Welfare and Collective Choice

Revolving door laws restrict public officials from representing private interests before government after leaving office. While these laws mitigate potential conflicts of interest, they also may affect the pool of candidates for public positions by lowering the financial benefits of holding office....

We document substantial racial disparities in consumer bankruptcy outcomes and investigate the role of racial bias in contributing to these disparities. Using data on the near universe of US bankruptcy cases and self-reported and manually-identified measures of race, we show that minority filers are...

This introduction to the Special Issue reviews the existing literature on the domestic politics of international organizations (IOs), presenting them within a unified theoretical framework. We emphasize the central role of domestic forces in the study of IOs: how individual preferences are channeled...

This paper examines the impact of political polarization on public trust in the Fed and its influence on macroeconomic expectations. Using a large-scale survey experiment which we fielded on President Trump's 2025 inauguration day, we study how households form beliefs about the Fed regarding its...

In many countries, local governments struggle with inefficiency and corruption, often perpetuated by entrenched elites. This paper explores how leadership changes affect local bureaucratic performance. Combining personnel and citizen surveys with a regression discontinuity design in a large sample...

How do economic costs affect religious choices, and how do religious institutions adapt to economic realities? We study the Seventh-Day Adventist (SDA) church in Sub-Saharan Africa, which prohibits production of tobacco, coffee, and tea, creating salient opportunity costs for potential members in...

For a place-based policy to succeed, it must target the right areastypically those with lower economic development and resident well-being. The U.S. has two major place-based tax policies: the New Markets Tax Credit (NMTC), where government approved entities select investments, and Opportunity Zones...

Using data on the residential location and migration for every voter in U.S. states recording partisan registration between 20082020, we find that residential segregation between Democrats and Republicans has increased year over year at all geographic levels, from neighborhoods to Congressional...

This study examines the long-term social and political impacts of mass media exposure to religious content in India. We study the impact of "Ramayan," the massively popular adaptation of the Hindu epic televised in 1987-88. To identify causal effects, we conduct difference-in-difference analyses and...

Altruism is a key component of medical professionalism that underlies the physician's role as a representative agent for patients. However, physician behavior can be influenced when private gains enter the objective function. We study the relationship between altruism and physicians' receipt of...

We study racial differences in internal migration responses to one of the most severe climatic shocks in US historythe drought of the 1930s. Using data from the 1940 census on 65 million adults, we find that individuals exposed to more severe drought between 1935 and 1940 were more likely to make an...

This study examines the long-term effects of prenatal exposure to war violence on cognitive and developmental outcomes, focusing on children in Afghanistan, a country deeply affected by prolonged violent conflict. Using data from the 2022 Afghanistan Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys and geo...

Crisis bargaining games are widely used to analyze bilateral conflicts, featuring strategic bluffing akin to poker. Players risk substantial losses from overplaying their hand but can secure significant gains if their opponent concedes. Since decisions in crises typically emerge from collective...

For a place-based policy to succeed, it must target the right areastypically those with lower economic development and resident well-being. The U.S. has two major place-based tax policies: the New Markets Tax Credit (NMTC), where government-approved entities select investments, and Opportunity Zones...

In 1975, a federal court ordered the desegregation of public schools in Jefferson County, KY. In order to approximately equalize the share of minorities across schools, students were assigned to a busing schedule that depended on the first letter of their last name. We use the resulting quasi-random...

Researchers cannot definitively interpret what the framers of the United States Constitution had in mind when they wrote of the general Welfare. Nevertheless, welfare economics can contribute to policy choice in democracies. Specifying social welfare functions enables coherent analysis, by...

We propose a novel time-series econometric framework to forecast U.S. Presidential election outcomes in real time by combining polling data, economic fundamentals, and political prediction market prices. Our model estimates the joint dynamics of voter preferences across states. Applying our approach...

To what extent, if at all, did employee-owned (EO) firms maintain jobs for workers compared to non-EO firms in the spring 2020 Covid-19 shock to the US economy? Did EO firms shift jobs from workplaces to work-from-home locations in the pandemic more or less than other firms? This paper uses a unique...

Given the use of an individuals arrest history for many economic and social outcomes, policymakers have enacted criminal justice reform measures. This paper examines which officers are making convictionless arrests (arrests that result in no charges or where the defendant is found not guilty), and...

We evaluate the effects of a program in Brazil that selects and trains new politicians, addressing three main challenges: selection bias from program screening, self-selection into candidacy, and the need to quantify the contributions of both selection and training in a holistic evaluation. Our...

We study the causal effects of income on political attitudes and behavior with a field experiment. In the experiment, a non-profit gifted 1,000 low-income Americans $1,000 per month for three years tax-free, and 2,000 control participants $50 monthly. Contrary to resource models of participation, we...

This paper explores the determinants of the level of, and trends over time in, Japans household saving rate, with emphasis on the impact of the age structure of the population, and makes projections about future trends therein. The paper finds that Japans household saving rate has not always been...

Evolutionary accounts assert that while diversity may lower subjective well-being (SWB) by creating an evolutionary mismatch between evolved psychological tendencies and the current social environment, human societies can adapt to diversity via intergroup contact under appropriate conditions....

We analyze the expressive content of government action, focusing on Istanbul Convention, an international treaty aimed at protecting women against violence, signed and ratified by 39 countries. In 2021, ten years after signing the Convention, the Turkish government withdrew from it, on the grounds...

