Abundance-related Job Market Papers 2025 (the rest) - The Complete List
Where new researchers are looking
This post contains a complete list of Abundance-related job market papers that we’ve identified. Earlier posts covered innovation, housing, and energy; this final post covers remaining areas related to Abundance. To find all these papers, we looked through the titles of over 1,000 economics job market papers. We also asked for suggestions from peers. If we’ve missed anything, please feel free to send us suggestions (including your own paper) at abundanceandgrowth@coefficientgiving.org.
For more on why we’re sharing these, take a look at our first post on job market papers.
First we present only categories and titles, so you can quickly skim what’s here. After the title index, we present titles plus abstracts.
Titles Index
Titles are presented in random order under each category. There might be additional authors on these papers - we’ve listed the associated job market candidate only.
State Capacity
Startups and the State - Raman Singh Chhina
Education Policy and the Quality of Public Servants - Juan Martín Pal
Economic Ideas and Policy Implementation: Evidence from Malthusian Training in British Indian Bureaucracy - Eric Robertson
Infrastructure
Competition and the Cost of U.S. Infrastructure - Lindsey Currier
Strategic Transportation Investment and Coordinative Policies: Evidence from the U.S. Highway Network - Yuyang Jiang
Travel Mode Choice and Distributional Impacts of Congestion Charge Policy in New York City - Yikuan Ji
The Trade-Offs of Curbside Parking: Evidence from Demand-Based Pricing - Tuyetanh L. Tran
Road to Green? The Effect of Highway Expansion on Industrial Emissions Intensity - Siyu Zhang
Infrastructure Investment, Self-Employment, and Structural Change in the US Labor Market - R. Benjamin Rodriguez
Fiscal Capacity, Railway Federalism, and German Railway Development 1835-1885 - Paul Lowood
Driving Inclusion: The Effect of Improved Transportation for People with Disabilities - Melissa Gentry
Equilibrium Commuting Costs: The Role of Private and Public Transit - Jordan Mosqueda Juárez
Climate Trade Costs: Extreme Weather, Transportation, and Supply Chains - Hubert Massoni
Load it Up: Network Disruptions, Economies of Scale, and Variety Loss in Freight Trucking - Gustavo Nino
On the Move: How Changes in Public Transit Accessibility Affect Household Food Security - Elena Krasovskaia
Public Transit, Residential Sorting and Labor Supply: Evidence and Theory from Lahore’s Bus Rapid Transit System - Bisma Haseeb Khan
Paving the Way for Higher Costs? The Impact of Steel Tariffs on Highway Procurement - Ashwin Nair
Beyond the Flypaper Effect: Crowding-In from Federal Investment in Public Transit - Arseniy Braslavskiy
Moving Opportunity Closer: How Public Transit Transforms Firm Composition and Employment - Akhila Kovvuri
Healthcare and Clinical Trials
The Economics of Choosing Traditional Medicine: Theory and Evidence from India - Zincy Wei
Hospitals, Health, and Growth: The Local Impacts of Public Investment in Health Infrastructure - Spencer McCloy
Hospital Ownership and Quality of Care - Radhika Ramakrishnan
Can Drug Pricing Transparency Reduce Drug Costs? - Nicola Maria Fiore
The Propagation of FDA Regulatory Enforcement Through Drug Supply Chains - Karna Malaviya
The Impact of Medical Innovation on Health and Disability - Jinyeong Son
Do Pharmacies Matter? - Joseph Battles
Restructuring Public Delivery Care - Guilherme Amorim
Market Size and the Returns to Surgeon Volume: Evidence from Joint Replacements - Dante Domenella
Economic Dynamism
Labor Market Dynamics after Cost-of-Living Shocks - Yannick Reichlin
Trapped or Transferred: Worker Mobility and Labor Market Power in the Energy Transition - Minwoo Hyun
For Better or For Worse: The Added Worker Effect in the 21st Century U.S - Luwen Mai
Competitive Occupational Licensure: Doctors Versus Chiropractors - John Fallon
Does Government Procurement Promote Small Business Growth? - Jiaming Soh
Employer Competition and Certification - Hershdeep Chopra
Labor Force Growth, Firm Dynamics, and Declining Labor Mobility - Hector Cardozo
A Taste For Luxury - Josemaria Larrain
High-Skilled Immigration
International Undergraduate Student Inflows and College Pricing Strategies - Sheng Qu
The Social Consequences of Technological Change: Evidence from U.S. Electrification and Immigrant Labor - Sara Benetti
Immigration, job sorting, and health: Evidence from 1920s US immigration policy - Patrick Szurkowski
Elasticity of Taxable Income and Social and Cultural Norms: Evidence from Immigrants in Canada - Kuot D. Manyang
Quality and Location Choice of Immigrant Doctors - Jason Chen
Creating Opportunity: The Impact of Immigration on Native Entrepreneurship - Gabriel Chaves Bosch
Immigration Policies and Human Capital: The Impact on Undocumented College Attendance - David Titus
General Abundance
Information Bias and Selection of Female Professors - Stephanie El Khoury
Competition, Signaling, and Status Externalities in Ph.D. Admissions - Siqi Li
Toxic Tradeoffs: Impact of Environmental Regulations on Workplace Safety in Mining - Sanjukta Mitra
Sticky Intra-household Resource Allocation in the Face of Technological Change: Evidence from a Framed Field Experiment in Mozambique - Rachel Jones
Environmental Regulation with Irreversible Investments: Evidence from High Plains Aquifer Depletion - Nathaniel Hickok
The Hidden Curriculum - Michael G. Cuna
Does Greater Policy Intensity Improve Policy Effectiveness? Evidence from Seoul, South Korea - Hayeon Jeong
Beyond argumentation: AI-powered Socratic dialogue and political moderation in public deliberation - José Ramón Enríquez
Titles, Abstracts, and Links to Papers
Startups and the State
Raman Singh Chhina
Can bureaucrats in developing countries identify and selectively promote high-growth startups? How much additional gain does selective targeting provide over uniform startup subsidies? I develop a quantitative endogenous growth model of selective targeting in which the entry and growth of different startup types responds heterogeneously to the government’s ability to filter and select startups. To estimate this selection ability and quantify the resulting gains, I build a novel dataset of startup selections and rejections from an online startup registry and bureaucratic board meeting minutes, as well as novel patent application data and hand-collected income statements, in the context of the Startup India Program—one of the largest such policies, launched in 2016. I find substantial variation in selection ability across components of the program: startup labeling selects below average-quality firms and distorts exit decisions, whereas provisions of R&D benefits and tax-holiday approvals by a bureaucratic board successfully identify innovative, high-growth startups. The latter double the benefits-to-cost ratio relative to uniform subsidies. I also derive implications for optimal program design by evaluating counterfactual policies that vary the duration and composition of subsidies.
