Knowledge that Transforms

Teacher contracts that condition pay and retention on demonstrated performance can improve selection into and out of teaching. I study alternative contracts in a simulated teacher labor market that incorporates dynamic self-selection and Bayesian learning. Bonus policies create only modest incentives and thus have small effects on selection. Reductions in tenure rates can have larger effects, but must be accompanied by substantial salary increases; elimination of tenure confers little additional benefit unless firing rates are extremely high. Benefits of both bonus and tenure policies exceed costs, though optimal policies are sensitive to labor market parameters about which little is known.

In many developing countries property rights over rural land are maintained through continuous personal use instead of by land titles. We show that removing the link between land use and land rights through the issuance of ownership certificates can result in large-scale adjustments to labor and land allocations. Using the rollout of the Mexican land certification program from 1993 to 2006, we find that households obtaining certificates were subsequently 28 percent more likely to have a migrant member. We also show that even though land certification induced migration, it had little effect on cultivated area due to consolidation of farm units.

Immigration enforcement has ambiguous implications for the crime rate of undocumented immigrants. On the one hand, expulsions reduce the pool of immigrants at risk of committing crimes, on the other they lower the opportunity cost of crime for those who are not expelled. We estimate the effect of expulsions on the crime rate of undocumented immigrants in Italy exploiting variation in enforcement toward immigrants of different nationality, due to the existence of bilateral agreements for the control of illegal migration. We find that stricter enforcement of migration policy reduces the crime rate of undocumented immigrants.

This paper develops axiomatically a revealed preference theory of reference-dependent choice behavior. Instead of taking the reference for an agent as exogenously given in the description of a choice problem, we suitably relax the Weak Axiom of Revealed Preference to obtain, endogenously, the existence of reference alternatives as well as the structure of choice behavior conditional on those alternatives. We show how this model captures some well-known choice patterns such as the attraction effect.

We document several facts about workforce transitions from the informal to the formal sector in Vietnam, a fast growing, industrializing, and low-income country. First, younger workers, particularly migrants, are more likely to work in the formal sector and stay there permanently. Second, the decline in the aggregate share of informal employment occurs through changes between and within birth cohorts. Third, younger, educated, male, and urban workers are more likely to switch to the formal sector than other workers initially in the informal sector. Poorly educated, older, female, rural workers face little prospect of formalization. Fourth, formalization coincides with occupational upgrading.

Under the Affordable Care Act, individual states have discretion in how they define coverage regions, within which insurers must charge the same premium to buyers of the same age, family structure, and smoking status. We exploit variation in these definitions to investigate whether the size of the coverage region affects outcomes in the ACA marketplaces. We find large consequences for small and rural markets. When states combine small counties with neighboring urban areas into a single region, the included rural markets see 0.6 to 0.8 more active insurers, on average, and savings in annual premiums of between $200 and $300.

The Great Recession marks the worst downturn since those of the early 1980s. A large literature considers how the public safety net responded to this shock. We instead consider the responsiveness of one dimension of the private safety net. Families can react to negative shocks by moving in with relatives or downsizing. We use across-state over-time variation to estimate the effects of cycles on living arrangements, paying particular attention to young adults. We find living arrangements are cyclical, but effects are small. Surprisingly given the press attention, we find no evidence that things are different in the Great Recession.

We consider vertical contracting arrangements between a manufacturer and a retailing network when retailers have private information and the organization is run through bilateral contracts. We highlight a new form of informational opportunism arising when the manufacturer manipulates information learned separately in each relationship. We characterize the set of allocations robust to such opportunism by means of simple ex post incentive compatibility constraints. Those constraints limit the manufacturer's ability to use yardstick competition among retailers. They simplify contracts and restore a rent/efficiency trade-off even with correlated information. We show that sell-out contracts are optimal under a wide range of circumstances.

The experience of first Japan and now Europe and the USA suggests that Hansen's concept of secular stagnation is highly relevant. Recovery has been anemic and follows a generation of financially unsustainable and often lackluster growth. Investment demand has declined while the supply of saving has increased, leaving the economy vulnerable to liquidity traps. Although some US indicators have improved, forward real rates have declined sharply, European prospects remain muddled, and the zero-bound will likely constrain again during the next recession. Infrastructure and private investment are the best ways to both minimize the risk of secular stagnation and raise demand.

Stratification is a distinctive feature of competitive education markets that can be explained by a preference for good peers. Learning externalities can lead students to care about the ability of their peers, resulting in across-school sorting by ability. This paper shows that a preference for good peers, and therefore stratification, can also emerge endogenously from reputational concerns that arise when graduates use their college of origin to signal their ability. Reputational concerns can also explain puzzling observed trends including the increase in student investment into admissions exam preparation, and the decline in study time at college.