1. Mai Hassan, Horacio Larreguy and Stuart Russell. “Who Gets Hired? Political Patronage and Bureaucratic Favoritism”. American Political Science Review , First View , pp. 1 - 18, January 25,2024
Abstract
Most research on biased public sector hiring highlights local politicians’ incentives to distribute government positions to partisan supporters. Other studies instead point to the role of bureaucratic managers in allocating government jobs to close contacts. We jointly consider the relative importance of each source of biased hiring as an allocation problem between managers and politicians who have different preferences regarding public sector hiring and different abilities to realize those preferences. We develop a theoretical model of each actor’s relative leverage and relative preferences for different types of public sector positions. We empirically examine our theory using the universe of payroll data in Kenyan local governments from 2004 to 2013. We find evidence of both patronage and bureaucratic favoritism, but with different types of bias concentrated in different types of government jobs, as our theory predicts. Our results highlight the inadequacy of examining political patronage alone without incorporating the preferences and leverage of the bureaucratic managers who are intricately involved in hiring processes.
2. Enrique Alasino, María José Ramírez, Mauricio Romero, Norbert Schady, David Uribe. "Learning losses during the COVID-19 pandemic: Evidence from Mexico". Economic of Education Review Volume 98, February 2024, 102492.
Abstract:
This paper presents evidence of large learning losses and partial recovery in Guanajuato, Mexico, during and after the school closures related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Learning losses were estimated using administrative data from enrollment records and by comparing the results of a census-based standardized test administered to approximately 20,000 5th and 6th graders in: (a) March 2020 (a few weeks before school closed); (b) November 2021 (2 months after schools reopened); and (c) June of 2023 (21 months after schools re-opened and over three years after the pandemic started). On average, students performed 0.2 to 0.3 standard deviations lower in Spanish and math after schools reopened, equivalent to 0.66 to 0.87 years of schooling in Spanish and 0.87 to 1.05 years of schooling in math. By June of 2023, students were able to make up for 60% of the learning loss that built up during school closures but still scored 0.08–0.11 standard deviations below their pre-pandemic levels (equivalent to 0.23–0.36 years of schooling).
3. José Ramón Enríquez, Horacio Larreguy, John Marshall, and Alberto Simpser. “Mass Political Information on Social Media: Facebook Ads, Electorate Saturation, and Electoral Accountability in Mexico”. Journal of the European Economic Association. 13 February, 2024.
Abstact:
Social media’s capacity to quickly and inexpensively reach large audiences almost simultaneously has the potential to promote electoral accountability. Beyond increasing direct exposure to information, high saturation campaigns—which target substantial fractions of an electorate—may induce or amplify information diffusion, persuasion, or coordination between voters. Randomizing saturation across municipalities, we evaluate the electoral impact of non-partisan Facebook ads informing millions of Mexican citizens of municipal expenditure irregularities in 2018. The vote shares of incumbent parties that engaged in zero/negligible irregularities increased by 6–7 percentage points in directly-targeted electoral precincts. This direct effect, but also the indirect effect in untargeted precincts within treated municipalities, were significantly greater where ads targeted 80%—rather than 20%—of the municipal electorate. The amplifying effects of high saturation campaigns are driven by citizens within more socially-connected municipalities, rather than responses by politicians or media outlets. These findings demonstrate how mass media can ignite social interactions to promote political accountability.
4. Andrei Gomberg, Romans Pancs, Tridib Sharma. "Padding and Pruning: Gerrymandering Under Turnout Heterogeneity",accepted at Social Choice and Welfare.
Abstract:
Padding is the practice of adding nonvoters (e.g., noncitizens or disenfranchised prisoners) to an electoral district in order to ensure that the district meets the size quota prescribed by the one man, one vote doctrine without affecting the voting outcome in the district. We show how padding (and its mirror image, pruning) can lead to arbitrarily large deviations from the social optimum in the composition of elected legislatures. We solve the partisan districter's optimal padding problem.
5.. Mauricio Romero, Juan Bedoya, Monica Yanez-Pagans, Marcela Silveyra, Rafael de Hoyos. " The effect of school grants on test scores: experimental evidence from Mexico". Economica,Volume91, Issue363, July 2024 Pages 980-995.
