SEMINARIOS Y WORKSHOPS

Public sector jobs have regulated pay structures that commonly tie wage growth to promotions. This paper leverages novel data and quasi experimental variation in the allocation of promotions to examine how credit utilization and household labor supply respond to wage increases. We exploit the sharp discontinuity from an exambased promotion policy to compare the outcomes of nearly identical police officers in Colombia before and after they receive a 25 percent pay raise. Four years after promotion, officers accumulate debt for about 160 percent of their annual pay increase. This response is driven by mortgages and personal loans, two types of installment credit. As a result, officers need only one-third of the raise to repay their quarterly financial obligations. Using household data, we show a significant reduction in wives’ employment after their police husbands are promoted. This effect is more pronounced among couples with school-age children, but cannot be explained by changes in fertility decisions. Our findings suggest that households rely on credit instruments to adjust their time and consumption allocation in response to a pay increase.

I design and conduct an online hiring experiment with a geographically representative U.S. sample, where White employers decide whether to hire White, Black, and Hispanic workers. In the experiment, guided by a Bayesian framework featuring asymmetric updating and multiple worker groups, I manipulate the worker groups available for hire. I employ the experiment first to identify and compare biases in beliefs about productivity and hiring against Black and Hispanic workers. I then investigate whether hiring experiences with Black (Hispanic) workers have positive or negative spillovers on beliefs about productivity and the hiring of Hispanic (Black) workers, and whether the answer differs by minority. Results from the experiment show that employers are biased against both Black and Hispanic workers, with the bias being stickier for Hispanic workers. I find positive hiring spillovers from Hispanic to Black workers only: while employers are more likely to hire Black workers after hiring experiences with Hispanic workers, their hiring decisions regarding Hispanic workers are unaffected by previous hiring of Black workers. I provide suggestive evidence that the latter finding is driven by a more pronounced bias against Hispanic workers.

Appropriate decisions depend on information gathered beforehand. We study the problem faced by a decision-maker who can only access verifiable information through an agent who prefers a particular decision. In a dynamic framework with exogenous decision timing, we analyze when to request evidence optimally and how it affects allocational efficiency. The optimal mechanism without transfers implements the efficient allocations if and only if the information acquisition costs are low for both parties. Otherwise, the decision-maker commits to distortions (from the static optimal choice) to incentivize information acquisition. Optimal evidence acquisition exhibits a bias: it tends to request additional evidence when the current one favors the agent’s preferred choice. Applications include optimal testing policies for patients awaiting transplants and the optimal promotion of employees subject to moral hazard.

This study explores how, when income inequality is perceived to arise from both effort and luck, excuses (self-serving belief distortions) can influence acceptance of inequality. In a controlled laboratory setting involving a real-effort task, participants make redistribution decisions between themselves and a partner. The study varied the degree of uncertainty about the role of effort and luck in determining initial earnings endowments. Belief elicitations indicate that increased uncertainty caused participants to be more likely to attribute their partner’s success to luck. Furthermore, the use of excuses (attributing others’ outcomes to luck) was found to reduce willingness to redistribute earnings to their partners. These findings highlight how excuses about the role of luck versus effort may contribute to the persistence of inequality even if many individuals have meritocratic principles, and how variation in the degree of uncertainty about the causes of inequality, across individuals or societies, may contribute to different degrees of biased beliefs and inequality. The paper also shows evidence of excuses in another sense: According to a structural model of fairness views, individuals tend to adopt a fairness view – egalitarian, meritocratic, or libertarian – to justify an allocation that benefits themselves.

Under what conditions do distinct groups facing shared risks cooperate, and how does the presence or absence of group divisions influence this cooperation? Using a new laboratory experiment, we investigate how different forms of communication impact cooperative behavior. We compare three communication structures: within-group communication, intergroup (society-wide) communication, and a dual structure that allows both types of communication simultaneously. Our findings reveal two main results. First, divided societies with identity-based group distinctions show higher levels of cooperation compared to undivided societies, suggesting that group identity can enhance collective action. Second, in divided societies, we find that within-group communication promotes stronger cooperation than intergroup com- munication. One possible explanation is that participants’ interventions to encourage specific behaviors were more often directed at individual group members during within-group communication. These findings contribute to our understanding of how communication structures and group identity shape coordination efforts, providing insights relevant to managing shared resources and addressing environmental challenges.

This paper introduces a time-series methodology to quantify heterogeneity in the dynamics of the unconditional temperature distribution and its association with climate drivers. By recognizing that temperature unconditional quantiles represent temperatures at different locations—or seasons—, I establish an equivalence between a structural One-Dimensional Energy Balance Model (1D-EBM) and a statistical reduced-form Vector Error Correction Model (VECM) for a range of distributional characteristics of temperature—mean and quantiles—and total radiative forcing, including radiative forcing from anthropogenic greenhouse gases (GHGs). The VECMis estimated employing time-series methods agnostic about the type of trends (stochastic or deterministic) in climate data, and is utilized to produce the following outcomes of practical interest for economic analyses: i) estimation of long-run responses of temperature distribution to changes in GHGs, ii) long-term temperature density forecasts, iii) conditional projections of temperature distribution under different scenarios of future GHGs emissions, iv) extraction of the common-trending component behind the existing warming trend, and v) identification of distributional climate shocks and impulse-response analysis. An empirical study using station-level temperature records (1880–2021) reveals strong climate heterogeneity at global, hemispheric, and continental (Europe) scales, with important potential implications for damage analysis and integrated assessment modeling. A deeper understanding of global warming dynamics is crucial for informing more efficient adaptation and mitigation policies.

This paper examines whether a gender gap exists in how men and women attribute success and failure to themselves or others, and if these differences persist under strategic incentives.
In a series of online experiments, participants justify outcomes in a knowledge quiz, where responsibility can be attributed to their own ability or another’s, and individual contributions are unobservable. I find that women are more likely to blame themselves for failures and less likely to take credit for successes compared to men, even after accounting for performance and beliefs. This gender gap in attribution also persists when strategic incentives are introduced by sharing attributions with a potential employer, and it becomes stronger among top performers. The gap also affects hiring decisions and earnings, with employers favoring those who shift blame and take credit. Finally, when workers’ gender is revealed, the earnings gap reverses, driven by preferential treatment for hiring women rather than anticipated attribution differences.

The 17,000th Dollar General store opened in 2020, as the company, which has locations in 46 states, added 1,000 new stores in 14 months. Dollar General is a low-cost retailer that makes shopping convenient by utilizing small stores, rather than following the traditional big box approach. Using the National Establishment Time Series dataset (NETS) for the state of Florida between 1990 and 2019, we use the difference in timing of Dollar General openings to investigate its effect on small businesses nearby. Specifically, we quantify the effects on nearby firm revenue, employment, and likelihood of exit. The unique nature of the NETS data allows us to focus on the impacts of businesses in narrower setting and determine a treatment group of firms within 0.5-mile radius, rather than using pre-defined geo-political boundaries. Our results suggest Dollar General can drive some firms out of business but provide positive spillovers in terms of revenues and employment for the ones that survive. These results are heterogenous across industries and retail subgroups.