Armed groups routinely delegate domains of rule to village customary chiefs--indirect rule. The larger a chief's power over the villagers relative to the group's, the more there is indirect rule. Over time, enabled by the chief's efforts to legitimize the group, the group expands the taxes they...

We study habit formation in annual biometric health screenings using a field experiment that randomly assigned financial incentives to 4,799 employees over three years. Completing the first screening raised subsequent screenings by 32.4-36.0 percentage points (84%-90%) annually. Habit formation...

This paper documents several facts about graduate program graduation rates using administrative data covering public and nonprofit graduate students in Texas. Despite conventional wisdom that most graduate students complete their programs, only 58 percent of who started their program in 2004...

We study the descriptive and substantive representation of workers through worker representatives, focusing on the selection of German works council representatives and their impact on worker outcomes. Becoming a professional representative leads to substantial wage gains for the elected,...

The pace of biodiversity loss requires drastic shifts in conservation efforts that carry substantial costs. We investigate how the financial market prices such conservation costs exploiting the "Green Shield Action," a major regulatory initiative launched by the Chinese central government in...

We characterize the evolution of markups for consumer products in the United States from 2006 to 2019. Using detailed data on prices and quantities for products in more than 100 distinct product categories, we estimate flexible demand systems and recover markups under an assumption that firms...

This paper builds on a previous paper by the authors (Kornfeld and Fraumeni, 2022) that primarily used U.S. Federal Highway Administration Highway Statistics data to disaggregate investment in highways and streets into more detailed types to produce updated estimates of net wealth stocks and...