Education Policy and the Quality of Public Servants
Juan Martín Pal
This paper studies the design of higher education policies targeted at improving the recruitment of public servants. I leverage the introduction of a policy in Chile that aimed to increase teacher quality by combining financial incentives and admission standards. Exploiting a sharp assignment rule for financial incentives eligibility, I estimate that, at the threshold, enrollment of high performing students at teacher colleges increased by 42%. For low-income students, two thirds of the increase is due to switching away from non-enrollment. The policy led to a 0.25SD increase in the scores at the college entrance exam, which translated into a 0.11SD increase in Teacher Value Added (TVA). I embed the reduced-form results into a demand and supply model of higher education that incorporates a novel method for solving discrete-continuous games in large markets. Alternative combinations of incentives and admission standards lead to increases of up to 6.6% in the test scores of students enrolled at teacher colleges, and up to 20% in TVA. Targeting the policy to low-income students yields further gains in TVA at no additional cost. To achieve similar gains, the expected wages of graduates from teacher colleges would need to increase by approximately 35%, highlighting the cost-effectiveness of the policy.
Economic Ideas and Policy Implementation: Evidence from Malthusian Training in British Indian Bureaucracy
Eric Robertson
Public officials often fail to implement government policy as directed, yet the role of economic ideas in shaping these implementation choices is poorly understood. This paper provides causal evidence that exposure to economic ideas can durably influence bureaucrat behavior. I study British colonial bureaucrats in India, exploiting a natural experiment created by the abrupt death of Thomas Malthus in 1834, replacing his economics instruction at a bureaucrat training college for that of a contemporary critic, Richard Jones. Whereas Malthus regarded economic distress as a natural mechanism for restoring equilibrium by reducing population growth, Jones disagreed with this view. Linking rainfall shocks to district-level fiscal responses, I show that officials trained by Malthus delivered less relief during droughts, providing 0.10-0.25 SD less aid across all major measures compared with officials taught by Jones. The results reveal that exposure to abstract economic ideas can shape real-world policy implementation for decades.
Competition and the Cost of U.S. Infrastructure
Lindsey Currier
Can limited competition in procurement auctions explain the high, and rising, price of road infrastructure in the U.S.? I assemble a new dataset covering the near-universe of state highway auctions between 2002 and 2024. I first document thin competition: one- or two-bidder auctions account for a third of awards, and this share has risen over the past decade. Using spatial variation in inter-state bidder locations, I then estimate the average causal effect of competition on prices; an additional bidder reduces prices by ten percent. To decompose bids in the data into markups and production costs, I develop a semi-parametric structural auction model that incorporates bidders’ uncertainty over the number of competitors they face. I show that price increases over the past decade are primarily attributable to increasing markups, not increasing production costs. Limited competition, in turn, is consistent with patterns generated by fixed costs of entry, but not broad construction-sector fixed costs. Embedding the markup estimates in an entry model, I estimate large auction and market entry costs, consistent with an important role for procurement complexity and regulatory barriers.
Strategic Transportation Investment and Coordinative Policies: Evidence from the U.S. Highway Network
Yuyang Jiang
Transportation networks are often constructed by multiple jurisdictions. When each decision-maker fails to internalize the full surplus generated by their investment, the resulting network can be inefficient. How large are the resulting inefficiencies, and to what extent can coordinative policies improve outcomes? This paper builds a framework to evaluate the welfare implications of non-cooperative transportation investments, accounting for goods trade, commuting and fiscal budget, and the efficacy of subsidies as a coordinative policy. In this framework, regional governments choose investments in their portion of the network to maximize constituents’ utility, taking as given investments set by other regions and subsidy rates set by a central government. Applying the model to U.S. highways, the observed network is underinvested by 15% relative to the national optimum and has incurred a welfare loss equivalent to 30% of the current level of investment. Across space, underinvestment patterns reflect a terms-of-trade externality, a fiscal externality, and spillovers of logistics technology due to through traffic. Finally, counterfactual exercises indicate that raising federal subsidy rates can improve efficiency, but excessively generous subsidies may backfire.
Travel Mode Choice and Distributional Impacts of Congestion Charge Policy in New York City
Yikuan Ji
This paper evaluates the distributional and welfare impacts of New York City’s recently implemented congestion pricing program, the first in the United States. Using the 2022 Citywide Mobility Survey, I estimate a discrete choice model of travel mode with heterogeneous responses to cost and time, embedded in a congestion feedback framework. The analysis distinguishes between two channels: a price-side effect, capturing the direct burden of the toll on travelers, and a revenue-side effect, reflecting how toll revenues are recycled. The results show that the current toll ($9 peak /$2.25 off-peak) reduces private vehicle trips involving the Manhattan Core by about 19,000 per weekday, with most shifts to subways and walking. Accounting for congestion feedback raises driving speeds and substantially increases welfare relative to a fixed-traffic analysis. The toll alone lowers consumer surplus by $0.32 per person-day, with larger relative burdens on lower-income travelers, while a uniform rebate raises net welfare by $2.24 and makes the policy mildly progressive. Distributional analysis shows that equity outcomes hinge on these two effects: the price-side burden follows income patterns, while the revenue-side outcome depends on policy design. Transit fare subsidies generate smaller average gains while reinforcing mode shifts. The findings highlight that the equity and efficiency of congestion pricing depend jointly on traveler behavior and revenue design, with lessons for other U.S. cities planning similar policies.
The Trade-Offs of Curbside Parking: Evidence from Demand-Based Pricing
Tuyetanh L. Tran
City governments face a trade-off in managing curb space: providing parking to facilitate access to consumption amenities and generate revenue, versus allocating it to alternative land uses. In this paper, we quantify the welfare implications of curbside parking and evaluate alternative policies for managing curb space through parking instruments. We develop a structural model of drivers’ joint destination and parking decisions: drivers choose which destination to visit under imperfect information about parking availability, then decide where to park near the chosen destination. We estimate the model using high-frequency data on metered parking transactions and GPS data on visits to points of interest in San Francisco, one of the few cities that have implemented demand-based pricing for curbside parking. We find that, while drivers value curbside parking, the present discounted value of parking revenue and driver surplus generally falls short of local assessed land values, which proxy for the economic value of land uses. Compared to a revenue-maximizing uniform pricing scheme, San Francisco’s demand-based pricing generates about 30% more revenue while reducing cruising trips by nearly 70%. Our counterfactuals show that reducing parking supply by roughly 6% and lowering the status quo demand-based prices by $1.25 citywide preserves parking welfare, with only a modest revenue loss, while freeing curb space for other uses.
Road to Green? The Effect of Highway Expansion on Industrial Emissions Intensity
Siyu Zhang
This paper examines whether highway expansion, beyond improving connectivity and lowering trade costs, can also reduce the emissions intensity of industrial production. I develop a general equilibrium model in which emissions are an endogenous by-product of firms’ output, and show that highways can lower aggregate emissions intensity by fostering tougher competition and improving resource allocation, especially where trade costs were initially high. The sign of the effect depends on the relative elasticities of wages and productivity with respect to trade costs. Empirically, I use detailed firm-level data from China and a network-based instrument variable to show that highway expansion reduces markup dispersion and lowers sulfur dioxide (SO2) emissions and chemical oxygen demand (COD) per unit of output at the province level, consistent with improved resource allocation. Using geospatial highway data, I further document reductions in emissions intensity at the county level. These results highlight the potential for transportation infrastructure to jointly enhance economic efficiency and environmental sustainability, a co-benefit thus far overlooked.
