Expectations, Wage Hikes, and Worker Voice

Enabling worker voice could improve worker retention and effort by providing workers the chance to improve their situation or an outlet to express discontent. We provide a test of this hypothesis via a randomised controlled trial in Indian garment factories. Just after what proved to be a disappointing wage hike, workers were chosen at random to participate in an anonymous survey in which they were asked for feedback on job conditions, supervisor performance, and overall job satisfaction. Enabling voice in this manner reduced turnover and absenteeism after the hike, particularly for the most disappointed workers.

The Effect of Concealed-Carry and Handgun Restrictions on Gun-Related Deaths: Evidence from the Sullivan Act of 1911

The 1911 NY State Sullivan Act (SA) outlawed carrying concealable firearms without a licence, established strict licencing rules, and regulated the sale and possession of handguns. We analyse the effects of the SA using historical data on mortality rates, pistol permits, and citations for illegal carrying. Our analysis of pistol permits and citations reveal clear initial effects of the SA on gun-related behaviours. Using synthetic control and difference-in-differences methodologies, our main analyses show no effects on overall homicide rates, evidence of a reduction in overall suicide rates, and strong evidence of a large and sustained decrease in gun-related suicide rates.

A Subsidy That Is Inversely Related to the Product Price

This study considers a new subsidy design to support the purchase or production of target products. Under the proposed design, subsidy payments are inversely related to product prices. Compared to ‘flat’ subsidies, this design reduces producers’ market power and the subsidy benefits passed on to them, improving the cost-effectiveness of government spending (by up to 50% according to simulations based on an actual subsidy programme). Additionally, this subsidy’s cost-effectiveness and incidence can be adjusted flexibly by changing the policy parameters. Finally, the subsidy design can be modified to provide larger payments to higher-quality products, thereby offsetting disincentives for quality improvement.

The Brides of Boko Haram: Economic Shocks, Marriage Practices, and Insurgency in Nigeria

Marriage markets in rural Nigeria are characterised by bride price and polygamy. These customs may diminish marriage prospects for young men, causing them to join militant groups. Using an instrumental variables strategy, I find that marriage inequality increases civil conflict in the Boko Haram insurgency. To generate exogenous shocks to the marriage market, I exploit the fact that young women delay marriage in response to favourable pre-marital economic conditions, which increases marriage inequality primarily in polygamous villages. The same shocks that increase marriage inequality and extremist violence also lead women to marry fewer and richer husbands, generate higher average marriage expenditures, and increase insurgent abductions. The results shed light on the marriage market as an important driver of violent extremism.

Hobo Economicus

The central implication of maximising behaviour amid competition is that rates of return tend toward equality. We test that implication in a market whose participants have the traits that behavioural economics suggests should make it hardest to find evidence of maximisation: the market for panhandling at Metrorail stations in Washington, DC. We find that stations with more panhandling opportunities attract more panhandlers and that cross-station differences in hourly panhandling receipts are statistically indistinguishable from zero. Panhandling rates of return thus tend toward equality. Extreme ‘behavioural’ traits do not prevent maximisation in this market.

Patience, Risk-Taking, and Human Capital Investment Across Countries

Patience and risk-taking – two preference components that steer intertemporal decision-making – are fundamental to human capital investment decisions. To understand how they contribute to international skill differences, we combine PISA tests with the Global Preference Survey. We find that opposing effects of patience (positive) and risk-taking (negative) together account for two-thirds of the cross-country variation in student skills. In an identification strategy addressing unobserved residence-country features, we find similar results when assigning migrant students their country-of-origin preferences in models with residence-country fixed effects. Associations of national preferences with family and school inputs suggest that both may act as channels.

Information Operations Increase Civilian Security Cooperation

Information operations are considered a central element of modern warfare and counterinsurgency, yet there remains little systematic evidence of their effectiveness. Using a geographic quasi-experiment conducted during Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, we demonstrate that civilians exposed to the government’s information campaign resulted in more civilian security cooperation, which in turn increased bomb neutralisations. These results are robust to a number of alternative model specifications that account for troop presence, patrol-based operations, and local military aid allocation. The paper demonstrates that information campaigns can lead to substantive attitudinal and behavioural changes in an adversarial environment and substantially improve battlefield outcomes.

Emotion and Reason in Political Language

This paper studies the use of emotion and reason in political discourse. Adopting computational-linguistics techniques to construct a validated text-based scale, we measure emotionality in 6 million speeches given in U.S. Congress over the years 1858-2014. Intuitively, emotionality spikes during times of war and is highest in speeches about patriotism. In the time series, emotionality was relatively low and stable in earlier years but increased significantly starting in the late 1970s. Across Congress Members, emotionality is higher for Democrats, for women, for ethnic/religious minorities, for the opposition party, and for members with ideologically extreme roll-call voting records.

Cognitive Skills and Economic Preferences in the Fund Industry

By running a battery of experiments with fund managers, we investigate the impact of cognitive skills and economic preferences on their professional decisions. First, we find that fund managers’ risk tolerance positively correlates with fund risk when accounting for fund benchmark, fund category, and other controls. Second, we show that fund managers’ ambiguity tolerance positively correlates with the funds’ tracking error from the benchmark. Finally, we report that cognitive skills do not explain fund performance in terms of excess returns. However, we do find that fund managers with high cognitive reflection abilities compose funds at lower risk.

Housing Expenditure and Income Inequality

The trend of rising income inequality in Germany since the mid-1990s is strongly amplified when considering income after housing expenditure. The income share of housing expenditure rose disproportionally for the bottom income quintile and fell for the top quintile. Factors contributing to these trends include declining relative costs of homeownership versus renting, changes in household structure, declining real incomes for low-income households, and residential mobility towards larger cities. Younger cohorts spend more on housing and save less than older cohorts did at the same age, which will affect future wealth accumulation, particularly at the bottom of the income distribution.