Several countries, including Australia, have a means-tested public age pension. Means testing the age pension can reduce the overall fiscal burden relative to a universal pension, but can also distort households’ incentives to work and save. Policymakers can influence the sizes of these...

This paper develops and analyzes a model of international trade comprising multiproduct firms that can produce a range of product varieties distinguished by quality. First, it analyses the within-firm distribution of product quality and argues that firms’ export decisions are sensitive to...

This article uses satellite data to estimate the effectiveness of government protection on forested land across the globe over 2000-2018. Since deforestation is a significant contributor to precipitous declines in biodiversity, spillover of zoonotic viruses and climate change, measuring and...

We study the impact of child work on cognitive development in four Low- and Middle-Income Countries. We advance the literature by using cognitive test scores collected regardless of school attendance. We also address a key gap in the literature by controlling for children’s complete time...

We study a model of the rise and fall of illiberal democracies. Voters value both liberty and economic security. In times of crisis, voters may prefer to elect an illiberal government that, by violating constitutional constraints, offers greater economic security but less liberty. However,...

In the United States, the boundaries of congressional districts are often drawn by political partisans. In the resulting partisan gerrymandering problem, a designer partitions voters into equal-sized districts with the goal of winning as many districts as possible. When the designer can...

We consider a standard persuasion problem in which the receiver’s action and the state of the world are both one-dimensional. Fully characterizing optimal signals when utilities are non-linear is a daunting task. Instead, we develop a general approach to understanding a key qualitative...

We construct a Cournot model in which firms have uncertainty about the total number of firms in the industry. We model such an uncertainty as a Poisson game and we characterize the set of equilibria after deriving some novel properties of the Poisson distribution. When the marginal cost is...

Predicting the impact of climate change on crop yield is difficult, in part because the production function mapping weather to yield is high dimensional and nonlinear. We compare three approaches to predicting yields: (i) deep neural networks (DNNs), (ii) traditional panel-data models, and (iii)...

Using data on essentially every US Supreme Court decision since 1946, we estimate a model of peer effects on the Court. We consider both the impact of justice ideology and justice votes on the votes of their peers. To identify these peer effects we use two instruments that generate plausibly...