Infrastructure Investment, Self-Employment, and Structural Change in the US Labor Market
R. Benjamin Rodriguez
This paper studies the effects of infrastructure investment on the labor market. Between 1920 and 1950, the US government began constructing its first interstate highways, the Numbered Highway System. Regions gaining access to the Numbered Highway System experienced significant population growth alongside a shift from self-employment to salaried jobs. To identify the causal effect of this highway network on local labor markets, I use a novel instrumental variable approach exploiting a hypothetical set of highways proposed by the US Army for national defense. I further interpret these causal effects through a spatial equilibrium model in which highway construction induces households to select out of self-employment as local agglomeration—manifested in higher land costs and denser markets—increases the fixed cost of production near highways. I find that investment in the Numbered Highway System can account for one fifth of the decline in the aggregate self-employment rate over this period, underscoring how infrastructure investment fosters regional integration and structural change.
Fiscal Capacity, Railway Federalism, and German Railway Development 1835-1885
Paul Lowood
This paper analyzes the relationship between fiscal capacity and railroad development in Germany. German states understood the benefits of railroads but faced budget constraints when supporting network construction. Using newly constructed fiscal capacity and railroad ownership datasets, I estimate the effect of state revenue growth on the decision to grant concessions to private companies or expand public firms. I find that increases in government revenues led to a significant switch away from public construction towards a concession based system without changing the overall rate of construction. I hypothesize that this is because revenue shocks were not large enough to fund new public railroad projects, but could subsidize significant private investment. This may have allowed states to meet capital demands for consistent levels of construction while issuing less debt.
Driving Inclusion: The Effect of Improved Transportation for People with Disabilities
Melissa Gentry
People with disabilities face substantial barriers to economic and social participation. I explore the extent to which these barriers are overcome by the availability of reliable and flexible transportation, which may serve as “reliability insurance” in case other modes of transit fail. Leveraging the roll-out of Uber, I use a stacked difference-in-differences approach to show that the availability of reliable and flexible transportation leads to improvements in social and economic participation through increased marriage rates and labor force participation, and reduced reliance on public assistance. The reduction in public assistance outweighs expected rideshare costs, lending support to the recent push towards public-private partnerships in the transportation space.
Equilibrium Commuting Costs: The Role of Private and Public Transit
Jordan Mosqueda Juárez
Developing cities rely on a mix of private minibuses and public transit, with many commutes being multimodal. This paper investigates how private providers’ decisions shape commuting costs considering complementarities with the public network, and the welfare and spatial consequences of policies that directly shift prices such as fare regulation and subsidies. I develop a quantitative spatial model in which commuters choose multimodal routes and private providers shape commuting costs through entry, pricing, and frequencies, affecting congestion and network-wide costs. The model is disciplined with newly collected geographic and service data covering the near-universe of transit lines in the Mexico City metropolitan area. To identify key substitution and congestion elasticities, I exploit road-link-level speed changes induced by an exogenous subway-line collapse. Counterfactual analyses suggest that price-based policies can generate welfare gains comparable to infrastructure expansions. The mechanisms underscore that the endogenous response of the private sector and network-wide cost interactions are central to understand the effects of transit interventions.
Climate Trade Costs: Extreme Weather, Transportation, and Supply Chains
Hubert Massoni
Transportation infrastructure is vulnerable to extreme weather events. Vulnerability is prominent at maritime ports, where tropical cyclones frequently halt operations and force firms to adapt to transportation disruptions. I quantify these responses by linking high-frequency maritime shipment data to tropical cyclone tracks. Exposure to tropical cyclones temporarily disrupts port activities (≈1–2 weeks), prompting firms to adjust route choices along transportation networks (rerouting), even after ports resume operations (≈2–6 months). To evaluate the general equilibrium implications of these weather disruptions, I develop a quantitative model of spatial production networks with endogenous routing. Structural estimation reveals that maritime transportation costs decrease with port capacity (scale), but increase with port traffic (congestion) and cyclone risk. Investigating future climate hazards to the transportation network, I find that rerouting is a key adaptation mechanism that prevents global welfare losses. To translate evidence into policy, I derive modelbased sufficient statistics for evaluating and targeting future port investments in light of climate change. Allocation rules that ignore weather risk and firms’ adaptive responses systematically misallocate investment.
Load it Up: Network Disruptions, Economies of Scale, and Variety Loss in Freight Trucking
Gustavo Nino
Sudden disruptions in supply chains often raise fears of sharp shipping price spikes and economic losses, yet policy responses are difficult to establish when the mechanisms of freight firms’ reactions to these shocks are not well understood. This study examines how sudden increases in marginal costs, triggered by landslides on roads, affect ground freight transportation prices and market structure. I use a comprehensive dataset of more than 3.5 million truck movements, over one million detailed route calculations, and geolocated records of landslides on roads that increased the travel times across Colombia in 2019. The findings indicate that disruptions lead to a notable decline in the number of trucks operating (-21%) and a considerable rise in the price per unit of Kg transported (7.5%). Economies of scale are critical to understand the market response, as evidenced by an increase in the average load per truck and a redistribution of market share in favor of larger vehicles. Price increases are driven primarily by a shift from “economy” services offered by small-scale trucking to more expensive services mainly provided by large-scale trucking, rather than by opportunistic price manipulation. A structural consumer welfare model indicates that 88 percent of the resulting consumer welfare loss comes from reduced variety (fewer low price options) and 12 percent from price increases linked to the cost shock. Findings suggest that, in the short run, policies that keep small trucks operating when disruptions occur are very cost effective and might outperform those designed to reinforce infrastructure.
On the Move: How Changes in Public Transit Accessibility Affect Household Food Security
Elena Krasovskaia
Food insecurity is an increasing issue in the United States. Transportation barriers are an indirect yet potentially formidable challenge to access affordable and nutritious food. This paper investigates the impact of public transit (PT) accessibility on household food security in the US. While extensive research exists on food security and PT separately, the intersection of these topics remains underexplored. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, supplemented with several datasets providing transit accessibility measures, I examine how changes in transit accessibility influence household food security outcomes. This study leverages a quasi-experimental design, focusing on “movers” - households that relocate between census tracts with different levels of PT accessibility to obtain a within-household estimate of the effect of PT accessibility on food security. I find that during the period from 1999 to 2003, a one std. dev. increase in PT accessibility was associated with 2-3 percentage points decrease in the probability of food insecurity among Black and poor households, as well as households without a car, and households that used PT in the past. However, during a more recent period from 2015 to 2019, I find no significant relationship between PT access and food security, suggesting that the US food and transportation systems changed substantially between the early 2000s and the late 2010s.
Public Transit, Residential Sorting and Labor Supply: Evidence and Theory from Lahore’s Bus Rapid Transit System
Bisma Haseeb Khan
Public transit can transform how people live and work, yet its distributional effects remain unclear, particularly in developing cities where most households rely on low-quality transit. This paper studies the establishment of the Lahore Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system to examine how mass transit reshapes residential sorting and household labor supply. Using a novel geo-spatial dataset, and exploiting the staggered roll-out of the planned BRT lines, I show that younger, nuclear, non-college-educated households relocate closer to BRT corridors, with greater labor force participation of men in these households. Women’s labor market participation, however, remains largely unchanged—consistent with tied-mover dynamics. To interpret these patterns, I build a spatial model that incorporates gender specific constraints, age-based mobility, and endogenous amenities and provides a framework for evaluating the distributional welfare consequences of transit infrastructure in developing-country contexts.