Abstract:
We use a randomized experiment (across 200 public primary schools in Puebla, Mexico) to study the impact of providing schools with cash grants on student test scores. Treated schools received on average ∼16 USD per student each year for two years, an increase of ∼20% in public spending per child, after teacher salaries. Overall, the grants had no impact on student test scores. Lack of a treatment effect does not seem to be driven by poor implementation or a substitution away from other inputs (e.g. household expenditure).
6. Abhijeet Singh, Mauricio Romero and Karthik Muralidharan, " COVID-19 L earning loss and recovery. Panel data evidence from India." The Journal of Human Resources. Vol. 59, Issue 3, 1 May 2024.
Abstract:
We use a panel survey of ~ 19,000 primary-school-aged children in rural Tamil Nadu to study ‘learning loss’ after COVID-19-induced school closures, and the pace of recovery after schools reopened. Students tested in December 2021 (18 months after school closures) displayed learning deficits of ~0.73σ in math and 0.34σ in language compared to identically-aged students in the same villages in 2019. Two-thirds of this deficit was made up within 6 months after schools reopened. Further, while learning loss was regressive, recovery was progressive. A government-run after-school remediation program contributed ~24% of the cohort-level recovery, likely aiding the progressive recovery.
7. Horacio Larreguy and Shelley Liu. “When does education increase political participation? Evidence from Senegal”. Political Science Research and Methods , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , April 2024 , pp. 354 – 371.
Abstract:
We argue that education's effect on political participation in developing democracies depends on the strength of democratic institutions. Education increases awareness of, and interest in, politics, which help citizens to prevent democratic erosion through increased political participation. We examine Senegal, a stable but developing democracy where presidential over-reach threatened to weaken democracy. For causal identification, we use a difference-in-differences strategy that exploits variation in the intensity of a major school reform and citizens’ ages during reform implementation. Results indicate that schooling increases interest in politics and greater support for democratic institutions—but no increased political participation in the aggregate. Education increases political participation primarily when democracy is threatened, when support for democratic institutions among educated individuals is also greater.
8. Anastasia Kozyreva, Philipp Lorenz-Spreen, Stefan M. Herzog, Ullrich K. H. Ecker, Stephan Lewandowsky, Ralph Hertwig, Ayesha Ali, Joe Bak-Coleman, Sarit Barzilai, Melisa Basol, Adam J. Berinsky, Cornelia Betsch, John Cook, Lisa K. Fazio, Michael Geers, Andrew M. Guess, Haifeng Huang, Horacio Larreguy, Rakoen Maertens, Folco Panizza, Gordon Pennycook, David G. Rand, Steve Rathje, Jason Reifler, Philipp Schmid, Mark Smith, Briony Swire-Thompson, Paula Szewach, Sander van der Linden & Sam Wineburg. "Toolbox of individual-level interventions against online misinformation" Nature Human Behaviour. Forthcoming.
Abstract:
The spread of misinformation through media and social networks threatens many aspects of society, including public health and the state of democracies. One approach to mitigating the effect of misinformation focuses on individual-level interventions, equipping policymakers and the public with essential tools to curb the spread and influence of falsehoods. Here we introduce a toolbox of individual-level interventions for reducing harm from online misinformation. Comprising an up-to-date account of interventions featured in 81 scientific papers from across the globe, the toolbox provides both a conceptual overview of nine main types of interventions, including their target, scope and examples, and a summary of the empirical evidence supporting the interventions, including the methods and experimental paradigms used to test them. The nine types of interventions covered are accuracy prompts, debunking and rebuttals, friction, inoculation, lateral reading and verification strategies, media-literacy tips, social norms, source-credibility labels, and warning and fact-checking labels.
9. Jackson Dorsey, Ashley Langer, and Shaun McRae. "Fueling Alternatives: Gas Station Choice and the Implications for Electric Charging". American Economic Journal: Economic Policy. Forthcoming.
Abstract:
T his paper quantifies the value of electric vehicle (EV) charging networks and the marginal value of network speed and density. We estimate a model of gasoline drivers’ refueling preferences and simulate how these potential future EV drivers value refueling time under counterfactual charging networks. Drivers value refueling time at $19.73/hour. EV adopters with home charging receive $675 per vehicle in benefits from avoiding travel to gas stations, whereas refueling travel and waiting time costs $7,763 for drivers using public charging. Increasing network charging speed yields three times greater time savings than a proportional increase in station density.
10. Romans Pancs and Tridib Sharma. "One Man, One Vote". accepted at the American Economis Journal: Microeconomics. Fothcoming.
