Marriage and the Intergenerational Mobility of Women: Evidence from Marriage Certificates 1850-1920 -- by Katherine Eriksson, Gregory Niemesh, Myera Rashid, Jacqueline Craig
We document that women’s economic mobility improved nearly a century before married women gained broad labor market opportunities. Using Massachusetts marriage registers linked to U.S. censuses (1850–1920), we create new father–child links for women to estimate intergenerational mobility and assortative mating, overcoming a key historical linkage barrier. Estimates from a structural marriage market model suggest assortative mating fell 61% from 1850–1870 to 1900–1920. Counterfactuals imply women’s mobility would have been far lower absent the decline in assortative mating. Had late cohorts faced early cohort sorting, the rank–rank slope between a woman’s father and husband wo..
NBER > Working PapersIncentives and Prosocial Discomfort: A Laboratory Experiment -- by Grace E. Steward, Mario Macis, Nicola Lacetera, Jeffrey P. Kahn, Vikram Chib
We conducted a within-subject laboratory experiment in which participants decided whether to experience physical discomfort for charity, with or without additional personal compensation. Acceptance decreased with greater discomfort and increased with both larger charitable donations and personal payments. We show that private monetary incentives and prosocial benefits interact in a less-than-additive way: personal compensation raises participation but attenuates the marginal impact of charitable donations, making the combined impact of private and social rewards smaller than the sum of their separate effects. We also find suggestive evidence that the sequencing of compensated and uncompensat..
NBER > Working PapersCurrency Pegs, Trade Imbalances and Unemployment: A Reevaluation of the China Shock -- by Bumsoo Kim, Marc De la Barrea, Masao Fukui
We develop a dynamic quantitative model of trade and labor adjustment, incorporating nominal wage rigidity and consumption–saving decisions, to study how China’s currency peg interacted with its rapid growth in shaping the US economy. We show that the peg temporarily boosts China’s export growth by preventing an appreciation of the Chinese currency, thereby amplifying the US labor-market consequences of the China shock. At the same time, the temporary export boom increases China’s savings and leads to a larger US trade deficit. Calibrating the model to match trade and labor-market flow data, we find that China’s currency peg played a quantitatively important role in the US manufact..
NBER > Working PapersInterest Rate Pass-Through With Adjustable Rate Mortgages -- by Manuel Adelino, Miguel A. Ferreira, Sujiao Zhao
Adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs) transmit monetary policy less directly than often assumed. We exploit quasi-experimental variation in ARM rate reset timing in Portugal—where over 92% of mortgages are indexed to Euribor—around the ECB’s 2022–2023 tightening cycle to estimate responses to mortgage payment shocks. After reset dates, mortgage renegotiations increase by 10 percentage points, lender switching by 4, partial prepayments by 5, and full prepayments by 3, offsetting about 17% of the payment increase implied by policy rates. Responses occur only immediately after resets, consistent with selective inattention, and are largest among younger, more educated, and higher-balance borr..
NBER > Working PapersDynamic Complementarity -- by James J. Heckman, Haihan Tian, Zijian Zhang, Jin Zhou
Dynamic complementarity is the concept that past investments that lead to higher stocks of skill at one age promote the growth of skills from investment at that age. We define and provide evidence on dynamic complementarity using unique Chinese data from a home visiting program for young children targeted to parents in rural China. In addition, we investigate growth in learning due to innate, parental, and environmental factors that occur in the absence of any formal intervention.
NBER > Working PapersNon-Fungible Tokens as Investment -- by William N. Goetzmann, Dong Huang, Milad Nozari
NFTs provided an extraordinary real-time laboratory for bubble economics: returns were exceptionally right-skewed, illiquidity pervaded even the most active platforms, and a handful of trades drove aggregate performance. Investors extrapolating from realized returns without recognizing selection bias and survivorship faced a substantial risk of disappointment. As our data and simulations confirm, successful NFT investing during the bubble required an almost perfect confluence of timing, liquidity, and luck.
NBER > Working PapersHierarchy and Performance Pay: Experimental Evidence from the Public Sector -- by Garance Genicot, Zahra Mansoor, Ghazala Mansuri
Frontline workers in public bureaucracies perform multidimensional tasks and rely on supervisors who both monitor performance and supply essential managerial inputs. We study how incentive design should account for these interactions using a conceptual framework and a province-wide randomized experiment with the Punjab Agriculture Extension Department in Pakistan. Across 131 tehsils, we compare: (i) an Objective pay-for-performance scheme tied to digital activity metrics; (ii) a Subjective scheme in which supervisors allocate bonuses; and (iii) a Subjective Plus scheme that preserves discretion but introduces light-touch oversight of supervisors. All three schemes increase outreach, but thro..
NBER > Working PapersA Population Perspective on the Beneficiaries of Public and Private Assistance Immediately and over the Long-term After a Major Disaster -- by Elizabeth Frankenberg, Nicholas Ingwersen, Cecep Sumantri, Duncan Thomas
Natural disasters undermine economic development, destroying lives, livelihoods, the built and natural environment. Public assistance programs follow, but knowledge of their reach, impact and evolution is limited. We address this gap, analyzing population-representative longitudinal survey data collected in Indonesia before and for two decades after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami which was followed by a large recovery program involving multiple major actors. Those who lived, at the time of the tsunami, in communities that were badly damaged, were far more likely to receive aid and received larger amounts than residents of other areas immediately after the tsunami. Those gaps were small and in..