Paving the Way for Higher Costs? The Impact of Steel Tariffs on Highway Procurement
Ashwin Nair
I study the impact of the 2018 U.S. steel tariffs on bidding in highway procurement auctions. The requirement to use domestically produced steel did not insulate procurement spending from the effects of tariffs in import-reliant coastal states. I find that bids on steel inputs saw a significant increase in these states but were unaffected in the Midwest, where most domestic steel is produced. Using a structural model of bidding and entry, I show that bidders in California faced higher costs but also earned higher markups as fewer bidders participated in steel-intensive projects. I estimate that California incurred an additional $100 million (a 6.8% increase) to construct highway projects, with one-third of the increase driven by the decline in competition. These effects are absent in Michigan.
Beyond the Flypaper Effect: Crowding-In from Federal Investment in Public Transit
Arseniy Braslavskiy
I examine how targeted federal grants affect state and local spending on public transit. The analysis uses comprehensive U.S. expenditure data from 2000–2019 and exploits an exogenous shock from the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). ARRA funds were apportioned to Urbanized Areas through preexisting formula programs, independent of potential changes in transit investment. Using ARRA apportionments as an instrument, I find that each $1 of exogenous federal grants generates a $0.20 annual increase in capital transit spending from all sources. This average effect reflects two distinct phases between 2009–2019: an initial rise in federally funded expenditures with no displacement of state or local spending (the flypaper effect), followed by substantial crowding-in of state funding to the same localities. I develop a conceptual model of local officials’ investment decisions that distinguishes between guaranteed and flexible funding from each source, the latter requiring costly negotiation. In this framework, the initial flypaper effect arises from the stickiness of guaranteed funds, while the subsequent state crowding-in results from increased negotiation for flexible funding. This negotiation can be driven by two mechanisms: (i) higher returns to additional investment or (ii) lower costs of negotiation. Empirical evidence on the nature of additional spending rejects the first mechanism, while crossstate variation in institutional settings supports the second. Taken together, these results suggest that federal grants empowered local officials to secure additional flexible state funding by reducing the cost of negotiation, leading to a disproportionate and persistent increase in total public transit spending.
Moving Opportunity Closer: How Public Transit Transforms Firm Composition and Employment
Akhila Kovvuri
Transportation infrastructure can improve workers’ access to existing economic opportunities, but it can also reshape economic opportunity itself by influencing where and what kinds of firms locate. This paper studies how public transit infrastructure influences firm location, composition, and employment at the neighborhood level. We construct novel data tracking over one million establishment entries and employ both difference-in-differences and market access specifications, exploiting the phased expansion of the Delhi Metro Rail in India. Transit access increases firm entry near stations, with larger, established retail and service firms locating first and inducing subsequent entry of other firms. These patterns create new economic hubs in peripheral areas, increasing employment per capita, especially for women in a context of low baseline female labor force participation. Counterfactual decompositions using a quantitative spatial model with estimated gender-specific commute elasticities reveal that compositional shifts toward larger establishments and consumer-facing industries that ex-ante employ more women account for the majority of this differential employment effect. Understanding how infrastructure reshapes the demand side of the labor market is thus critical for predicting and enhancing its distributional impacts.
The Economics of Choosing Traditional Medicine:Theory and Evidence from India
Zincy Wei
Why do patients reject clinically superior treatments, even when they are accessible and affordable? This phenomenon is particularly acute in India, where half of urban households rely on traditional practitioners for chronic conditions such as hypertension, despite modern medicine being more effective and cheaper. I conduct a randomized controlled trial with 1,819 adults at high risk of hypertension who primarily use traditional medicine. I randomly vary only the institutional sources of clinical evidence about modern medicine’s efficacy. I find three main results: (i) the messenger matters more than the message—attributing evidence to India’s traditional medicine authority (AYUSH) increases modern medicine spending and take-up rates, while attributing to international medical journals has modest, insignificant effects; (ii) patients can simultaneously adopt superior treatments while experiencing smaller decreases in trust in traditional institutions when information comes from trusted sources; and (iii) effects fade within two months without reinforcement, revealing that sustained behavior change requires repeated engagement rather than one-time messaging. The results demonstrate that institutional credibility is a first-order determinant of healthcare decision-making, with implications for any domain where multiple authorities compete for legitimacy.
Hospitals, Health, and Growth: The Local Impacts of Public Investment in Health Infrastructure
Spencer McCloy
This study examines how large-scale public investment in the health care capital stock shapes local health and economic outcomes. I exploit the Hill-Burton Act of 1946–the largest federal program to expand and modernize United States medical facilities–as a quasi-experimental setting. Using newly digitized archival data, I show that Hill-Burton causally increased both the capacity and quality of local hospitals, leading to higher patient utilization and greater physician staffing. Expanded access to care improved mortality rates among the general and infant populations. This investment generated broader spillovers, fostering growth in non-medical employment, patenting, and academic publications. These results demonstrate that public investment in health care capital can improve population health and promote local economic development, highlighting the policy relevance of efforts to improve healthcare infrastructure.
Hospital Ownership and Quality of Care
Radhika Ramakrishnan
Differences between nonprofit and for-profit hospitals within the private US hospital market have been a matter of longstanding theoretical and empirical interest in economics and are the subject of much policy debate. Despite this, few prior works take a causal approach to examining the difference in quality of care between these hospital types. I apply an instrumental variables strategy based on ambulance preferences for individual hospitals (Doyle et al. 2015) to mitigate patient selection into hospital types. I find that for-profit hospitals offer slightly worse care (5.7% higher readmissions) and cause patients to experience higher costs (6.7%). These effects are not attenuated over time. Higher costs are likely driven in part by higher treatment intensity in the form of more frequent inpatient admissions and longer stays.
Can Drug Pricing Transparency Reduce Drug Costs?
Nicola Maria Fiore
High drug prices and opaque middle-man contracting have driven calls for transparency. I examine whether mandates to disclose rebate flows lower prescription drug costs. I find no meaningful reduction in premiums, deductibles, or out-of-pocket payments across different market structures and incentive conditions. Instead, I find that costs can rise in markets not directly regulated—consistent with intermediaries shifting costs across jurisdictions. Contrary to regulators’ expectations, transparency alone may not reduce drug spending—and may even redirect it—when contracts span multiple markets.
The Propagation of FDA Regulatory Enforcement Through Drug Supply Chains
Karna Malaviya
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) upholds the safety of US drug supply, but persistent shortages and concentration in manufacturing have raised concerns that the agency’s regulatory enforcement actions may disrupt access to essential medicines. I study this trade-off between access and safety by estimating the causal effects of FDA enforcement at upstream drug manufacturing facilities on downstream hospitals and the patients they serve. Linking Medicare claims to newly assembled data on the origin facilities of sterile injectable opioid drugs, I find that enforcement causes substantial production disruptions, reducing volume from the implicated facility by one-third. Yet, responses by other elements of the supply chain provide resilience: hospitals draw on multi-sourced procurement networks to rapidly substitute to alternative suppliers, such that more-exposed hospitals experience no detectable declines in drug supply relative to less-exposed hospitals. Even in high-risk conditions under which supply does decline—among rural hospitals and when enforcement occurs during critical shortages—the disruption does not compromise patient health or quality of care. These findings suggest that, despite concerns about fragility in this setting, FDA enforcement in concentrated supply chains shields patients from drugs produced at non-compliant facilities while maintaining access and quality of care.
