AbstractIndividualism has long been linked to economic growth. Using the COVID-19 pandemic, we show that such a culture can hamper the economy’s response to crises, a period with heightened coordination frictions. Exploiting variation in U.S. counties’…
AbstractJob insecurity can have wide-ranging consequences outside of the labor market. A 1999 rise in the French layoff tax paid by large private firms when they laid off older workers made younger workers less secure; this insecurity reduced their fer…
AbstractWe study a dynamic game in which players compete for a prize. In a waiting game with two-sided private information about strength levels, players choose fighting, fleeing, or waiting. Players earn a “deterrence value” on top of the prize if the…
AbstractI leverage the staggered rollout of VAT in Pakistan to document the role of withholding mechanism in the self-enforcement of a VAT. Focusing on firms already in the tax net, I see how their outcomes respond when the tax is extended upward to in…
AbstractThis paper introduces a structural model for the coevolution of networks and behavior. We characterize the equilibrium of the underlying game and adopt the Bayesian Double Metropolis-Hastings algorithm to estimate the model. We further extend t…
AbstractSince the Great Recession in 2007–2009, U.S. real GDP has failed to return to its previously projected path, a phenomenon widely associated with secular stagnation. We investigate whether this stagnation was due to hysteresis effects from the G…
AbstractThis paper evaluates the effects of encouraging the selection of local politicians in India via community consensus, as opposed to a secret ballot election. Using village-level data on candidates, elected politicians, government budgets, and wo…
AbstractWe explore how team gender composition affects willingness to lead by randomly assigning participants in an experiment to male- or female-majority teams. Irrespective of team gender composition, men are substantially more willing than women to …
AbstractWe introduce a new mobile money interface that permits Sri Lankans to deposit mobile airtime balances directly into a formal bank account. Randomizing access and prices, we find a small increase in savings deposits with the partner institution …
AbstractThis paper estimates the effect on innovation of increased market access facilitated by trade liberalization. We use a novel empirical design that exploits tariff cuts during the 1990s, along with detailed data on innovation among firms from 65…