Abstract:
In the United States, electoral districts must be equipopulous. This requirement is knownas the one man one vote doctrine. We propose welfare-based justifications for this requirementunder the economic view, according to which voters care about the policy, and under the polit-ical view, according to which voters care about representation. Both justifications assume thatthe districter is partisan. If the districter is benevolent, one man one vote is harmless underthe economic view but may reduce voter welfare under the political view by as much as thereduction fromKto√Kdistricts would.
11. Karthik Muralidharan, Mauricio Romero and Kaspar Wüthrich, "Factorial designs, model selection, and (incorrect) inference in randomized experiments", Forthcoming at The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2023.
Abstract:
Factorial designs are widely used to study multiple treatments in one experiment. While t-tests using a fully-saturated “long” model provide valid inferences, “short” model t-tests (that ignore interactions) yield higher power if interactions are zero, but incorrect inferences otherwise. Of 27 factorial experiments published in top-5 journals (2007–2017), 19 use the short model. After including interactions, over half of their results lose significance. Based on recent econometric advances, we show that power improvements over the long model are possible. We provide practical guidance for the design of new experiments and the analysis of completed experiments.
12. Raul Prelleso,José María Da Rocha, María L.D. Palomares,U. Rashid Sumaila and Sebastian Villasante. "Building climate resilience, social sustainability and equity in global fisheries." Nature portfolio Journal. Forthcoming.
Abstract:
Although the Paris Agreement establishes targets to limit global warming—including carbon market mechanisms—little research has been done on developing operational tools to achieve them. To cover this gap, we use CO2 permit markets towards a market-based solutions (MBS) scheme to implement blue carbon climate targets for global fisheries. The scheme creates a scarcity value for the right to not sequester blue carbon, generating an asset of carbon sequestration allowances based on historical landings, which are considered initial allowances. We use the scheme to identify fishing activities that could be reduced because they are biologically negative, economically inefficient, and socially unequitable. We compute the annual willingness to sequester carbon considering the CO2e trading price for 2022 and the social cost of carbon dioxide (SC-CO2), for years 2025, 2030 and 2050. The application of the MBS scheme will result in 0.122 Gt CO2e sequestered or US$66 billion of potential benefits per year when considering 2050 SC-CO2. The latter also implies that if CO2e trading prices reach the 2050 social cost of carbon, around 75% of the landings worldwide would be more valuable as carbon than as foodstuff in the market. Our findings provide the global economy and policymakers with an alternative for the fisheries sector, which grapples with the complexity to find alternatives to reallocate invested capital. They also provide a potential solution to make climate resilience, social sustainability and equity of global fisheries real, scientific and practical for a wide range of social-ecological and political contexts.
13. Jeremy Bowles and Horacio Larreguy, "Who Debates, Who Wins? At-Scale Experimental Evidence on the Supply of Policy Information in a Liberian Election. ", Forthcoming at the American Political Science Review.
14. Romans Pancs. " A Vaccine Auction", Review of Economic Design, Forthcoming.
Abstract:
This article describes an auction for selling vaccines in a pandemic.The environment borrows from the problem of allocating positionsfor sponsored links on pages with online search results but recognizesthe externalities that one man’s vaccination imposes on another. Theauction is the pivot Vickrey-Clark-Groves mechanism and, so, inheritsits properties: efficiency and strategy-proofness. The auction lets eachbidder bid not only on his own behalf but also on behalf of others. Theauction requires neither the bidders nor the auctioneer to forecast theefficacy of the vaccine or the evolution of the pandemic.
15. Paola Manzini, Marco Mariotti and Levent Ülkü, “A model of approval with an application to list design”,Journal of Economic Theory, Volume 217, April 2024.
Abstract:
Online technologies enable a host of observable acts, such as wishlisting, that do not quite amount to choice meant as a final selection. Rather, they express interest and a positive attitude towards an item. We gather this type of behaviour under the term approval. With items presented as a list, we propose a model of approval. We completely characterise the model in terms of simple properties of observed approval data. We introduce and study the problem of list design. This captures situations where an interested party can manipulate the approver's behaviour by choosing the list with the aim of maximising an objective.
16. Jackson Dorsey, Ashley Langer and Shaun McRae, “Fueling Alternatives: Gas Station Choice and the Implications for Electric Charging”, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy. Forthcoming.
