Governments worldwide administer social programs for vulnerable groups, yet many eligible citizens fail to benefit. This paper studies barriers to take-up of an unconditional cash transfer program for poor women in Delhi, India, where only one-third of eligible individuals were enrolled. In a randomized experiment with eligible women, providing program information alone increased applications only among the literate. Adding basic or intensive application assistance, however, raised average application rates by 41 percent and 70 percent, respectively, and expanded access among more vulnerable women. These results suggest that application ordeals can limit take-up by those with high need. (JEL D83, I32, I38, J16, O15)
Exploiting the arrangement of railroad tracks in northern cities, we explore the extent to which segregation impacts homicide victimization by race. Our results reveal a robust positive relationship between segregation and non-White homicide victimization. In addition, we find a decrease in public provisions, as highly segregated locations generate fewer revenues and have lower public expenditures. Our findings suggest that White flight and segregation deplete the local tax base, leading to urban decay and higher crime, resulting in the loss of non-White lives. (JEL H71, I32, J15, K42, R23)
Incarceration is often justified by a defendant’s risk of future crime. To what extent do biased beliefs about predictors of crime distort incarceration decisions? We survey prosecutors about how violent rearrest rates vary by defendant age and criminal history. Surveyed prosecutors make systematic errors: They underestimate the decline in rearrest with age and overestimate the increase with criminal history. By linking prosecutors’ beliefs to their quasi-randomly assigned cases, we show that prosecutors’ beliefs predict incarceration patterns by defendant age and criminal history in their cases. Finally, we find that prosecutors with more accurate beliefs simultaneously reduce violent rearrest and incarceration. (JEL D83, K14, K41, K42)
Financial crimes are costly to society but less severely punished than other nonviolent crimes. We investigate whether prison sentences reduce financial crimes. Using random assignment of judges in Finland to identify causal impacts, we find a prison sentence reduces defendant reoffending by 42.9 percentage points three years postsentencing. Given prior evidence of financial misconduct "contagion," we also explore spillovers on colleagues. A prison sentence reduces the likelihood that a financial crime defendant's colleagues commit crimes by 27 percentage points, suggesting broader deterrent effects of harsher punishments, but only for fraud cases. Last, we show financial crimes are not victimless crimes. (JEL K14, K22, K41, K42)
We study the role of international financial integration in buffer-ing natural disaster shocks, using a large sample of advanced and emerging economies. Natural disasters are largely unpredictable and unrelated to the state of financial integration. We document that integration improves the absorption of such shocks: Output, con-sumption, and investment are significantly higher after a natural disaster in states with high than in states with low integration. The benefits are most clear for advanced economies. Emerging markets tend to profit from financial integration, too, but the estimates are less precise unless we condition on institutional quality or consider only debt assets.
We estimate the direct and spillover effects of cannabis legalization on longstanding racial disparities in criminal justice outcomes. We find that legalization reduces cannabis possession and sales arrests for White and Black populations, narrowing but not eliminating disparities. We also find spillover increases in hospitalizations involving cannabis and other illegal drugs. However, spillovers on arrests, incarcerations, and crimes involving serious violent or property offenses are insignificant or even decrease. Other illegal drug sales arrests decrease across populations, while illegal drug incarcerations decrease only among White populations. Spillovers on other low-level offenses are insignificant for White but mixed for Black populations. (JEL I12, J15, K14, K41, K42)
I study the effects of charters on student racial segregation, identifying a novel mechanism: the assignment of White and non-White students to regular classrooms within their school-grade. Exploiting almost 100 entries of elementary charters in North Carolina from 1997 to 2015, I show that the announcement of an opening significantly increases classroom segregation within public schools nearby, relative to schools farther away, especially within non-majority-White schools and for charter openings that enroll a relatively large share of White students. Accounting for classrooms is unlikely to reverse the literature’s conclusion that the charter effects on student segregation are modest in magnitude. (JEL H75, I21, I24, I28, J15)
We show that exposure to extreme temperatures significantly increases international migration from El Salvador, where nearly a quarter of the population lives in the United States. Extreme temperatures reduce corn yields, leading producers to decrease their use of postharvest inputs and demand for agricultural workers. These income losses, combined with established US migration networks, increase emigration. Our findings highlight how international migration serves as a response to extreme temperatures when destination networks are strong and migration remains financially feasible. This pattern is not unique to El Salvador: Roughly 30 million farms globally are in low-income settings with access to remittances. (JEL F24, J15, J23, J43, O15, Q12, Q54)
This paper develops a structural model of endogenous product attribute choice in the presence of indirect network effects to study electric vehicle (EV) subsidies. Using data on the German EV market, I find that a support scheme almost doubled EV sales but substantially affected EVs' price and driving range. These adjustments create a trade-off between optimizing different policy objectives when designing subsidies. Large purchase subsidies maximize EV sales, whereas large charging station subsidies maximize consumer and total surplus. The results suggest that maximizing EV sales can lead to unintended consequences in the form of price and range adjustments.
