AbstractWe study the circumstances under which public pressure affects judging. We show that crowd pressure biases decisions in favor of the crowd for “subjective decisions” with respect to which the judge has more discretion but not for “objective dec…
AbstractAre firms sophisticated maximizers, or do they appear to make mistakes? Using transaction data from Ugandan value-added tax returns, we show that sellers and buyers report different amounts 79% of the time, despite invoices being easily cross-c…
AbstractCan revenue sharing of resource rents be a source of distributive conflict? Can cohesive institutions avoid such conflicts? We exploit exogenous variation in local government revenues and new data on local democratic institutions in Nigeria to …
AbstractDuring the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic, many local authorities made the controversial decision to close schools. We use newly digitized data from newspaper archives on the length of school closures for 165 large U.S. cities during the 1918–191…
AbstractWe use newly linked tax records to show that the large responses of UK company owner-managers to personal taxes are due to intertemporal income shifting and not to reductions in real business activity. Around half of this shifting is short-term…
AbstractLittle is known about where hotspots of gentrification emerge within a city and the role that some types of businesses play in the process. We develop a method to detect the sectors whose presence heralds the process of gentrification in a neig…
AbstractWe exploit changes in U.S. visa policies for nurses to measure the origin-country human capital response to international migration opportunities. Combining data on all migrant departures and postsecondary institutions in the Philippines, we sh…
AbstractThis paper exploits location choices of all generalist physicians who graduated in Brazil between 2001 and 2013 to study policies aimed at increasing the supply of physicians in underserved areas. We set up and estimate a supply and demand mode…
AbstractWe collect worker month-level panel data from two companies in Beijing for a two-year period before and after the opening of a nearby subway station, which significantly improved public transportation commutes for some workers. We find a signif…
AbstractThe U.S. income tax code encourages marriage for some and discourages marriage for others, but same-sex couples were only recently exposed to these incentives. We estimate marriage responses by exploiting variation in the recognition of same-se…