The Impact of Medical Innovation on Health and Disability
Jinyeong Son
This paper investigates the impact of one of the most important surgical innovations in recent decades: the move from traditional open surgery to minimally invasive surgery. Using an instrumental variables strategy along with administrative data on injured workers undergoing orthopedic surgery, we quantify the impact of minimally invasive surgery (compared to analogous open surgery) on subsequent health care use, return to work, long-term disability, and social insurance payments. The findings suggest minimally invasive surgery reduces health care spending in the two years following surgery by 30%—through both reduced complexity of the surgery itself and large reductions in subsequent health care use. Analysis by type of service suggests minimally invasive surgery reduces subsequent office visits, opioid use, and revision surgeries. Moreover, we document that minimally invasive surgery also improves broader measures of patient health and disability—speeding return to work (by 37 days), reducing the severity of permanent disabilities (by 30%), and reducing associated social insurance costs (by 28%). We conclude by documenting trends in the adoption of minimally invasive surgeries and exploring the policy implications of our findings in light of these trends.
Do Pharmacies Matter?
Joseph Battles
Despite potential health benefits of prescription drugs, many patients do not take them as prescribed. While prior work has emphasized the role of prices and insurers in patients’ drug consumption decisions, this paper provides novel evidence on a non-price driver of drug consumption: pharmacies. Using a staggered event study design, I find that pharmacy closures cause Medicare patients’ drug use to decline in the short-run—especially among low-income patients—but increase in the long run. To explain the long-run increase in drug consumption following a pharmacy closure, I model three potential mechanisms driving the reduced-form effect: temporary disruption/switching costs, permanent changes in patient costs (e.g., copays or travel distance), and permanent shifts to higher- or lower-dispensing pharmacies. To quantify the relative impacts of these mechanisms, I estimate a two-way-fixed-effects model in the style of Abowd, Kramarz, and Margolis (1999) of pharmacies’ effects on low-income patients’ drug use. Combining the pharmacy effects from the AKM model with my reduced-form closure analyses, I find that the long-run increase in drug consumption following a pharmacy closure is explained by patients switching from lower-dispensing pharmacies (which are disproportionately likely to close) to higherdispensing pharmacies. More generally, the variation in pharmacy fixed effects is about half that of prescriber fixed effects, indicating that pharmacies matter for drug consumption.
Restructuring Public Delivery Care
Guilherme Amorim
While health systems around the world increasingly consolidate services into fewer hospitals, potentially improving care quality by reallocating patients to better-resourced facilities, such changes can also increase travel distances and hinder access to care. This paper studies the impacts of public hospital closures on delivery care in Brazil, a middle-income country with persistently high maternal and infant mortality and exceptionally high C-section rates. Using administrative birth and hospitalization records from 2007 to 2019 and a difference-in-differences design, we show that closures shift deliveries toward larger, better-equipped hospitals and reduce C-section rates, but yield no meaningful improvements in maternal or newborn health. Instead, we observe slight declines in birthweights and increases in preterm births, along with substantial heterogeneity in impacts across local demographics. Moreover, we find no evidence of improved treatment efficiency: post-closure C-section decisions are not better targeted to clinically recommended cases and appear largely driven by hospital-level practices, as shown using a “movers” design. Using a structural model of hospital demand, we show that closures reduce patient welfare and provide cost-utility estimates for alternative staffing policies that could mitigate their negative effects.
Market Size and the Returns to Surgeon Volume: Evidence from Joint Replacements
Dante Domenella
Why are people in larger geographic markets more productive? This paper investigates one potential mechanism in the health care sector–the relationship between a surgeon’s procedural volume and patient health outcomes–that may generate benefits to market size. I study this topic in the context of hip and knee replacements, two of the most frequently performed medical procedures in the U.S. Using differential distance as an instrument, I find that surgeon volume significantly affects patient health outcomes. I then attribute 22% of the benefits of market size to this mechanism. This result highlights an externality, as a patient’s choice of surgeon affects other patients’ health outcomes through surgeon quality. Incorporating this externality into a demand model, I evaluate the welfare consequences of a first-best policy and three feasible policies: a minimum volume standard, transportation subsidies, and a policy that moves surgeons to shortage areas. Failing to incorporate the externality substantially understates the welfare effects of the feasible policies. Among the feasible policies, the minimum volume standard generates the largest welfare increase, yet it only achieves 7% of the gain from the first-best policy.
Labor Market Dynamics after Cost-of-Living Shocks
Yannick Reichlin†
This paper provides causal microevidence on how idiosyncratic cost-of-living shocks transmit into labor market outcomes. Using the case of energy price changes, I combine 20 years of German employer-employee data with a representative household expenditure survey and rely on regional differences in energy expenditure patterns to identify the pass-through of energy cost shocks into earnings. A one-standard-deviation shock raises annual earnings growth by 0.6 percentage points, offsetting approximately 40% of local cost increases within a year and nearly fully compensating workers over five years. Job-to-job mobility is a key mechanism: higher exposure to energy price changes both increases the likelihood of switching and makes switches more profitable. Through the lens of an equilibrium model of the labor market, I clarify that while labor market responses substantially mitigate the distributional impact of relative price changes, they impose additional non-pecuniary costs on workers.
Trapped or Transferred: Worker Mobility and Labor Market Power in the Energy Transition
Minwoo Hyun
Using matched employer-employee data covering 1.35 million US workers separated from the fossil fuel extraction industry between 1999 and 2019, I estimate how local fossil fuel labor demand shocks affect employment and earnings. Employment probabilities fall markedly after exposure, and earnings decline gradually over the first seven years with only partial recovery by ten years since exposure to the shocks. Workers who remain in the fossil fuel sector, disproportionately men in sector-specific roles, experience nearly twice the earnings losses of those who switch sectors, possibly due to limited occupational mobility. Among non-switchers, losses are larger in labor markets with high employer concentration, indicating that scarce outside options translate into lower reemployment wages and weaker bargaining positions. Geographic movers fare worse than stayers, reflecting negative selection (younger, lower-earning) and relocation to metropolitan areas where fossil fuel or low-skilled service sectors remain highly concentrated, leaving monopsony power intact.
For Better or For Worse: The Added Worker Effect in the 21st Century U.S
Luwen Mai
The average Added Worker Effect (AWE) in the United States appears small. This paper shows that such muted estimates mask substantial heterogeneity across the life cycle and household structures. Using newly linked restricted administrative and census data from 2000–2022, I exploit mass-layoff events as exogenous shocks to identify involuntary job loss and its impact on spousal labor supply. Event study and matched difference-indifference estimates reveal that younger spouses with children increase employment and earnings in response to displacement, consistent with a financially motivated AWE. In contrast, childless young female spouses often reduce labor supply, particularly when both partners work in the same industry, reflecting a ”trailing spouse” dynamic. Among older couples, job displacement accelerates joint labor market exit, consistent with coordinated retirement. These findings highlight the role of age, parental status, and joint career dynamics in shaping household labor supply responses to job loss, and help reconcile why aggregate AWE estimates in high-income countries are small despite strong responses among population subgroups.
