ABSTRACT Toward the goal of reconciling conflicting arguments on whether performance-based incentives facilitate or impede divergent thinking, we identify a feature common to prior demonstrations of negative incentive effects: they generally involve tasks with only one correct solution. Our first experiment replicates a negative incentive effect when insight problems require “bottom-up” divergent thinking from an unexpected resource to the problem it is uniquely equipped to solve, whereas our second experiment finds a positive incentive effect in the more general case of problems that enable “top-down” divergent thinking from a problem to multiple potential solutions. We also observe a positive incentive effect in a third experiment that measures the time needed to generate a solution to problems that have multiple potential solutions and in a fourth experiment in which participants design insight problems. Overall, our findings suggest that any harmful effects of performance-based incentives are likely restricted to highly constrained settings. Data Availability: Data are available from the authors upon request. JEL Classifications: J33; M14; M41; M52.

We build a publicly available database that tracks economic activity in the United States at a granular level in real time using anonymized data from private companies. We report weekly statistics on consumer spending, business revenues, job postings, and employment rates disaggregated by county, sector, and income group. Using the publicly available data, we show how the COVID-19 pandemic affected the economy by analyzing heterogeneity in its effects across subgroups. High-income individuals reduced spending sharply in March 2020, particularly in sectors that require in-person interaction. This reduction in spending greatly reduced the revenues of small businesses in affluent, dense areas. Those businesses laid off many of their employees, leading to widespread job losses, especially among low-wage workers in such areas. High-wage workers experienced a V-shaped recession that lasted a few weeks, whereas low-wage workers experienced much larger, more persistent job losses. Even though consumer spending and job postings had recovered fully by December 2021, employment rates in low-wage jobs remained depressed in areas that were initially hard hit, indicating that the temporary fall in labor demand led to a persistent reduction in labor supply. Building on this diagnostic analysis, we evaluate the effects of fiscal stimulus policies designed to stem the downward spiral in economic activity. Cash stimulus payments led to sharp increases in spending early in the pandemic, but much smaller responses later in the pandemic, especially for high-income households. Real-time estimates of marginal propensities to consume provided better forecasts of the impacts of subsequent rounds of stimulus payments than historical estimates. Overall, our findings suggest that fiscal policies can stem secondary declines in consumer spending and job losses, but cannot restore full employment when the initial shock to consumer spending arises from health concerns. More broadly, our analysis demonstrates how public statistics constructed from private sector data can support many research and real-time policy analyses, providing a new tool for empirical macroeconomics.