We study the direct and indirect effects of randomized entry. In partnership with the two largest service providers in Ghana, we implement a three-step design that randomizes the entry of new financial mobile money vendors, who also sell non-financial goods/services, across local markets. This mixed...

We quantify the U.S. corporate sector's carbon externality by computing the sector's carbon burdenthe present value of social costs of its future carbon emissions. Our baseline estimate of the carbon burden is 131% of total corporate equity value. Among individual firms, 77% have carbon burdens...

We conduct a survey experiment with a large, politically representative sample of U.S. consumers (5,205 participants) to study how perceptions of the U.S. Federal Reserves (Fed) political stance shape macroeconomic expectations and trust in the Fed. The public is divided on the Feds political...

This paper estimates and quantifies the impact of the diaspora remittance flows on the conflict intensity and outcomes in the Sri Lankan Civil War during the period 1996-2009. We develop an approach to infer which remittance inflows were likely to benefit the Tamil Tiger rebels relative to the...

Many observers have forecast large partisan shifts in the US electorate based on demographic trends. Such forecasts are appealing because demographic trends are often predictable even over long horizons. We backtest demographic forecasts using data on US elections since 1952. We envision a...

In this paper, I analyze detailed data on intergenerational transfers in 4 countries (China, India, Japan, and the United States) from the Japan Household Panel Survey on Consumer Preferences and Satisfaction (JHPS-CPS) which has been conducted by the Institute of Social and Economic Research of...

We study the volunteers dilemma in environments with heterogeneous preferences and private information. We characterize the efficiency properties of equilibrium, which is a departure from all the previous literature that focuses only on the probability of group success. While the probability of...

Political leaders make policy choices which are often hard to explain via institutions. We use the behavior of Colombian paramilitary groups as an environment to study non-institutional sources of variation in how public good provision and violence are combined to control populations. We hypothesize...

We revisit the relationship between firm competition and real efficiency in a novel setting with informational feedback from financial markets. Although intensified competition can decrease market concentration in production, it reduces the value of proprietary information (e.g., market prospects)...

In recent years, voter ID laws and convenience voting have generated heated partisan debates. To shed light on these policy issues, we survey the recent evidence on the institutional determinants and effects of voter turnout and broaden the perspective beyond the most debated rules. We begin by...

Whether monetary incentives to change behavior work and how they should be structured are fundamental economic questions. We overcome typical data limitations in a large-scale field experiment on vaccination (N = 5,324) with a unique combination of administrative and survey data. We find that...

Economists often regard broad-based carbon pricing (whether in the form of a carbon tax or cap and trade) as the most efficient policy to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Relative to a narrower policy that exempts some emissions sources, a broader policy is often favored because it can exploit more...

We study optimal monetary policy in a general equilibrium economy with heterogeneous agents and nominal rigidities. Households differ in type-specific, state-contingent labor productivity and initial firm ownership, yet markets are complete. The fiscal authority has access to a linear tax schedule...

We study the distribution of political speech across U.S. firms. We develop a measure of political engagement based on firms communications (earnings calls, regulatory filings, and social media), by training a large language model to identify statements that contain political opinions. Using these...

Over the past decade, social media platforms have emerged as prominent vehicles for displaying dissent. In response, various actors have increasingly spread fake news on these platforms to impair the oppositionthe (dis)information war. We analyze a methodology to identify disinformation using...

Research on the causal effects of online advertising on consumer welfare is limited due to challenges in running large-scale field experiments and tracking effects over extended periods. We analyze a long-running field experiment of online advertising in which a random 0.5% subset of all users are...

Threshold models have been widely used to analyze interdependent behavior, yet empirical research identifying peoples thresholds is nonexistent. We introduce an incentivized method for eliciting thresholds and use it to study support for affirmative action in a large, stratified sample of the U.S....

We examine how politics and policy have affected remote-work rates in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using the Current Population Survey, American Community Survey, and the American Time Use Survey, which have several different measures of remote work, we examine how trends in remote work vary...

We analyze the saving motives of European households using micro-data from the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS), which is conducted by the European Central Bank. We find that the rank ordering of saving motives differs greatly depending on what criterion is used to rank them. For...

We examine technology adoption and consumer welfare disparities across demographic groups using data from an online solar photovoltaic (PV) marketplace. Low-income households are 25% less likely to purchase solar through the platform and obtain 53% lower expected consumer surplus than high-income...

We consider the optimal policy problem of a benevolent planner, who is uncertain about an individual's true preferences because of inconsistencies in revealed preferences across behavioral frames. We adapt theories of expected utility maximization and ambiguity aversion to characterize the planner's...

Political discourse has often stoked racial and ethnic divisions, raising the possibility that individuals self-reported racial and ethnic identities may change in response to an increasingly hostile environment. We shed light on this question by measuring the impacts of local support for...

We conduct parallel surveys of legislators and citizens in three countries to study their tolerance for corruption. In Italy, Colombia, and Pakistan legislators and citizens respond similarly to hypothetical scenarios involving trade-offs between, for example, probity and efficiency: both perceive...

This paper develops a model of news discernment to explore the influence of elections on the formation of partisan-driven parallel information universes. Using survey data from news quizzes administered during and outside the 2020 U.S. presidential election, the model shows that partisan congruences...

Theories of crime in economics focus on the roles of deterrence and incapacitation in reducing criminal activity. In addition to deterrence, a growing body of empirical evidence has shown that both income support and employment subsidies can play a role in crime reduction. This paper extends the...