Experimental evidence from Pakistan shows that distance poses a large and discontinuous access constraint: women with village-based training centers are four times more likely to access valued training opportunities. More than half of the travel penalty is incurred when crossing the village boundary. Exogenous stipend variation reveals that this boundary effect is costly to offset and is not explained by travel costs. Security considerations are an important factor: providing secure group transport raises take-up, while women with greater safety concerns and those traversing underpopulated areas, a proxy for insecurity, have lower take-up. The training has similar positive benefits for women attending inside- and outside-village centers.
We test Le Play's 1875 hypothesis that the French Revolution contributed to France's early fertility decline by imposing equal partition of inheritance among all children, including women. We combine new data on local inheritance rules before the Revolution and individual-level demographic data from historical sources and crowdsourced genealogies. Difference-in-differences and regression discontinuity estimates show that the inheritance reforms enacted during the Revolution reduced completed fertility by 0.5 children. A key mechanism was the desire to avoid land fragmentation across generations. These reforms closed the fertility gap between regions with different historical inheritance rules and crucially contributed to France's demographic transition.
This paper examines the impact of cultural diversity on innovation. Focusing on the United States from 1850 to 1940, we develop a novel surname-based measure of cultural diversity and combine this with patent data. Leveraging quasi-random variation in counties' surname compositions driven by historical immigration, we find that rising diversity increased both the quantity and the quality of innovation within counties and for individual inventors. Examining mechanisms, we provide evidence suggesting that greater surname diversity accelerated innovation both by expanding the range of ideas, skills, and perspectives available for recombination and by fostering the diverse social interactions that facilitate idea sharing.
We develop and test a model of social duties. The model distinguishes unconditional duties to take or avoid certain actions from conditional duties that depend on the actions' payoffs. It also distinguishes strict duties (must do) from liberal duties (ought to do). The disutility associated with duty violation depends on the duty's strictness and is proportional to the externality the violation causes. The model rationalizes behavioral patterns that are incompatible with consequentialist preferences. Our tests comprise parameter estimation based on subjects' behavior across different situations as well as measurement of duties through spectators' appropriateness ratings.
We provide an organizational economics foundation for commitment to information structures in persuasion. An uninformed principal faces a joint screening-and-persuasion problem: she wants to influence a receiver's belief about a payoff-relevant state using information elicited from a privately informed agent. The agent's messages are publicly observed, so the principal cannot commit to a garbling of private communications. We show that commitment only to an employment contract with the agent permits the principal to implement the optimal unconstrained intermediation scheme. We apply our result to a brokerage contracting with sell-side analysts, where private communication is constrained by conflict-of-interest regulations, showing that public investment rating schemes can sidestep these regulations.
The measurement of intelligence should identify and measure an individual's subjective confidence that a response to a test question is correct. Existing measures do not do that, nor do they use extrinsic financial incentive for truthful responses. We rectify both issues and show that each matters for the measurement of intelligence, particularly for women. Our results on gender and confidence in the face of risk have wider applications in terms of the measurement of "competitiveness" and financial literacy. Contrary to received literature, women are more intelligent than men, compete when they should in risky settings, and are more literate.
This paper provides theory and evidence that distorted long-term interest rate expectations limit the effectiveness of monetary policy. Beliefs that depart from rational expectations break the tight link between policy rates and long-term interest rates, even when determined by the expectations hypothesis of the yield curve. Because long-term expectations are excessively sensitive to short-term interest rates, optimal policy is less aggressive relative to rational expectations. More aggressive policy leads to suboptimal volatility in long-term interest rates and aggregate demand through standard intertemporal substitution effects. These effects are quantitatively important in the United States over the postwar period.
Despite escalating losses in climate-related disasters, adoption of protective technologies and behaviors is limited by risk misperception, externalities, and insurance market frictions. One response to these market failures is to mandate these investments. We measure the effect of California's wildfire building codes on own and neighboring structure survival using comprehensive data on US homes exposed to wildfires since 2000. Differences across jurisdictions and vintages reveal remarkable resilience effects of building codes. Codes also increase survival of neighboring homes by reducing structure-to-structure spread. We then develop and estimate a model of social benefits of mandatory building standards versus other adaptation policies.