Abstract:
This paper estimates an imperfect information discrete choice model of drivers’ refueling preferences and analyzes the implications of these preferences for electric vehicle (EV) adoption. Drivers respond four times more to stations’ long-run average prices than to current prices and value travel time at $27.54/hour. EV adopters with home charging receive $829 per vehicle in benefits from avoiding travel to gas stations, whereas refueling travel and waiting time costs increase by $9,169 for drivers without home charging. Increasing the charging speed of the existing network yields 4.7 times greater time savings than a proportional increase in the number of stations.
17. Karthik Muralidharan, Mauricio Romero, Kaspar Wüthrich, “Factorial Designs, Model Selection, and (Incorrect) Inference in Randomized Experiments”, The Reveiw of Economics and Statics. Forthcoming.
Abstract:
Factorial designs are widely used to study multiple treatments in one experiment. While t-tests using a fully-saturated “long” model provide valid inferences, “short” model t-tests (that ignore interactions) yield higher power if interactions are zero, but incorrect inferences otherwise. Of 27 factorial experiments published in top-5 journals (2007–2017), 19 use the short model. After including interactions, over half of their results lose significance. Based on recent econometric advances, we show that power improvements over the long model are possible. We provide practical guidance for the design of new experiments and the analysis of completed experiments.
18. Emilio Gutiérrez, Adrían Rubli, “LGBT+ persons and homophobia prevalence across job sectors: Survey evidence from Mexico”, Labour Economics, Volume 87, April 2024.
Abstract:
LGBTQ+ individuals may face particular labor market challenges concerning disclosure of their identity and the prevalence of homophobia. Employing an online survey in Mexico with two elicitation methods, we investigate the size of the LGBTQ+ population and homophobic sentiment across various subgroups. We find that around 5%–13% of respondents self-identify as LGBTQ+, with some variation by age and job sectors. Homophobic sentiment is more prevalent when measured indirectly and is higher among males, older and less educated workers, and in less traditional sectors. Lastly, we uncover a negative correlation between homophobia and LGBTQ+ presence in labor markets, suggesting a need for policies to address these disparities.
19. Sandra Aguilar-Gómez, Emilio Gutiérrez, David Heres, David Jaume and Martin Tobal, “Thermal stress and financial distress: Extreme temperatures and firms’ loan defaults in Mexico", Journal of Development Economics, Volume 168, May 2024.
Abstract:
The frequency and intensity of extreme temperature events are likely to increase with climate change. Using a detailed dataset containing information on the universe of loans extended by commercial banks to private firms in Mexico, we examine the relationship between extreme temperatures and credit performance. We find that unusually hot days increase delinquency rates, primarily affecting the agricultural sector, but also non-agricultural industries that rely heavily on local demand. Our results are consistent with general equilibrium effects originated in agriculture that expand to other sectors in agricultural regions. Additionally, following a temperature shock, affected firms face increased challenges in accessing credit, pay higher interest rates, and provide more collateral, indicating a tightening of credit during financial distress.
20. Antonio Aguierre & Ignacio Lobato, "Evidence of non-fundamentalness in OECD capital stocks", Empirical Economics, Forthcoming (2024).
Abstract:
This note examines evidence of non-fundamentalness in the rate of variation of annual per capita capital stock for OECD countries in the period 1955–2020. Leeper et al. (2013) proposed a theoretical model in which, due to agents performing fiscal foresight, this economic series could exhibit a non-fundamental behavior (in particular, a non-invertible moving average component), which has important implications for modeling and forecasting. Using the methodology proposed in Velasco and Lobato (2018), which delivers consistent estimators of the autoregressive and moving average parameters without imposing fundamentalness assumptions, we empirically examine whether the capital data are better represented with an invertible or a non-invertible moving average model. We find strong evidence in favor of the non-invertible representation since for the countries that present significant innovation asymmetry, the selected model is predominantly non-invertible.
21. Alexander Elbittar, Andrei Gomberg and Dario Trujano Ochoa, "Citizen Candidates in the Lab: Rules, Costs, and Positions", Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, Forthcoming.
Abstract:
We report the findings from a study that explores candidate participation in a context where citizens can become candidates under both plurality and run-off voting systems. The study also considers the influence of entry costs and different platforms of potential candidates. While our findings align with the expected outcomes of the citizen-candidate model, there’s notable over-participation by candidates from less favorable electoral positions. These entry patterns adjusted well to the QRE. This research adds to the existing body of knowledge about what motivates candidates to enter races under different voting systems and analyzes the behavior of candidates in extreme positions.