Conferencias y seminarios pasados

Harvard University

"School Vouchers, Labor Markets and Vocational Education."

We provide evidence on the long-run impact of vouchers for private secondary schools, evidence collected twenty years after students applied for the vouchers. Prior to the voucher lottery, students applied to either an academic or vocational secondary school, an important mediating factor in the vouchers’ impacts. We find strong tertiary education and labor market effects for those students who applied to vocational schools with almost no impact on those who applied to academic schools. The labor market gains for vocational students are strongest at the top of the distribution and null at the bottom of the distribution. We find additional long-run impacts on consumption and teen-age fertility. The expected net present value of benefits to participants and to taxpayers was large and positive implying that the program was welfare improving unless net externalities were large and negative.

Southern Methodist University (SMU)

"Credit Attribution and Collaborative Work."

We examine a dynamic model of teamwork in which the public attributes credit for success based on its perception of individual efforts. The collaborative behavior varies starkly depending on the shape of marginal effort cost, or project’s “difficulty.” In the unique (interior) equilibrium, higher ability collaborators work less and thus receive lower credit and payoff for “easy” projects, while the reverse holds for “difficult” projects. Despite free-riding, the team equilibrium may involve over-investment. Social efficiency requires over-rewarding collaborative work and under-rewarding solo work. The incentives to team up and the impact of effort monitoring on credit attribution are also investigated.

University of Chicago

"Price Regulation in Credit Markets: A Trade-off between Consumer Protection and Credit Access."

Interest rate caps are widespread in consumer credit markets, yet there is limited evidence on its effects on market outcomes and welfare. Conceptually, the effects of interest rate caps are ambiguous and depend on a trade-off between consumer protection from banks’ market power and reductions in credit access. We exploit a policy in Chile that lowered interest rate caps by 20 percentage points to understand its impacts. Using comprehensive individual-level administrative data, we document that the policy decreased transacted interest rates by 9%, but also reduced the number of loans by 19%. To estimate the welfare effects of this policy, we develop and estimate a model of loan applications, pricing, and repayment of loans. Consumer surplus decreases by an equivalent of 3.5% of average income, with larger losses for risky borrowers. Survey evidence suggests these welfare effects may be driven by decreased consumption smoothing and increased financial distress. Interest rate caps provide greater consumer protection in more concentrated markets, but welfare effects are negative even under a monopoly. Risk-based regulation reduces the adverse effects of interest rate caps, but does not eliminate them.

Developed by University of Texas at Austin

Main theme:

"Clinical depression and economic behavior: evidence from India"