Title: Politically Motivated Trade Protection (with Chad Bown, Aksel Erbahar, and Lorenzo Trimarchi)

Title: Reaching Returning Voters through Social Ties (with Hannah Walker, Allison Harris, Jennifer Doleac).

Title: Sea Level Rise and Urban Adaptation in Jakarta

Title: Price Discrimination with Manipulable Observables.

Title: Targeted Advertising in Elections

Abstract:

Some elections seem unwinnable for challengers because pivotal voters prefer policies on the opposite sides of the status quo. In this paper, I argue that the challenger can win any such election with positive probability if he uses targeted advertising with verifiable messages. In private ads, the challenger makes each voter believe that his policy is a sufficient improvement over the status quo and wins the election when his policy is sufficiently moderate. Furthermore, his odds of winning increase when voters become more extreme, because more extreme voters are more dissatisfied by the status quo and can therefore be persuaded by a wider range of policies.

Title: Self-employment within the firm

Abstract: We collect time-use data for entrepreneurs and their workers in over 1,000manufacturing firms in urban Uganda. We document limited labor special-ization within the firm for establishments of all sizes and argue that this islikely due to the prevalence of product customization. We then develop a gen-eral equilibrium model of task assignment within the firm, estimate it withour data, and find large barriers to labor specialization. This setting is close,in terms of aggregate productivity and firm scale, to an extreme benchmarkin which each firm is just a collection of self-employed individuals sharing aproduction space. Given how firms are organized internally, the benefits fromalleviating other frictions that constrain firm growth are muted: most Africanfirms resemble artisanal workshops whose business model is not easily scalable

Title. Dependence, examples and tools

Title: Privacy Preserving Signals

Abstract: A signal is privacy-preserving with respect to a collection of privacy sets, if the posterior probability assigned to every privacy set remains unchanged conditional on any signal realization. We characterize the privacy-preserving signals for arbitrary state space and arbitrary privacy sets. A signal is privacy-preserving if and only if it is a garbling of a reordered quantile signal. These signals are equivalent to couplings, which in turn lead to a characterization of optimal privacy-preserving signals for a decision-maker. We demonstrate the applications of this characterization in the contexts of algorithmic fairness, price discrimination, and information design.

Title: Bureaucrats in Congress: Strategic Information Sharing in Policymaking

Abstract: Given bureaucratic expertise and the critical role of information in policy production, what drives information sharing between bureaucrats and legislators? We argue that partisan alignment between the two drive the amount and type of information that bureaucrats choose to share with Congress. Using the most comprehensive data yet on agency affiliation, appointment type, and agency-level characteristics of each bureaucrat who testified in Congress from 1977-2014, as well as a new measure of informational content present in bureaucratic testimonies, we show that bureaucrats provide less analytical information under divided government. Further, we examine bureaucrat-legislator pair-level interactions in committee hearings and show that bureaucrats provide less analytical information to legislators who are presidential out-partisans than legislators who are presidential co-partisans even after controlling for legislators’ questioning styles, and that this behavior is heightened among bureaucrats who are political appointees. These dynamics highlight bureaucrats’ strategic incentives to selectively share information with Congress.

Title: It Takes a Village: The Economics of Parenting with Neighborhood and Peer Effects

Title: Testing for identification in potentially misspecified linear GMM (joint with Zhaoguo Zhan)

This paper is still work in progress so there is not a paper to distribute yet.

Title: Campaigning Against Populism: Emotions and Information in Real Election Campaigns (with Cesi Cruz and Francesco Trebbi).

 Abstract:

Across the world, politics is dominated by populists who are adept at using new forms of campaigning to reach citizens directly and spread, often through emotional appeals, their ideology. The challenge for mainstream parties has been how to articulate policy platforms and campaign promises in this new context. In particular, do forms of campaigning used by populist politicians -- direct in-person appeals and emotional messaging -- work for programmatic and platform-based politicians as well? We implement a field experiment during the 2019 Philippine Senate election with a mainstream opposition party to explore the effectiveness of: (i) their door-to-door visits delivering policy platform information to assess the role of direct appeals; (ii) the addition of explicit emotional messaging in mediating these interactions. We show that direct appeals and emotional messaging foster increased engagement with the campaign in the short term, but that over time the in-person policy information is more relevant in driving vote choice for programmatic parties, even when facing populist incumbents. The treatments operated through a persuasion channel, as treated voters were more likely to know the party, more certain, and gave higher ratings to the party's quality and proposed policies.

Title: Strategic Ignorance and Information Design (with Thomas Wiseman)

Title : Undergraduate Gender Diversity and the Direction of Scientific Research

Title: Persuasion with Limited Data: A Case-Based Approach

Title: Bourbon Reforms and State Capacity in the Spanish Empire

Abstract: We study state modernization and its fiscal and political consequences in Spain's American empire during the 18th century. We focus on the intendancy system, whereby the Bourbon rulers introduced a new corps of provincial governors to address misgovernance by local colonial officers. Our empirical strategy leverages the staggered implementation of this reform across the empire, extending from present-day Mexico to Argentina. Using fine-grained administrative data from the royal treasuries, we show that the intendancy system led to a sizable increase in Crown revenue, driven by a strengthening of state presence in the periphery and the disruption of local elite capture. The reform also caused a reduction in the incidence of rebellions by indigenous people, who were harshly exploited under the status quo. However, the intendancy system heightened tensions with the local Creole elites, as reflected by naming patterns, plausibly contributing to the nascent independence movement.

