Research

Research Statement

    Working Papers

    1. Mechanism Design for Personalized Policy: A Field Experiment Incentivizing Exercise
      with Ariel Zucker
      June 2023, Revise and resubmit, Econometrica
      [Online Supplement] | [VoxDev Podcast]

    2. Designing Incentives for Impatient People: An RCT Promoting Exercise to Manage Diabetes.
      with Shilpa Aggarwal and Ariel Zucker
      June 2024, Rejected and resubmitted, Journal of Political Economy
      [Online Appendix] | [New York Times coverage] | [The Hindu coverage] | [Policy Brief (J-PAL)] | [Policy Brief (TCD)] | [Video Summary] | [CBR Article] | [VoxDev Podcast] | [VoxDev Article]

    3. Not Playing Favorites: Parents and the Value of Equal Opportunity.
      with James Berry and Maulik Jagnani
      March 2024, Accepted subject to code review, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics
      [Supplementary Materials] | [CBR Article] | [CBR Graphic] | [Video Summary]

    4. Using Randomized Information Shocks to Understand How Parents’ Investments Depend on Their Children’s Ability.
      April 2022

     

    Publications and Forthcoming Papers

      1. The (Lack of) Anticipatory Effects of the Social Safety Net on Human Capital Investment
        with Manasi Deshpande
        American Economic Review 113, no. 12 (2023): 3129-3172. [Lead Article.]
        [Online Appendix] | [CBR Article]

      2. Detecting Mother-Father Differences in Spending on Children: A New Approach Using Willingness-to-Pay Elicitation.
        with Seema Jayachandran
        American Economic Review: Insights 5, no. 4 (2023): 445-459.
        [BFI Summary] | [CBR Article] | [CBR Podcast] | [VoxDev Podcast]

      3. Improving Willingness-to-Pay Elicitation by Including a Benchmark Good
        with Seema Jayachandran
        American Economic Association Papers and Proceedings 112 (2022): 551-555.

      4. How Does School Accountability Affect Teachers? Evidence from New York City.
        Journal of Human Resources 55.1 (2020): 76-118.
        [Chalkbeat Article] | [CBR Article]

      5. Parents' Beliefs About Their Children's Academic Ability: Implications for Educational Investments.
        American Economic Review 109, no. 8 (2019): 2728-65.
        [Online Appendix] | [CBR Article] | [Video Summary (CBR)] | [Video Summary (Econimate)] | [Data]

      6. Governance and the Effectiveness of Public Health Subsidies.
        with Pascaline Dupas and Jonathan Robinson
        Journal of Public Economics 156 (2017): 150-169.
        [Data]

      7. Dynamic Search Models with Multiple Items.
        with Sheldon Ross
        Annals of Operations Research 288 (2020): 223-235. 

      Selected research in progress  

       

      1. Encouraging Drug Abstinence with Dynamic Incentives
        with Ariel Zucker
        Analysis in progress.
        Draft expected late fall 2024.

        Extended Abstract

        Combatting the rise of the drug epidemic is a central challenge of U.S. health care policy. A large clinical literature has demonstrated the effectiveness of offering incentive payments for healthy behaviors to those with substance use disorders, showing that incentives decrease substance use and medical costs. However, adoption of such programs has been limited, in part because most existing approaches are implemented in-person and are not scalable due to high costs and logistical complexity. This project evaluates a scalable incentive program delivered through a mobile application. The app provides a “turnkey" solution that enables remote monitoring of behavior; for example, drug tests can be administered in patients' homes, as patients submit selfie-videos showing them taking saliva drug tests, which are then verified by trained remote staff. We are evaluating impacts on patient substance use and treatment enrollment, as well as on healthcare costs and employment.

        In addition to evaluating the program, our experiment is designed to investigate a key open question in the literature: how to dynamically adjust incentives in response to behavior. One way to do so is with escalating schedules that feature incentive amounts that increase as individuals comply with the behavior, and decrease with failures to comply. Escalating incentive schedules have good dynamic incentive properties, and are frequently tested in substance-use settings. However, escalating schedules may be poorly targeted, paying the largest incentives to individuals who are not struggling to abstain, and offering the smallest incentives to those who are struggling. De-escalating schedules can address the poor targeting of escalating schedules. De-escalating schedules feature incentive payments that increase when individuals fail to comply with the behavior. They hence offer larger incentives to those “at the bottom of the distribution” (i.e., who are struggling the most to abstain), which is a desirable feature in the addiction context, as the costs of substance abuse may be convex. While de-escalating schedules create a perverse incentive to “shirk” early on, the magnitude of this effect may be small if participants are not very forward-looking. Our experiment will test both escalating and de-escalating incentive schedules to shed light on their cost-effectiveness and distributional properties. We also use experimental variation to directly test whether participants respond to dynamic incentives (e.g., whether they respond differently to escalating vs. de-escalating schedules conditional on the reward for current behavior).


