The incorporation of increasing returns and imperfect competition into applied general-equilibrium (AGE) models, beginning with Harris (1984), led to much larger welfare effects from changes such as trade liberalization. But the imperfect competition side of these IO developments has often...

Price theory says that the most important effects of policy and technological change are often found beyond their first point of contact. This appears opposed to econometric methods that rule out spillovers of one person's treatment on another's outcomes. This paper uses the industry model from...

The rich tend to support policies favoring the affluent and are over-represented among both voters and legislators. This paper investigates whether these correlations reflect causal effects of wealth by leveraging random, positive wealth shocks in the form of lottery prizes. Compared to suitably...

We present results from a randomized controlled trial in Bangladesh that introduced operational practices to improve energy efficiency and reduce emissions in 276 "zigzag" brick kilns. 65% of intervention kilns adopted the improved practices. Treatment assignment reduced energy use by 10.3%...

We conduct parallel surveys of legislators and citizens in three countries to study their tolerance for corruption. In Italy, Colombia, and Pakistan legislators and citizens respond similarly to hypothetical scenarios involving trade-offs between, for example, probity and efficiency: both...

We analyze the saving motives of European households using micro-data from the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS), which is conducted by the European Central Bank. We find that the rank ordering of saving motives differs greatly depending on what criterion is used to rank them. For...

This paper studies the impact of career concerns on technological change by analyzing the adoption of digital cinematography in the US motion picture industry. This setting allows us to collect rich data on the adoption of this new technology at the project-level (i.e., movie) as well as on the...

We estimate the causal effect of emergency credit on households' finances after a negative shock. To do so, we link application data from the U.S. Federal Disaster Loan program, which provides loans to households that have uninsured damages from a federally-declared natural disaster, to a panel...

Globally, coercive labor (i.e., forced, bonded, and/or trafficked labor) and child labor are disproportionately prevalent in environments with weak regulatory enforcement and state capacity. Effective strategies for addressing them may therefore need to align with the private incentives of...

In recent years the analysis of US climate policy on the electricity sector has predominantly deployed electricity planning or capacity expansion models that use deterministic or equilibrium optimization methods. While uncertainty in key input assumptions is considered, it is usually restricted...