Title: Optimally Coarse Contracts (joint work with Roberto Corrao and Karthik Sastry).

Title: Better together? The unintended consequences of joint civic education training in a clientelist democracy

Abstract: Many civic education interventions seek to inform citizens about government officials' actions and duties in the hopes that citizens will reward and sanction officials to incentivize better performance. But in contexts where mechanisms for sanctioning poorly-performing officials are weak, empowering citizens through traditional civic education may instead create antagonism that leads officials to retreat and citizens to disengage. Through a field experiment conducted in collaboration with civil society partners across 224 villages in the northern Philippines, we test whether training citizens alongside local elected officials is more effective than training citizens alone. Our findings indicate that joint training did not make officials more responsive to citizen engagement. Instead, eight months after the intervention, officials in the joint training condition were less likely to have included citizen leaders in decision-making forums, and no more or less likely to express policy priorities consistent with their preferences.

Title: Economic Development according to Chandler

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Title: BIg question economics: A way to introduce undergraduates to modern economics.

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Title: Subgroup Decomposition of the Gini Coefficient: A New Solution to an Old Problem

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Title: Meritocracy and Its Discontents: Long-run Effects of Repeated School Admission Reforms

Authors: Chiaki Moriguchi, Yusuke Narita, Mari Tanaka
Abstract: What happens if selective colleges change their admission policies? We study this question by analyzing the world's first implementation of nationally centralized meritocratic admissions in the early twentieth century. We find a persistent meritocracy-equity tradeoff. Compared to the decentralized system, the centralized system admitted more high-achievers and produced more occupational elites (such as top income earners) decades later in the labor market. This gain came at a distributional cost, however. Meritocratic centralization also increased the number of urban-born elites relative to rural-born ones, undermining equal access to higher education and career advancement.

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Title: The Social Learning Barrier

Abstract: We consider long-lived agents who interact repeatedly in a social network. In each period, each agent learns about an unknown state by observing a private signal and her neighbors’ actions in the previous period before taking an action herself. Our main result shows that the learning rate of the slowest learning agent is bounded independently of the network size and structure and the agents’ strategies. This extends recent findings on equilibrium learning by demonstrating that the limitation stems from an inherent tradeoff between optimal action choices and information revelation, rather than strategic considerations. We complement this result by showing that a social planner can design strategies for which each agent learns faster than an isolated individual, provided the network is sufficiently large and strongly connected.

Link: http://brandlf.com/docs/network-learning.pdf

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