motivated state employment, and I use the framework to quantify the implicit subsidy that state firms receive for hiring male minorities.

We estimate the effects of monetary policy shocks across local areas in the US and find substantial variation in their responses. There is a positive covariance of the price and employment effects of monetary policy across regions, and more sensitive regions are those with low per capita income. These patterns are consistent with New Keynesian models of a monetary union where regions have different shares of handto- mouth consumers. The model predicts that monetary policy shocks create large differences in consumption and real wages across space, and that heterogeneity across local areas amplifies the aggregate responses to shifts in monetary policy rates.

Researchers commonly use jackknife-based instrumental variables estimators to eliminate the many-instruments bias of two-stage least squares. Where inference must be clustered, however, the jackknife fails to eliminate the bias. We propose a cluster-jackknife approach in which first-stage predicted values for each observation are constructed from a regression that leaves out the observation’s entire cluster. The cluster-jackknife instrumental variables estimator (CJIVE) eliminates many-instruments bias, and consistently estimates causal effects in the traditional linear model and local average treatment effects in the heterogeneous treatment effects framework. We illustrate the method in an application estimating the effects of pre-trial detention in Miami-Dade County.

This paper exploits spatial quasiexperimental variation around French departmental borders to provide novel evidence that regional borders disturb surrounding economic activity; namely, commuting flows, catchment areas, and residential density. The lack of integration of local transport networks at regional borders—leading to a 4.5 km travel distance penalty when crossing borders—explains the observed border effects. Using a spatial quantifiable equilibrium framework and accounting for construction costs, a policy simulation exercise shows that integrating local transport networks leads to a 6.36% average growth in real per capita residential income.