Algorithm designers increasingly care not only about accuracy but also about fairness across predefined groups. We study the trade-off between these objectives and characterize it by a fairness-accuracy frontier: the set of outcomes that cannot be simultaneously improved in both dimensions. The shape of this frontier is governed by a simple property of the inputs, which we call group skew. In particular, reducing accuracy for both groups to increase fairness is justified if and only if inputs are group skewed. We also study an information design problem in which a designer regulates inputs but another agent chooses the algorithm. We show that, when inputs are not group-skewed, banning group identity or other informative inputs is strictly suboptimal.
This paper investigates the weekly evolution of skills as measured by unique data from a widely-emulated early childhood home-visiting program in rural China. The design of the study avoids input endogeneity issues and lack of comparable measures of skills that plague previous studies. Skills, nominally classified as the same, in fact, do not appear to share a common unit scale across levels. They are produced by skill-lifecycle-stage-specific learning processes. A novel dynamic stochastic skill production model for multiple skills is developed, aligning with empirical evidence. The model explains the "fadeout" of measures of learning through forgetting or depreciation of skills.
Using field experimental data (study time tracking and randomized incentives), we identify a structural model of learning. Student effort is influenced by external costs/benefits and unobserved heterogeneity: motivation (willingness to study) and productivity (conversion rate of time into skill). We estimate academic labor supply elasticities and skill technology. Productivity and motivation are uncorrelated. Low productivity, not low motivation, is the stronger predictor of academic struggles. School quality augments productivity and accelerates skill production. We find that dynamic skill complementarities arise mainly from children's aging and from a feedback loop between investment activity and productivity rather than from carrying forward past skill stocks.
Many mental health disorders start in adolescence, and appropriate initial treatment may improve trajectories. But what is appropriate treatment? We use a large national database of insurance claims to examine the impact of initial mental health treatment on the outcomes of adolescent children over the next 2 years, where treatment is either consistent with US Food and Drug Administration guidelines, consistent with looser guidelines published by professional societies (gray area prescribing), or inconsistent with any guidelines (red-flag prescribing). We find that red-flag prescribing increases self-harm, use of emergency rooms, and health care costs, suggesting that treatment guidelines effectively scale up good treatment in practice.
This paper uses three decades of data on rhesus monkeys to investigate the multigenerational effects of early-life advantage. Monkeys and their offspring are both randomly assigned to be reared together or apart from their mothers. For the first time, we document the intergenerational complementarity of early-life advantage, where the benefits of maternal rearing are present only for offspring of mothers who were themselves mother reared. This illustrates the intergenerational dynamics of social advantage and how the value of an intervention can depend on the experiences of the previous generation. Our paper demonstrates how studies of primates can inform human development.
Many ideas succeed in small trials but weaken considerably at scale. Using early childhood investment as a case study, this paper develops a dynamic microfounded human capital model stylized in the Chicago tradition. The framework features optimizing agents, complementary skill formation, and a policymaker choosing scaling strategies. The model shows that naive extrapolation from pilots systematically overestimates societal impact by overlooking voltage drops: declining benefit-cost profiles due to unrepresentative samples and contexts. Optimal scaling requires option C thinking, a mechanism-based design approach that anticipates these failures through backward induction from real-world implementation constraints. Studies in this special issue enrich the model's insights.
Pay-as-bid (or discriminatory or multiple-price) auctions are used to sell homogenous goods, such as treasury securities and commodities. We prove the uniqueness of their pure-strategy Bayesian Nash equilibrium and establish a tractable representation of equilibrium bids for symmetrically informed bidders. Analyzing design, we show that supply transparency and full disclosure are revenue maximizing in pay-as-bid, though not necessarily in uniform-price (or single-price), auctions-the main alternative auction format. Pay as bid raises weakly more revenue than uniform price and may lead to higher welfare. Our results provide an explanation for the revenue equivalence observed in empirical studies of treasury auctions.
