AbstractThe H-1B Visa Reform Act of 2004 dictates an annual allocation of 85,000 visas with 20,000 reserved for advanced-degree applicants. We represent the main requirements of this legislation as formal axioms and characterize visa allocation rules c…
AbstractInformation on willingness-to-pay is key for public pricing and allocation of services but not easily collected. Studying land titles in Dar-es-Salaam, we ask whether local leaders know and will reveal plot owners’ willingness-to-pay. We random…
AbstractThis paper studies how the expansion of segregated neighborhoods eroded black wealth in prewar American cities. Using a novel sample of matched addresses, we find that over a single decade rental prices soared by roughly 50% on city blocks that…
AbstractWe study the removal of information from a market, such as a job-applicant screening tool. We characterize how removal harms groups with relative advantage in that information: typically those for whom the banned information is most precise rel…
AbstractIn this paper, we investigate the economic consequences of mass shootings. We find that shootings have negative effects on targeted counties’ economies. Estimates using three different comparison groups yield similar results. Examining the mech…
AbstractWe assess the predictive power of survey measures of social capital with a new behavioral data set that examines whether citizens report a lost wallet to its owner. Using data from more than 17,000 lost wallets across 40 countries, we find that…
AbstractWe provide a method to track the active prevalence of COVID-19 in real time, correcting for time-varying sample selection in symptom-based testing data and incomplete tracking of recovered cases and fatalities. Our method only requires publicly…
AbstractThis paper uses new data on the removal of local, sector-specific barriers to firm entry across 1,800 municipalities in Peru to estimate the impact on firm productivity and markups. New legislation in 2013 strengthened the national competition …
AbstractWe investigate the impact of peer interaction on the quality of financial decision making in a laboratory experiment. Face-to-face communication with a randomly assigned peer significantly improves the quality of subsequent private decisions ev…
AbstractWe develop a framework for measuring under- and overreaction in expectation formation. The basic insight is that under- and overreaction to new information is identified (up to sign) by the impulse response function of forecast errors. Our meas…