Competitive Occupational Licensure: Doctors Versus Chiropractors
John Fallon
This paper provides the first analysis of competitive occupational licensure, where substitute professions maintain separate licensing boards that set entry requirements strategically. I develop and structurally estimate a model where professional organizations choose licensing stringency to maximize industry profits while accounting for competitive responses, as workers with heterogeneous abilities select occupations based on expected returns and consumers observe only average quality within each profession. Testing this theory using historical competition between medical doctors (MDs) and chiropractors (DCs) from 1907-1960, I exploit digitized American Medical Association records and state-by-year variation in chiropractic board adoption. Medical boards responded strategically by increasing college requirements by 10 percentage points, mandating internships (10+ percentage points), and reducing pass rates by 5 percentage points. These regulatory changes generated substantial economic effects: doctors experienced 26% higher home values while their numbers declined by 17-40 practitioners per 100,000 population, and chiropractors saw 44% higher home values with increased market presence of 2-12 practitioners per 100,000. Structural estimation reveals that observed equilibria closely approximate profit-maximizing sequential competition rather than welfare-maximizing behavior.
Does Government Procurement Promote Small Business Growth?
Jiaming Soh
In the United States, policymakers increasingly rely on federal procurement to support small-business growth, yet it remains unclear whether government contracts generate only temporary demand boosts or lead to persistent firm growth. This paper creates a novel dataset that links federal contracts and construction bidding records to firm-level outcomes from restricted U.S. Census data and proprietary credit scores to study the impact of government procurement on small business growth in the U.S. The analysis combines matched differencein-differences and winner-versus-loser designs to establish several findings. First, procurement contracts lead to sustained increases in small business revenue, employment, and earnings. These effects persist for at least five years beyond the contract period and are not primarily driven by repeat contracting or long-duration contracts. Winning procurement contracts also leads to a short-run crowding out of small businesses’ private sales, which later recover and exceed their pre-contract levels. Second, using micro-level credit scores and labor share data, the study finds that financially constrained and capital-intensive firms experience stronger post-contract growth. A dynamic firm investment model with financial frictions, irreversible investment, and procurement-induced productivity dynamics explains these results through relaxed borrowing constraints that enable irreversible investment and productivity gains from procurement. Counterfactual simulations indicate that the observed persistence is primarily driven by productivity gains rather than short-lived easing of financing constraints
Employer Competition and Certification
Hershdeep Chopra
This paper develops a theory of employer competition over hiring standards in labor markets where employers rely on third-party certification to screen applicants. The certifier sells tests to an applicant, who possesses imperfect private information about his ability and seeks to persuade employers to offer him employment. An employer hires if conditional on the test outcome her posterior belief about the applicant’s ability meets her standard. Employers compete in their selectivity or hiring standards to attract the applicant. The certifier faces both a screening problem, due to applicants’ private information, and an information design problem, as tests must be informative enough to persuade employers. The screening frictions faced by the certifier affect the equilibrium determination of hiring standards and the certification mechanism. I show that this inefficiency in test allocation leads to two distortions relative to a benchmark where the certifier only faces an information design problem. First, there is an increase in the probability of unemployment. The certifier’s optimal selling mechanism leads to exclusion of some applicant types. Thus, there is an excessive restriction on labor supply relative to the benchmark. Second, competition among employers intensifies. The inefficient test allocation steers the applicant supply towards less selective employers, resulting in equilibrium constriction of standards. An excessive amount of the (restricted) labor supply joins the less selective employer, incentivizing the more selective employer to lower its standards.
Labor Force Growth, Firm Dynamics, and Declining Labor Mobility
Hector Cardozo
Labor mobility in the United States has fallen steadily since the 1980s. I examine the role of slower labor force growth in this long-run decline, specifically for employer-to-employer (EE) transitions. I develop a general equilibrium model of firm dynamics with on-the-job search along a wage-indexed ladder. In the model, job creation at higher rungs triggers EE moves and costless replacement hiring that cascade down the ladder. When labor force growth slows, firm entry declines, the firm distribution shifts toward slower-growing incumbents, job creation—especially in high-wage positions—falls, workers’ search incentives weaken, and EE declines. Using the calibrated model, I find that the observed slowdown in U.S. labor force growth since the 1980s accounts for more than 60% of the decline in EE, with meaningful implications for wage growth. A decomposition attributes the bulk of the decline (79%) to lower job creation, with smaller contributions from reallocation away from top rungs and an endogenous fall in search effort. Counterfactual exercises on immigration, aging, and female participation link labor supply policies to job creation, mobility, and wages. Halting immigration since the 1980s would have lowered EE transitions by about 20% and further slowed wage growth.
A Taste For Luxury
Josemaria Larrain
This paper examines the role of heterogeneous taste for luxury goods in occupational sorting, and thus in the intergenerational correlation of income and consumption. I show that individuals with a higher weight on luxury consumption are more willing to accept riskier and back-loaded occupations. Using the expanded consumption data from the PSID, I document that there is substantial variation in luxury expenditure shares and that these shares are correlated between childhood and adulthood. I show these facts arise from heterogeneous taste for luxury goods and childhood consumption of luxury goods shaping adulthood preferences. I then develop a two-generation model to explore how childhood luxury consumption and its shaping of adulthood taste for luxury can affect occupational choice, and thus reinforce the intergenerational correlation of income. I find that 12.2% of the intergenerational correlation of income can be explained by this mechanism.
International Undergraduate Student Inflows and College Pricing Strategies
Sheng Qu
This paper examines how growth in international undergraduate enrollment affects both sticker-price and net-price tuition at U.S. PhD-granting institutions. Leveraging the relaxation of U.S. visa policy and the appreciation of the Chinese yuan as natural experiments that drove a rise in Chinese undergraduate enrollment beginning in 2005, I use institution-level panel data from 2000 to 2019 and employ difference-indifferences and instrumental variable approaches to identify the causal effects of rising international undergraduate enrollment on tuition outcomes. I find that increases in international undergraduate enrollment raise out-of-state sticker-price tuition at public PhD-granting universities but reduce it at private PhD-granting institutions. Private PhD-granting institutions with greater exposure to international undergraduate enrollment growth also experience reductions in average net-price tuition, while public PhD-granting institutions show no significant change. These divergent responses highlight differing institutional priorities: private universities appear to prioritize school quality and student subsidization, while public institutions emphasize in-state access and budget stability. The findings suggest that domestic students at private universities benefit more from international undergraduate student growth than their counterparts at public institutions.
The Social Consequences of Technological Change: Evidence from U.S. Electrification and Immigrant Labor
Sara Benetti
This paper examines how technological change in production processes affects social cohesion in ethnically diverse societies. I study the early expansion of the electric grid in the United States between 1900 and 1940, when electrification transformed manufacturing and large-scale immigration reshaped the labor force. Using newly digitized maps of the U.S. high-voltage transmission network linked to full-count census data, I exploit the staggered rollout of electrification across counties to estimate its causal effects on the integration of immigrant and native workers. Electrified industries became more diverse and less segregated along ethnic lines. These effects extend beyond the workplace. Electrification is associated with lower residential segregation among manufacturing workers and a partial attenuation of the negative relationship between immigrant presence and local public service provision. Overall, I find that, in this context, technological change reshaped the social fabric by promoting integration both at work and within local communities.
