Knowledge that Transforms

Behavioral economics presents a “paternalistic” rationale for benevolent government intervention. This paper presents a model of public debt where voters have self-control problems and attempt to commit using illiquid assets. In equilibrium, government accumulates debt to respond to individuals' desire to undo their commitments, which leads individuals to rebalance their portfolio, in turn feeding into a demand for further debt accumulation. As a consequence, (i) large (and distortionary) government debt accumulation occurs, and (ii) banning illiquid assets could improve individuals' welfare. These results offer a new rationale for balanced budget rules in constitutions to restrain governments' responses to voters' self-control problems.

Many lament that weak accountability and poor governance impede economic development in Africa. Politicians rely on ethnic allegiances that deliver the vote irrespective of performance, dampening electoral incentives. Giving voters information about candidate competence counters ethnic loyalty and strengthens accountability. I extend a canonical electoral model to show how information provision flows through voter behavior and ultimately impacts the distribution of political spending. I test the theory on data from Sierra Leone using decentralization and differential radio coverage to identify information's effects. Estimates suggest that information increases voting across ethnic-party lines and induces a more equitable allocation of campaign spending.

We consider an economy where individuals face uninsurable risks to their human capital accumulation and analyze the optimal level of linear taxes on capital and labor income together with the optimal path of government debt. We show that in the presence of such risks, it is beneficial to tax both labor and capital and to issue public debt. We also assess the quantitative importance of these findings, and show that the benefits of government debt and capital taxes both increase with the magnitude of idiosyncratic risks and the degree of relative risk aversion.

Both under- and over-treatment of communicable diseases are public bads. But efforts to decrease one run the risk of increasing the other. Using rich experimental data on household treatment-seeking behavior in Kenya, we study the implications of this trade-off for subsidizing life-saving antimalarials sold over-the-counter at retail drug outlets. We show that a very high subsidy (such as the one under consideration by the international community) dramatically increases access, but nearly one-half of subsidized pills go to patients without malaria. We study two ways to better target subsidized drugs: reducing the subsidy level, and introducing rapid malaria tests over-the-counter.

Mathiness lets academic politics masquerade as science. Like mathematical theory, mathiness uses a mixture of words and symbols, but instead of making tight links, it leaves ample room for slippage between statements in the languages of words as opposed to symbols, and between statements with theoretical as opposed to empirical content. Because it is difficult to distinguish mathiness from mathematical theory, the market for lemons tells us that the market for mathematical theory might collapse, leaving only mathiness as entertainment that is worth little but cheap to produce.

We analyze strategic speculators’ incentives to trade on information in a model where firm value is endogenous to trading, due to feedback from the financial market to corporate decisions. Trading reveals private information to managers and improves their real decisions, enhancing fundamental value. This feedback effect has an asymmetric effect on trading behavior: it increases (reduces) the profitability of buying (selling) on good (bad) news. This gives rise to an endogenous limit to arbitrage, whereby investors may refrain from trading on negative information. Thus, bad news is incorporated more slowly into prices than good news, potentially leading to overinvestment.

Organizations depend on members' “loyalty” for their success. Studying a cooperative's attempt to increase deliveries by members, we show that the threat of sanctions leads to highly heterogeneous response among members. Despite the cooperative not actually enforcing the threatened sanctions, positive effects for some members persist for several months. Other members “exit,” stopping delivering altogether. Among non-compliant members we document substantial heterogeneity in beliefs about the legitimacy of the sanctions. This lack of common understanding highlights the role played by managers in organizations and provides a candidate explanation for lack of sanctions enforcement documented by Ostrom (1990) and other studies.

We address the role of “psychological frictions” in the incomplete take-up of EITC benefits with an IRS field experiment. We specifically assess the influence of program confusion, informational complexity, and stigma by evaluating response to experimental mailings distributed to 35,050 tax filers who failed to claim $26 million despite an initial notice. While the mere receipt of the mailing, simplification, and the heightened salience of benefits led to substantial additional claiming, attempts to reduce perceived costs of stigma, application, and audits did not. The study, and accompanying surveys, suggests that low program awareness/understanding and informational complexity contribute to the puzzle of low take-up.

We consider a multi-battle team contest in which players from two rival teams form pairwise matches to fight in distinct component battles, which are carried out sequentially or (partially) simultaneously. A team wins if and only if its players win a majority of battles. Each player benefits from his team's win, while he can also receive a private reward for winning his own battle. We find that the outcomes of past battles do not distort the outcomes of future battles. Neither the total expected effort nor the overall outcome of the contest depends on the contest's temporal structure or its feedback policy.