Partner Search and Demographics: The Marriage Squeeze in India

If women marry younger than men, increased population growth causes a sur- plus of women in the marriage market. This paper introduces search frictions into a matching model with transferable utility and age-dependent match payos to study if this so-called marriage squeeze has caused a dowry \in ation" in India. Using data from Karnataka it is shown that the observed shifts in the age distributions and sex ratio of unmarried men and women during the marriage squeeze lead to higher dowries conditional on the partners' ages. A GMM estimate of the model parameters suggests that average dowries have increased as well.#

Contracts for Agents with Biased Beliefs: Some Theory and an Experiment

This paper experimentally tests the predictions of a principal-agent model in which the agent has biased beliefs about his ability. Overcondent workers are found to earn lower wages than undercondent ones because they overestimate their expected payo, and principals adjust their oers accordingly. Moreover, the prot-maximizing contract distorts eort by varying incentives according to self-condence, although only the most successful principals use this strategy. These ndings have implications for the labor market; in particular, self-condence is often correlated with gender, implying that principals would prefer to hire men over women simply because they are more overcondent.#

Credit Constraints and the Measurement of Time Preferences

Incentivized experiments are commonly used to estimate marginal rates of intertemporal substitution (MRS) in the lab and in the field in order to make inferences about individual time preferences. This paper considers an integrated model of behavior in which individuals are subject to financial shocks and credit constraints, and take those into account when making experimental choices. The model shows that measured MRS depends on the individual’s effective interest rate which is equal to the relative marginal utility of current and future consumption. Experimental responses should therefore be correlated with other variables that describe the subject’s financial situation, like savings and shocks to income and consumption. We test the model using a new a panel data set from Mali and find evidence for such effects. Our results imply that the relationship between experimentally elicited MRS and time preferences is not straightforward. However, measured MRS can be useful in determining the importance of different types of financial shocks to the household

Incentives for Accurate Diagnosis: Improving Health Care Quality in Mali

This data on doctor-patient interactions and malaria treatment was collected for the project "Incentives for Accurate Diagnosis: Improving Health Care Quality in Mali" funded by DfiD/ESRC Development Frontier Award ES/N00583X/1

A revolution in economics? It’s just getting started…

We have each experienced thrills and pain while supporting the mission of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, which facilitated many of the experiments described in the 2019 Nobel Prize citation. J-PAL in many ways seeks to fulfill what Angrist and Pischke called the “Credibility Revolution in Empirical Economics.” Even though (or perhaps because) we have conducted many RCTs, we share many of the concerns that critics have highlighted: high cost, long time lags, and limits to generalizability. Yet, we are quite optimistic that the impact and reach of experimental work in economics and policy will only grow. We see two complementary developments which will make RCTs cheaper, faster, larger, and ultimately substantially more insightful. First, a new research literature seeks to improve the design of experiments, and what we can learn from them, through improved methodologies, meta-analyses, and improved understanding of heterogeneity. Second, the rise of administrative data rapidly opens new frontiers of investigation, in particular the possibility of ‘closed-loop’ data environments, in which interventions can be delivered and evaluated digitally, often on very large samples, and often iteratively

That Smarts!: Smartphones and Child Injuries

Abstract From 2005 to 2012, injuries to children under five increased by 10%. Using the expansion of ATT's 3G network, I find that smartphone adoption has a causal impact on child injuries. This effect is strongest amongst children ages 0-5, but not children ages 6-10, and in activities where parental supervision matters. I put this forward as indirect evidence that this increase is due to parents being distracted while supervising children, and not due to increased participation in accident-prone activities