Immigration, job sorting, and health: Evidence from 1920s US immigration policy
Patrick Szurkowski
This project examines how an exogenous decline in immigration flows induces sorting across the distribution of health conditions in the local labor market adjustment process and documents significant changes in the community health indicators. In the 1920s, a set of immigration laws in the United States imposed quotas based on national origin and restricted immigrant flows. These policies cut immigration flows from constrained countries to around 150,000 individuals a year. The effects of this policy change are identified in a difference-in-difference framework utilizing the LIFE-M, historical labor survey, and full count census data. Results indicate that individuals in areas facing larger declines in immigration are observed transitioning into occupations and industries with worse associated health measures. Increasing native-born employment in high health cost (HHC) positions offset lost immigrant labor leading to no change in HHC employment share. Further, policy exposure was associated with declining average lifespan and increasing mortality rates among counties’ working age US-born population.
Elasticity of Taxable Income and Social and Cultural Norms: Evidence from Immigrants in Canada
Kuot D. Manyang
Comprehending how cultural and social norms shape taxpayer responses to changes in tax policy is vital to promoting tax compliance and morale. Exploiting exogenous variation in the tax rate from Canadian reforms and detailed administrative data, I estimate elasticity of taxable income (ETI) and find that immigrants have a larger ETI (0.094) than non-immigrants (0.078). Then, I estimate the ETI for each country of origin and examine how it varies with those countries’ cultural and social norms. Immigrants from countries with cultural norms such as individualism, uncertainty avoidance, trust in others and government, and religiosity have lower elasticities. In contrast, those from countries with cultural norms such as high power distance, masculinity, long-term orientation, and political corruption are highly sensitive to tax changes. These findings show that cultural and social norms shape tax behaviour and suggest that promoting trust in government may enhance tax compliance.
Quality and Location Choice of Immigrant Doctors
Jason Chen
Doctor shortages are a widespread and growing concern in the healthcare systems of many developed countries, including in the United States. Allowing for immigration of working doctors is a commonly proposed policy to expand doctor supply. In the US, however, licensing requirements that impede immigrants with medical training from working as doctors are commonly justified on the grounds of ensuring their quality. I study the quality of domestically trained and immigrant doctors in the US, focusing on a setting with strong identification and measurement – Medicare patients and hospital emergency rooms. I find quality premiums associated with care provided by immigrant doctors, both within a given hospital and across the entire distribution of emergency room doctors. Notably, I do not find such quality premiums for US citizen medical students educated abroad. I also find immigrant doctors are significantly more likely to work in designated health professional shortage areas. Estimates from a structural matching model of the doctor labor market reveal that neither mobility preferences nor vertical sorting can fully explain this geographic pattern, suggesting immigrants have a greater preference towards working in these areas. These results show the important role of immigrant doctors in providing quality healthcare in the areas of greatest need in the US.
Creating Opportunity: The Impact of Immigration on Native Entrepreneurship
Gabriel Chaves Bosch
This paper examines the impact of immigration on native entrepreneurship using rich social security data and a unique immigration episode in Spain. Using variation across local labour markets and employing a shift-share instrumental variable for identification, I find that immigration has a positive effect on native entrepreneurship. The effect is primarily driven by wage workers who transition into entrepreneurship following the immigration episode. To rationalise these findings, I propose and calibrate a model of occupational choice with immigration. The model shows the empirical results are consistent with a profit-driven channel: an immigration-induced labour supply expansion lowers immigrant wages but has a limited impact on native wages. As a result, immigration lowers labour costs, enabling the creation of businesses that would not otherwise be profitable.
Immigration Policies and Human Capital: The Impact on Undocumented College Attendance
David Titus
I estimate the impact of Universal E-Verify laws on the college attendance of undocumented Hispanics in the United States. To do so, I implement a series of event studies that account for staggered adoption over time, and I use a random forest algorithm as my primary approach to predict undocumented status. My results indicate that Universal E-Verify laws lower the college attendance of undocumented Hispanics ages 18-24 by about 3.7 percentage points. This is a substantial effect: only 15.7 percent of undocumented Hispanics ages 18-24 in treated states were enrolled in college following the passage of the laws. This effect is robust to using logical imputation on non-citizen Hispanics to proxy for undocumented immigrants, using a logit model instead of random forest, testing for migration spillover effects on bordering states, and considering potentially confounding impacts of other state-level policies. I develop a theoretical model that explains the mechanisms through which Universal E-Verify affects college education, and I test this model’s implications. I find suggestive evidence that the effect is driven by a negative labor market shock on undocumented adults ages 25-54, which likely leads to worse schooling for their children and renders college less attainable. These findings indicate that employment restrictions targeting working-age undocumented adults hinder the human capital development of undocumented youth.
Information Bias and Selection of Female Professors
Stephanie El Khoury
Individuals often rely on crowd-generated ratings to form beliefs and guide decisions, yet these signals often embed bias. In higher education, students frequently consult online teaching evaluations when selecting instructors. Using survey evidence from one of the largest U.S. public universities along with a randomized control trial, I document that female professors receive ratings that are 5.5% lower than otherwise comparable male professors. Students place substantial weight on higher ratings but remain unaware of the bias embedded in them, resulting in distorted beliefs and enrollment choices. To assess whether such distortions can be corrected, I implement an informational intervention that shifts student beliefs. The intervention raises students’ valuation of female instructors by 10% relative to course cost, attenuates biased rating behavior among active raters, and increases female-taught chosen courses by 18% in the semester following the treatment. To interpret these findings, I develop and estimate a Bayesian updating model of belief formation and professor selection. The model shows that students who rely on professor review websites disproportionately internalize biased signals, generating systematic undervaluation of female faculty consistent with statistical discrimination. Finally, I quantify the consequences of this bias by documenting a utility loss equivalent to a 5% increase in textbook costs over a six-course semester due to suboptimal enrollment decisions.
Competition, Signaling, and Status Externalities in Ph.D. Admissions
Siqi Li
Rising competition in imperfect markets pushes agents to invest in costly signals that differentiate themselves. Such investments can mitigate unraveling and improve matching efficiency, but also generate rat races that reallocate resources towards relative standing. I develop an empirical framework to quantify how competition affects signal adoption in matching markets and its welfare consequences, applying it to the role of pre-Ph.D. experiences—master’s and predoctoral programs—in Ph.D. admissions. These experiences help programs screen applicants and provide research training. Yet when capacity is limited and grade inflation reduces informativeness, students pursue additional research experience to stand out. Using LinkedIn data on Economics and Business Ph.D.s, I find that pre-Ph.D. experience improves admission outcomes, with 54% of the gain attributable to signaling and 46% to training. While signaling restores about half of the matching efficiency lost under pooling, its opportunity costs exceed benefits, yielding a 15% net welfare loss. Benefits are concentrated among economics majors from top colleges; other groups are worse off. Grade inflation explains roughly one-quarter of the rise in pre-Ph.D. experience.