Title: Heterogeneous Predferences, Spousal Interaction, and Couples' Time-Use.

Title: Semidiscrete optimal transport maps: stability, limit theorems, and asymptotic efficency.

This is a joint seminar with Department of Statistics as part of the new joint Econometrics & Statistics seminar series.

Title : The Job Ladder: Inflation vs Reallocation (with Fabien Postel-Vinay)

Title: Who benefits from faster public transit?

Abstract: Fast public transit networks are widely believed to (i) reduce driving and its externalities, and (ii) reduce inequality by improving mobility for the urban poor. But are the transit improvements that are most effective at reducing driving also more equitable? Combining survey data with web-scraped counterfactual travel times for millions of trips across 49 large US cities, I estimate a model of travel mode and residential location choice. I characterize the heterogeneity across income groups and cities in commuters' marginal willingness to pay for access to faster transit and to increase their transit ridership. I find that higher-income transit riders sort more aggressively into the fastest transit routes and are, on average, willing to pay more for faster commutes. Improvements in transit speed are most effective at generating transit ridership and welfare gains where transit is already fast (relative to driving), in cities with a greater share of rail-based transit and where the gains are larger for higher-income commuters. Transit improvements benefit lower-income commuters more where transit is relatively slow, in cities with more bus transit, and where the overall marginal gains are small.

Title: Dynamic Screening: Why Weight isn't Volume

This paper is preliminary and incomplete

Title: The Legacy of Church-State Conflict: Evidence from Nazi Repression of Catholic Priests

Title: Learning Before Testing: A Selective Nonparametric Test for Conditional Moment Restrictions

This seminar will be online via MS Teams.

Title: What happens when you tax the rich? – Evidence from South Africa

Abstract - Rising levels of income inequality and tight government budgets have spurred discussions in many developing nations about how to appropriately tax high-income earners. In this paper, we study taxpayer responses to an increase in the top marginal tax rate in South Africa drawing on exceptionally rich tax administrative data and a transparent empirical identification design. We establish that treated taxpayers strongly reduce their reported taxable income in response to the tax reform. Our preferred estimates suggest an elasticity of taxable income (ETI) of 1.1. Consistent with few deductions in the South African PIT system, adjustments are driven by changes in broad income – in particular investment income and other income components that are not subject to third-party reporting. While standard labor income remains unaffected, our evidence does point to real effects of the reform: Treated taxpayers attract fewer annual incentive and bonus payments after the reform. Consistent with this reflecting less effort provision by leading workers in South African firms, we find that businesses, which employ workers subject to the tax increase, experience a significant decline in business output after the reform.

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Title: Optimal Indirect Regulation of Externalities

Title: How (not) to Solve the Guardianship Dilemma: Counterbalancing and the Consequences of Military Control in Medieval China

Abstract: Counterbalancing, a strategy to strengthen control of the military by weakening the command authority within it, is prevalent across many parts of the world. Yet, few studies have systematically examined the benefits and costs of this strategy at the micro-level. We exploit a unique historical setting to evaluate how counterbalancing affects the competence and loyalty of the military. Using geocoded data from archival and archaeological sources, we study a reform in China’s Tang Dynasty (618 - 907 CE) that fragmented the military commissioners’ authority over their armies. Difference-in-differences analyses document that the reform reduced the military’s threat to the regime: commissioner-led rebellions decreased. However, it reduced the military’s effectiveness, evidenced by an increase in soldier-led mutinies within the military, a higher probability of defeat in battles, and an increase in civilian uprisings against the regime. Our findings highlight the sharp tradeoffs of military control in settings with strong military corporate interest.

Title: The Effect of Mergers on Innovations (joint with Kaustav Das and Tatiana Mayskaya)

Abstract: We study the effect of a merger on R&D activity in a dynamic model in which there is uncertainty about the feasibility of innovation. Once an innovation has already taken place, the merger may block future innovations (cannibalization effect). The merger may increase the probability of the first innovation (appropriability effect). The merger may bring the first innovation forward in time (informational effect). The merger may increase innovation diversity (diversity effect).

Title: Optimal Income Redistribution (this paper is a work in progress)

Title: You Only Weave Twice: Industrial Espionage and Economic Growth in XIX Century France

Can state-sponsored industrial espionage promote innovation and lead to self-sustained growth? We study the effect of 18th century French industrial espionage activity on French innovation and industrial activity in the XIX century. Between 1730 and 1800 the French Bureau of Commerce promoted an ambitious plan aimed at stealing from Britain the new technologies of the Industrial Revolution, bribing British entrepreneurs and inventors to leave England and bring their expertise to France. We assemble a novel database with a comprehensive list of French espionage activity between 1730-1800 and combine it with newly-digitized 17th 18th century industrial surveys, 1800s industrial censuses, and the full list of early French patents. We find large, positive, and persistent effects of industrial espionage on industrial activity and innovation.

This paper is joint with Julian Langer (UZH) and Raffaele Blasone (LSE).

Title: Design-Robust Two-Way-Fixed-Effects Regression For Panel Data (paper)