Research

As children reach adolescence, peer interactions become increasingly central to their development, whereas the direct influence of parents wanes. Nevertheless, parents may continue to exert leverage by shaping their children's peer groups. We study interactions of parenting style and peer effects in a model where children's skill accumulation depends on both parental inputs and peers, and where parents can affect the peer group by restricting who their children can interact with. We estimate the model and show that it can capture empirical patterns regarding the interaction of peer characteristics, parental behavior, and skill accumulation among US high school students. We use the estimated model for policy simulations. We find that interventions (e.g., busing) that move children to a more favorable neighborhood have large effects but lose impact when they are scaled up because parents' equilibrium responses push against successful integration with the new peer group.

We used a randomized experimental vignette study to assess the effects of sunset clauses and conditional sunset clauses on support for proposed legislation, perceived legitimacy of legislation, and perceived good faith of legislators. In general, we hypothesized that including both types of sunset clause would increase support for legislation, increase perceived legitimacy, and increase perceived good faith. We also varied the political valence of legislation to identify whether the impact of sunset clauses varies depending on whether the legislation aligns with political viewpoint. We hypothesized that sunset clauses may increase support for laws that run contrary to political views. Our sample included 1639 adults from throughout the U.S. Participants tended to be more supportive of neutral laws compared to laws with liberal or conservative valence. Across all participants, we found that adding a sunset clause or a conditional sunset clause did not significantly affect overall support for the law, holding political valence and topic area constant. Our findings, however, showed consistently that the sunsets tended to increase support for conservative laws more than they increased support for laws that were liberal or neutral in valence. Pairwise comparisons showed that when the policy was conservative, a sunset clause and a conditional sunset clause each significantly increased support compared to no sunset. Among Liberal participants, adding either type of sunset significantly increased support for a conservative policy (p<0.05). Among Conservative participants, we found that sunsets did not affect support for liberal policies, but they marginally increased support for laws that were already conservative. Overall, sunset clauses tended to induce a broader range of compromise beliefs and significantly more compromise support for conservative legislation, compared to liberal legislation.

When physicians whom patients do not choose and cannot avoid can bill out of network for care delivered within in-network hospitals, it exposes patients to financial risk and undercuts the functioning of health care markets. Using data for 2015 from a large commercial insurer, we found that at in-network hospitals, 11.8 percent of anesthesiology care, 12.3 percent of care involving a pathologist,
5.6 percent of claims for radiologists, and 11.3 percent of cases involving an assistant surgeon were billed out of network. The ability to bill out of network allows these specialists to negotiate artificially high in-network rates. Out-of-network billing is more prevalent at hospitals in concentrated hospital and insurance markets and at for-profit hospitals. Our estimates show that if these specialists were not able to bill out of network, it would lower physician payments for privately insured patients by 13.4 percent and reduce health care spending for people with employer-sponsored insurance by 3.4 percent (approximately $40 billion annually).

Social movements are associated with large societal changes, but evidence of their causal effects is limited. We study the effect of the MeToo movement on reporting sex crimes to the police. We construct a new dataset of crimes reported in 31 OECD countries and employ a triple-difference strategy between crime types, across countries, and over time. The movement increased the reporting of sex crimes by 10%. Using rich US data, we find that in contrast to a common criticism of the movement, the effect is similar across socioeconomic groups, and that the movement also increased arrests for sexual assault. The increased reporting reflects a higher propensity to report sex crimes and not an increase in crime incidence. The mechanism most consistent with our findings is that victims perceive sexual misconduct to be a more serious problem following the movement. Our results demonstrate that social movements can rapidly and persistently affect high-stakes decisions. 

We study the effects of defaults on charitable giving in a large-scale field experiment on an online fundraising platform. We exogenously vary default options along two choice dimensions: the charitable donation decision and the “co-donation” decision regarding how much to contribute to supporting the platform. We document a strong effect of defaults on individual behavior but nevertheless find that aggregate donation levels are unaffected by defaults. In contrast, co-donations increase in the default amount. We complement our experimental results with a structural model that investigates whether personalizing defaults based on individuals' donation histories can increase donation revenues.

Job differentiation gives employers market power, allowing them to pay workers less than their marginal productivity. We estimate a differentiated jobs model using application data from Careerbuilder.com. We find direct evidence of substantial job differentiation. Without the use of instruments for wages, job applications appear very inelastic with respect to wages. Plausible instruments produce elastic firm level application supply curves. Under some assumptions, the implied market level labor supply elasticity is 0.5, while the firm level labor elasticity is 4.8. This suggests that workers may produce 21% more than their wage level, consistent with significant monopsony power.

We document that an experimental intervention offering transport subsidies for poor rural households to migrate seasonally in Bangladesh improved risk sharing. A theoretical model of endogenous migration and risk sharing shows that the effect of subsidizing migration depends on the underlying economic environment. If migration is risky, a temporary subsidy can induce an improvement in risk sharing and enable profitable migration. We estimate the model and find that the migration experiment increased welfare by 12.9%. Counterfactual analysis suggests that a permanent, rather than temporary, decline in migration costs in the same environment would result in a reduction in risk sharing.

Many countries face growing concerns that population aging may make voting and policy-making myopic. This concern begs for electoral reform to better reflect voices of the youth, such as weighting votes by voters' life expectancy. This paper predicts the effect of the counterfactual electoral reform on the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Using the American National Election Studies (ANES) data, I find that Hillary Clinton would have won the election if votes were weighted by life expectancy. I also discuss limitations due to data issues.

We use insurance claims data covering 28% of individuals with employer-sponsored health insurance in the United States to study the variation in health spending on the privately insured, examine the structure of insurer-hospital contracts, and analyze the variation in hospital prices across the nation. Health spending per privately insured beneficiary differs by a factor of three across geographic areas and has a very low correlation with Medicare spending. For the privately insured, half of the spending variation is driven by price variation across regions, and half is driven by quantity variation. Prices vary substantially across regions, across hospitals within regions, and even within hospitals. For example, even for a nearly homogeneous service such as lower-limb magnetic resonance imaging, about a fifth of the total case-level price variation occurs within a hospital in the cross section. Hospital market structure is strongly associated with price levels and contract structure. Prices at monopoly hospitals are 12% higher than those in markets with four or more rivals. Monopoly hospitals also have contracts that load more risk on insurers (e.g., they have more cases with prices set as a share of their charges). In concentrated insurer markets the opposite occurs—hospitals have lower prices and bear more financial risk. Examining the 366 mergers and acquisitions that occurred between 2007 and 2011, we find that prices increased by over 6% when the merging hospitals were geographically close (e.g., 5 miles or less apart), but not when the hospitals were geographically distant (e.g., over 25 miles apart). JEL Codes: I11, L10, L11.