Economics

Many instrumental variables applications specify a single Bernoulli treatment. But instruments may change outcomes through multiple pathways or by varying treatment intensity. Lottery instruments that boost charter school enrollment, for instance, may affect outcomes by lengthening time enrolled in a charter school and by moving students between charter schools of different types. We analyze the identification problem such scenarios present in a framework that generalizes the always-taker/never-taker/complier partition of treatment response types to cover a wide range of multinomial and ordered treatments with heterogenous potential outcomes. This framework yields novel estimators in which a..

Extreme temperatures threaten agriculture and exacerbate global food insecurity, yet their direct impact on dietary choices remains poorly understood. We provide novel evidence of how short-term exposures to extreme temperatures affect macronutrient intake in China. We show that both hot and cold weather elevate high-fat diet risks. In particular, hot weather reduces carbohydrate and protein consumption but not fat intake, while cold weather increases all nutrient intake, particularly fats. Temperature-induced dietary changes are shaped primarily by physiological responses to thermal stress, whereas physical activities demonstrate little effect. Technologies that improve indoor thermal comfo..

Do the returns to quality upgrading pass through supply chains to primary producers? We explore this question in the context of Colombia’s coffee sector, in which market outcomes depend on interactions between farmers, exporters (which operate mills), and international buyers, and contracts are for the most part not legally enforceable. We formalize the hypothesis that quality upgrading is subject to a key hold-up problem: producing high-quality beans requires long-term investments by farmers, but there is no guarantee that an exporter will pay a quality premium when the beans arrive at its mills. An international buyer with sufficient demand for high-quality coffee can solve this problem ..

Household finance research has come of age during the early 21st Century by exploiting computational advances for solving complex optimization problems, the availability of large administrative datasets, the development of microeconometrics for causal inference, and new paradigms in behavioral economics. We discuss the distinctive concerns of household finance in relation to other fields of financial economics, and we outline directions for the future growth of the field.

Broadband internet has become a critical component of U.S. infrastructure, but policymakers are increasingly concerned that the widespread adoption of this technology has adversely affected adolescent mental health. To test this hypothesis, we use 2009–2019 National and State Youth Risk Behavior Survey data and leverage the nationwide rollout of broadband internet. First, we show that adolescents in states with greater broadband internet access reported spending more time online. Next, we find that a one-standard-deviation increase in broadband internet access was associated with a 9.3–16.5-percent increase in adolescent suicide ideation. While we document increases in suicide ideation f..

Employing large language models to analyze official documents, we construct a comprehensive record of daily changes in de jure restrictions on cross-border flows worldwide since the 1950s. Our analysis uncovers the wide array of instruments used to regulate cross-border financial flows and documents their evolving prevalence over the past seven decades. The fine granularity of the new measures allows us to characterize cross-country and time-series variation across eight categories of restrictions, further distinguishing by flow, direction, instrument type, and overall policy stance. We exploit the high frequency nature of the new data to document novel patterns in the use of these restricti..