We examine the impact of the free supply of diphtheria antitoxin, the first effective medical treatment for an infectious disease, on the historical health transition in Massachusetts. Using newly collected municipality-level data on the distribution of antitoxin and information from over 1.5 million death certificates from 1880 to 1914, we find that the rapid availability of antitoxin treatment significantly increased life expectancy at young ages. Our findings suggest that medicine, combined with an effective public health policy, played a more important role in improving life expectancy in the early twentieth century than previously thought.
We evaluate a tax reform in Ecuador that introduced generous deductions from personal income taxes (PIT), encouraging consumers to request receipts. The reform addresses tax evasion by targeting small self-employed businesses that mainly sell goods or services not subject to value-added taxes (VAT) but that often evade income taxes. Exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in receipt demand due to the distribution of taxpayers across regions and professions, we find significant increases in reported profits among self-employed businesses exposed to the reform. We document spillover effects on VAT. Our net-revenue impact analysis suggests the additional tax payments outweigh the foregone tax revenue. (JEL H24, H25, H26, J23, K34, O17)
We study how distance to one's polling place affects the likelihood of voting using a geographic regression discontinuity design with data from Pennsylvania and Georgia. A one-mile increase in distance to the polling place reduces the likelihood of voting in person by 1 to 3 percentage points. Effects are two to three times higher among those closest to the polling place. When available, voters substitute to mail-in voting as distance to the polling place increases. In counterfactual exercises, we identify turnout-maximizing polling places. Some precincts have large potential gains in turnout, even when choosing from existing buildings. (JEL D72, K16, R23)
We examine how connections shaped transitional justice during France's post-WWII democratic transition. Parliamentarians who had supported the Vichy regime faced a two-stage purge process involving two courts. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, we find that law graduates-an influential group with ties to one of the courts-had a 10 to 14 percentage point higher acquittal rate. We analyze 17,589 documents in individual defendants' files to explain this difference. According to this analysis, indirect connections-connections through third parties-enabled transmission of information to the judges, highlighting how connected elite groups can navigate transitions despite institutional safeguards. (JEL D72, D83, K41, N44)
Exploiting the arrangement of railroad tracks in northern cities, we explore the extent to which segregation impacts homicide victimization by race. Our results reveal a robust positive relationship between segregation and non-White homicide victimization. In addition, we find a decrease in public provisions, as highly segregated locations generate fewer revenues and have lower public expenditures. Our findings suggest that White flight and segregation deplete the local tax base, leading to urban decay and higher crime, resulting in the loss of non-White lives. (JEL H71, I32, J15, K42, R23)
We study impacts of VA disability compensation on the health and well-being of the large and rapidly growing population of veterans claiming mental disorders. We leverage quasi-random assignment of veterans to medical examiners with varying assessing tendencies. An additional $1,000 per year decreases food insecurity and homelessness by 4.1 and 1.3 percent over 5 years. Health care utilization increases, with greater engagement in preventive care. We estimate precise null average effects on health and mortality. Those on the margin of claim denial experience worse outcomes on average than other applicants, with suggestive evidence of large treatment effects for this subpopulation. (JEL I12, I31, I38, J14)
We provide empirical evidence on how insecurity affects firm behavior by linking data on deadly terrorist attacks in Afghanistan to geolocated data on corporate mobile phone activity. We first develop an approach to estimate the geographic footprint of firms based on employee locations. Using these measures, our main analysis shows that violent shocks reduce local firm presence by both increasing firm exit and decreasing entry. Firms respond most strongly to violence in their "headquarters" districts. We also find suggestive evidence of persistence; stronger impacts in more secure districts; and spillovers, whereby attacks in provincial capitals reduce firm presence in surrounding rural districts. (JEL D22, K42, L11, L96, O18, R32)
This paper studies whether grants and tax incentives for private R&D are complements or substitutes. I use multiple quasi-experimental research designs to examine firms in the United Kingdom and find that increasing tax credit generosity substantially enhances the effect of grant funding on R&D for small firms, suggesting that the instruments are complements. Financial constraints are likely at play. The effects are strongest for firms that appear constrained, and the combination of policies increases R&D "entry." Furthermore, I find that the instruments are substitutes for larger firms, which are usually less constrained. Some alternative explanations can be ruled out. (JEL D22, H25, H81, L25, O31, O38)
I investigate the intrahousehold labor and resource allocation consequences of an employment guarantee targeting rural households in India. The guarantee insures household earnings, replacing women as added workers and shutting down a motive for saving. Despite sizable program-job take-up, the guarantee decreases participation in other working activities and, thus, labor force participation of married women and total time worked by their husbands. The guarantee accounts for up to 30 percent of a recent countrywide decrease in rural female labor force participation. Though it increases household consumption, the guarantee reduces the command of women's household earnings and, thereby, their well-being. (JEL D13, G51, I32, J16, J22, J68, O12)
