Asset owners often need to identify and choose between potential contracting partners to monetize their asset’s value. For example, companies that are acquisition targets may have multiple potential acquirers, and research institutions looking to commercialize intellectual property often decide among several interested parties. Many land transactions also look like this. How should an owner go […]
Criminal capital and a life of crime
What follows will outline how the coca economy might be one specific and persistent factor that leads people towards a criminal life path, and explain how a recent study establishes this for rural Peru. Children are put on a criminal life path when they invest in criminal human capital rather than formal schooling, when the […]
Liberation Technology: Mobile Phones and Political Mobilization in Africa
Can digital information and communication technology (ICT) foster mass political mobilization? In our 2020 Econometrica piece (Manacorda and Tesei, 2020), we use a variety of georeferenced data for the whole of Africa covering a 15-year span to investigate this question and explore channels of impact. The spread of digital ICT has fed a wave of […]
Achieving Scale Collectively
Most firms in developing countries employ only a few workers, if any (Hsieh and Olken, 2014). A key policy concern is that their small size may prevent firms from adopting technology: technology is often embodied in large machines, and small firms might not have the scale to justify the investment. As a result, firms may […]
Fighting brands, competition, and consumers
Understanding fighting brand strategies Johnson and Myatt (2003) developed a model of competition where firms can offer products that vary in quality. They showed that an incumbent monopoly active in a high-quality segment may have an incentive to launch a product in a low-quality segment only after new entry in that segment, and not before. […]
The Long-Run Impact of Immigration on Local and Aggregate Productivity
Can increases in the size of the population raise productivity? There are ample theoretical reasons to believe that the answer to this question ought to be yes. Most theories of growth predict a positive relationship between innovation incentives and market size, and many models of international trade or development economics highlight the importance of agglomeration […]
Hospital Network Competition and Adverse Selection: Evidence from the Massachusetts Health Insurance Exchange
The Affordable Care Act is one of the most significant health reforms in a generation. In addition to covering 15 million uninsured Americans, substantially expanding government health spending, and setting off a fierce political debate, the ACA is notable for an underappreciated reason: it is a major expansion of market-based health insurance. Traditionally, health insurance […]
What happens when foreign firms expand local employment?
Data and Statistical Patterns The new study is the first to construct a panel data set linking all firms and workers in the U.S. with foreign ownership information on firms. To do so, we developed a worker-firm panel from the population of annual U.S. Treasury tax filings from 1999 to 2017. For each worker-firm-year combination, […]
Cash Transfers and Nonlinear Prices
Cash transfer programs have become increasingly popular in developing countries over the past twenty years. Recently, World Bank researchers have documented a dramatic expansion of such programs to address the Covid-19 crisis. The reason for the popularity of these programs is that they have proved successful at alleviating poverty in both the short run, by […]
Should There Be Vertical Choice in Health Insurance Markets?
Are consumers on ACA exchanges actually made better off by having a choice between a high-deductible and a low-deductible health plan? Would U.K. citizens be better off if they could opt into accepting a deductible, in exchange for an up-front payment? The research summarized here introduces a framework for exploring such questions theoretically and empirically. […]