Toxic Tradeoffs: Impact of Environmental Regulations on Workplace Safety in Mining
Sanjukta Mitra
Environmental regulations reduce ambient pollution exposure, which may benefit workers at regulated firms; on the other hand, new compliance costs may crowd out safety investments at firms, increasing the risk of worker injuries. This paper estimates the short-run net effects of the 1990s Clean Air Act (CAA) PM10 standards on workplace injuries in the mining sector by employing Difference-in-Differences, using a panel linking Mine Safety and Health Administration mine-year injury records to novel sub-county PM10 nonattainment boundaries for 1983–1997. I find that serious nonattainment designation increased workplace injuries by 3.7 per 100 full-time workers, and severe injuries by 0.972 per 100 full-time workers, imposing an economic cost on workers of roughly $0.20 billion (1990 dollars) per year. These estimates persist across specifications and are driven by reduced safety compliance, increased work hours, and overexertion among retained staff. The findings reveal thorny distributional tradeoffs: health benefits of the 1990 CAA Amendments are large but diffuse, while safety costs are small and concentrated among vulnerable, less-experienced workers.
Sticky Intra-household Resource Allocation in the Face of Technological Change: Evidence from a Framed Field Experiment in Mozambique
Rachel Jones
Although new agricultural technologies are widely expected to enhance the productivity of rural households, evidence on how households reallocate resources to capitalize on these innovations is limited. To explore how households respond to a profitable, but risky new technology, I conduct a framed field experiment played with maize growing couples that simulates the exchange of labor and income in Mozambican households. When presented with a familiar local maize variety that is relatively insensitive to the wife’s labor input, households allocate labor to husbands’ maize production fairly efficiently. But when faced with an improved maize variety whose higher returns would induce cooperative households to increase maize labor, couples forego 17% of expected cooperative income. Analysis of husbands’ income sharing rules reveals that wives stood to gain just 7% in expected income had they increased their labor as predicted, and in exchange for a 68% increase in their probability of coming away from the game with no income. These results suggest that stickiness in intra-household income sharing may dampen the reallocation of productive resources in households that adopt profitable new technologies. Novel empirical evidence on real life intra-household income sharing from sample communities corroborates key findings from the game.
Environmental Regulation with Irreversible Investments: Evidence from High Plains Aquifer Depletion
Nathaniel Hickok
Many of the world’s major aquifers are being rapidly depleted from agricultural irrigation, generating dynamic common-pool externalities by raising future extraction costs. Entry restrictions are commonly used to limit depletion because well drilling is easily monitored, but they are second-best compared to Pigouvian taxes that directly target the intensive margin of water use. When policies cannot be tailored to heterogeneous users, however, the relative effectiveness and political feasibility of entry fees and water-use taxes become theoretically ambiguous, depending crucially on the correlation between water users’ productivity and externalities. To study this question, we develop a dynamic model of farmers’ joint well-drilling and water-use decisions, integrated with a physically realistic model of groundwater flows, and estimate it using field-level data on aquifer levels, water use, and crop production in the Kansas High Plains Aquifer from 1959 to 2022. We find that field-level productivity and water-use externalities are strongly positively correlated due to the spatial concentration of high-productivity fields, leading uniform taxes to outperform entry fees in terms of aggregate welfare. Nevertheless, entry fees are preferred by most users because the optimal uniform tax exceeds the marginal social cost of water use for all but the most productive fields. However, driven by irreversible well investments that lock in depletion from high-externality early entrants, the effectiveness and popularity of entry fees decline rapidly over time. These findings highlight how heterogeneity and irreversibility jointly shape the efficiency and political feasibility of environmental regulation.
The Hidden Curriculum
Michael G. Cuna
Despite dramatically expanded access to selective U.S. colleges, first-generation students persistently trail continuing-generation peers in GPA, internship attainment, and early-career outcomes. We identify a key mechanism: the hidden curriculum– unwritten strategies like cold-emailing alumni or strategically engaging faculty– essential for success yet unknown and costly to discover without guidance. Leveraging survey and administrative data from 100,000+ undergraduates across 20 public universities, we document stark disparities: first-generation students invest 14-26% less in these high-return hidden actions while over-investing in formal tasks. Standard explanations–income, ability, or preferences–do not fully explain these gaps. Through a field experiment at UC Berkeley, we isolate causal channels by randomizing information on action availability (awareness) versus returns (beliefs): awareness treatments close the 30% baseline gap almost entirely. Finally, we develop an AI college advisor to expose underlying search frictions in an online experiment; first generation students allocate just 11% (versus 16%) of queries to hidden topics and follow up about 48% less on hidden curriculum nudges. However, an “active” AI that increases awareness, narrows these search gaps and follow up behaviors. By formalizing the hidden curriculum as dual informational frictions, we demonstrate that overcoming these invisible barriers requires more than equal access.
Does Greater Policy Intensity Improve Policy Effectiveness? Evidence from Seoul, South Korea
Hayeon Jeong
Many policies in practice become gradually more intensive over time in the hope of becoming more effective. While stricter policies may enhance compliance, they may also encourage loophole exploiting behaviors that offset intended policy benefits. If the increase in loophole exploitation outweighs the increase in compliance, overall policy effectiveness can actually decrease when a policy is intensified. I exploit the gradual intensification of Seoul’s vehicle control policy—an increasingly common policy instrument shaping pollution exposures in cities globally. In my theoretical framework, I model individual decisions to comply, exploit loopholes, or violate the policy outright, and assess how these responses vary with policy stringency. Empirical results support the theoretical prediction that higher policy intensity can induce greater loophole exploitation. I find loophole exploiting behaviors—driving outside regulated hours (before 6 a.m. or after 9 p.m.)—increased with policy tightening. Across multiple tightening events, the most stringent phase led to a 19% rise in loophole exploitation, the next to 13%, and the least stringent to 7%. I find a deterioration in air quality (PM10, PM2.5) during non-crackdown hours due to loophole exploitation. The resulting net health costs underscore the potential unintended consequences of intensified regulation. I emphasize the need to consider both the health benefits from policy compliance and the health costs from loophole exploitation to accurately estimate the true health impact of policy intensification.
Beyond argumentation: AI-powered Socratic dialogue and political moderation in public deliberation
José Ramón Enríquez
I examine whether AI-guided reasoning reduces issue polarization in two preregistered experiments conducted on deliberation.io, a purpose-built platform for deliberation research, with 5,000 participants across contentious U.S. policy issues. Relative to reflective writing, AI-emotional regulation, and AI-grammar correction, AI-Socratic dialogue—which prompts users to articulate supporting arguments—significantly moderates extreme positions on mental health-based gun regulation. A second experiment comparing AI-Socratic dialogue to AI-grammar correction across abortion, handgun regulation, and voter ID requirements finds that extreme participants moderate their positions and exhibit behavioral changes, including increased cross-partisan donations and reduced endorsement of extreme comments. Moderation effects are largest for abortion, where baseline cross-partisan agreement was highest, and concentrate among participants with low initial confidence, high susceptibility to elite cues, and limited cross-party interactions. Text analysis of conversational transcripts reveals that moderation operates through increased consideration of alternative perspectives rather than improved argument quality, challenging standard deliberative theory. One-month follow-up displays mixed persistence and minimal spillovers to untreated issues, consistent with issue-specific effects. Perceived agency remains equivalent across conditions, suggesting preserved autonomy. Overall, results indicate that AI conversational agents can facilitate compromise through previously underexplored mechanisms, offering promising scalable applications.