NBER > Working PapersThreshold Disclosure in Collective Decisions -- by Luca Braghieri, Leonardo Bursztyn, Jan Fasnacht
Voting-based collective decisions are typically made either anonymously or publicly. Anonymous voting protects truthful expression but conceals individual behavior; public voting provides information about individual votes, but, when one option is socially stigmatized, it can distort participation and choices. We introduce threshold majority voting, in which voters choose a disclosure threshold determining whether and when their votes are revealed. In an experiment at UC Berkeley on the participation of transgender women in women’s sports, public voting nearly doubles abstention and reduces support for the stigmatized option. Threshold voting eliminates these distortions while revealing on..
NBER > Working PapersSeeing Green: The Effects of Financial Exposures on Support for Climate Action -- by Michelle Hanlon, Saumitra Jha, Namrata Kala, Nemit Shroff, Chagai M. Weiss
Despite the large common net benefits of climate mitigation, broad-based political consensus for large-scale policy action remains elusive. We hypothesize that financial exposure to energy stocks central to the green transition can induce learning and greater support for climate mitigation policies. We conduct a RCT which randomizes both the presence of financial market exposure to the energy sector, as well as which type of portfolio—fossil-fuel (brown) or renewable energy (green)—is given to an individual. Treatment increases support for mitigation action and intent to undertake adaptation, with positive support caused by ownership of both green and brown assets. The effects are partic..
NBER > Working PapersMass Media and Contraception Use: An Experimental Test of Modernization Theory in Burkina Faso -- by Rachel Glennerster, Joanna Murray, Victor Pouliquen
This paper tests whether the arrival of mass media triggers a decline in fertility, a central prediction of modernization theory. Using a field experiment, we vary exposure to mass media and its content in a quarter of Burkina Faso. We provide radios to 1,600 women without previous access to mass media. Half live in status quo areas and half in areas where the local radio station was randomly selected to air a science-based family planning campaign. Contrary to modernization theory and previous literature, gaining access to status quo mass media decreases contraception use by 14 percent and reinforces traditional gender norms. In contrast, receiving a radio in campaign areas boosts contracep..
NBER > Working PapersUsing Life Satisfaction Data to Measure Parents' Child Gender Preferences -- by Anna Barbeta-Margarit, Seema Jayachandran, Suanna Oh
Can questions about life satisfaction be used to measure parental preferences for daughters versus sons? Daughter preference has rarely been documented in the literature, even in matrilineal settings. One possible reason is that the commonly used measures of parental gender preference, such as fertility-stopping rules and sex ratio at birth, are ill-suited to high-fertility settings. We instead assess maternal preferences in Malawi by examining the life satisfaction of women who currently have one child, comparing those with a daughter to those with a son. We find that in matrilineal (but not patrilineal) households, having a daughter increases mothers' life satisfaction, relative to having ..
NBER > Working PapersMore Hours, More Work: Head Start Expansions Boost Maternal Employment -- by Chloe Gibbs, Esra Kose, Maria Rosales-Rueda
Women’s employment remains highly sensitive to childcare constraints, making childcare availability a critical lever for supporting mothers’ labor force attachment. We study the effects of expanded full-day programming in Head Start, using the 2016 federal funding initiative that targeted grantees with low full-day enrollment. Linking administrative program data, geo-coded center locations, and household data on employment, we estimate a difference-in-differences design by comparing mothers of young children in treated and untreated areas. The policy increased full-day enrollment by 19 percent and raised single mothers’ employment (1.9%), hours (2.5%), and earnings (6.5%). Results show..
NBER > Working PapersGender Norms and Development -- by Erica M. Field, Madeline McKelway, Alessandra Voena
Gender norms—shared expectations about appropriate behavior by gender—shape the outcomes of men and women across societies, and are correlated with GDP per capita. This chapter surveys the literature on gender norms and economic development, focusing on the pervasive and traditional ‘male breadwinner norm’ that assigns men to market work and women to domestic responsibilities. We review empirical approaches to measuring norms, including direct survey questions on attitudes, second-order beliefs about others' views, and behavioral proxies. Establishing causal effects of norms on behavior poses significant challenges, and we review a range of approaches to identify this link. We then p..
NBER > Working PapersGPT as a Measurement Tool -- by Hemanth Asirvatham, Elliott Mokski, Andrei Shleifer
We present the GABRIEL software package, which uses GPT to quantify attributes in qualitative data (e.g. how “pro innovation” a speech is). GPT is evaluated on classification and attribute rating performance against 1000+ human annotated tasks across a range of topics and data. We find that GPT as a measurement tool is accurate across domains and generally indistinguishable from human evaluators. Our evidence indicates that labeling results do not depend on the exact prompting strategy used, and that GPT is not relying on training data contamination or inferring attributes from other attributes. We showcase the possibilities of GABRIEL by quantifying novel and granular trends in Congress..
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