Today’s large developing countries have perhaps the highest levels of air pollution recorded in human history. The World Health Organization (WHO) sets an air quality standard of 10 micrograms per cubic meter for fine particles, PM2.5. In the United States, air pollution is worse than the WHO standard in 73 counties, home to 36 million […]
How acquisitions affect firm behavior and performance: Evidence from the dialysis industry
Health care markets have become increasingly concentrated through mergers and acquisitions. Proponents of this consolidation cite several potential benefits, including lower costs due to economies of scale and better patient outcomes through coordinated care. Greater concentration may also result in higher prices or lower quality, however. In a recent paper, funded in part by a […]
The Return to Protectionism
After more than a half-century of leading efforts to lower international trade barriers, the United States enacted several waves of tariff increases on specific products and countries in 2018 and 2019. Overall, the U.S. implemented tariffs on 17.6% of its 2017 imports, primarily from China, raising tariffs on targeted imports from an average of 3.7% […]
What Medicare Part D Teaches Us About Social Insurance Markets
Social insurance programs, such as health insurance and social security, have traditionally been paid for and provided by the government. However, more recently, there have been a number of high-profile initiatives to replace government-provided services with private provision via regulated competition. The motivation for these programs is if incentives are set up in the right […]
Poor Little Rich Kids? The Role of Nature versus Nurture in Wealth and Other Economic Outcomes and Behaviors
Wealth is highly correlated between parents and their children; however, little is known about what drives this relationship. Is it that children of wealthy parents are inherently more talented, and that is what shapes their later success? Or is it that children had parents who gave them more opportunities because they themselves had more wealth? […]
Who Profits from Patents? Rent-Sharing at Innovative Firms
Measuring the extent to which firms pass changes in their performance through to worker earnings is challenging. Our work uses US patent allowance decisions as “natural experiments” that lift a company’s labor productivity. We find robust evidence that variability in firm performance is an important causal determinant of worker pay in our sample of small […]
Improved allocation of talent boosts US economic growth
In 1960, 94% of American doctors and lawyers were white men: by 2010, the fraction was just 62%. Similar changes in other high-skilled occupations have occurred throughout the US economy over the last 60 years. Given that the innate talent for these professions is not likely to be any different across groups, the change in […]
Capitalists in the Twenty-First Century
Suppose you happen to meet a very high earner. How does she typically make her money? Is she likely a human capitalist, in that she makes most of her income from her labor or other human capital? Or is she likely a financial capitalist, in that she makes most of her income from her portfolio […]
Insuring the Poor: Experimental evidence from contract farming in Kenya
Throughout the world, the poor purchase less insurance (Rampini and Viswanathan 2016), and insurance markets are especially thin in the developing world. This could reflect supply-side problems: insurance is a complicated and highly regulated product, reliant on effective financial and legal institutions. Yet surprisingly, the binding constraint is often on the demand side. Across many […]
Life-cycle benefits of early childhood programs: evidence from an influential early childhood program
A substantial body of evidence shows that high-quality early childhood programs boost the skills of disadvantaged children.[1] Most of this research reports short-run treatment effects of these programs on cognitive test scores, school readiness, and measures of early-life social behavior. A few studies analyze longer-term benefits in terms of completed education, adult health, crime, and […]