      2. The Dignity of Work and the Social Safety Net
        with Manasi Deshpande
        Pilot August 2024.
        Main experiment September-November 2024.
        Draft expected early winter 2025.

        Abstract

        Work may have important non-monetary benefits, such as increasing self-esteem and decreasing loneliness and depression. These benefits could be particularly large for recipients of government benefit programs, which might otherwise reduce self-esteem and self-worth. The non-monetary benefits of work could thus serve to offset the work disincentives typically associated with the social safety net, as individuals receiving benefits might maintain a desire to work regardless of the financial incentive to do so. To test the hypothesis that receiving government benefits affects the non-monetary value of work, we will use quasi-experimental variation (through an examiner leniency design) in government benefit receipt among a sample of young adults who received Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits as youth. All youth who receive SSI must re-qualify for benefits when they turn 18; we will compare young adults who were assigned to examiners with a higher versus lower propensity to remove participants from benefits to isolate quasi-exogenous variation in adult benefit receipt. To measure the perceived benefits of work, we will offer and measure take-up of work opportunities, varying features such as payment (including unpaid vs. paid opportunities), how social the job is, how skill-building it is, etc.


      3. Getting Educated to Stay at Home? Female Labor Force Participation in India
        with Marianne Bertrand and Heather Schofield
        Data collection to be completed by October 2024.
        Abstract

        Female labor force participation (FLFP) in India is very low. Moreover, it has been falling over the last 20 years even while female education has been rising rapidly, and it is lower among women with secondary education than women with lower levels of education. This paper examines whether higher educational attainment may actually decrease FLFP in India. We use the openings of secondary and tertiary educational institutions to instrument for educational attainment and explore the differences in the effects of expanded access for women versus men. We also explore channels for education to affect FLFP in India, including through changes in marriage market matching and the gender norms of the matched family, the timing of marriage, the types of work that are deemed appropriate or acceptable, and the degree to which women desire to emulate the upper castes, which have much lower rates of FLFP.


      4. Expanding Access to Health Care: Evaluating Rural Centers and Price Discrimination Strategies in Kenya
        with Isabelle Cohen and Seema Jayachandran
        Pilot summer 2024.
        Abstract

        Many people live so far from a government health center that they cannot effectively access primary health care. OneDay Health's cost-effective health center model provides high-quality care to these remote communities. A health center is set up in a rented facility, and a local nurse is empowered to treat a range of conditions. By launching new health centers, we will evaluate the impacts on health and wellbeing through a randomized trial. Additionally, we will investigate the effects of different pricing strategies by randomizing whether clinics use uniform pricing or a second-degree price discrimination strategy. The latter involves offering discounted care during an early-morning time that is inconvenient for most. Generally, charging user fees can help rural health centers remain sustainable, but may decrease access for the poorest individuals who cannot afford even below-marginal-cost fees. Implementing price discrimination may enable health centers to stay financially viable while still serving the poorest consumers.


      5. The Non-Working Wife As a Status Symbol: A Field Experiment in India
        with Suanna Oh, Heather Sarsons, and Sneha Subramanian
        Pilot summer 2024.

      6. Simplifying Screening Contracts for Effective Sorting
        with Seema Jayachandran
        Pilot summer 2024.

      7. Peace Through Prosperity? Evidence from a High-Tech Entrepreneurship RCT in the Palestinian West Bank
        with Daniel Fehder, Yael Hochberg, Joshua Krieger, and Daniel Lee
        Data collection complete.

      8. Debiasing Peoples’ Overoptimism About Their Health Risk
        with Seema Jayachandran and Ariel Zucker
        Data collection complete.

      9. Missing Missing Girls: The Impact of an Extra Child
        with Seema Jayachandran

      10. Broadening Women's Job Search to Improve Their Employment
        with So Yoon Ahn and Benjamin Feigenberg
        Project funded.