Horizontal inequalities

I assess the efficiency of transport networks for every country in Africa. Using spatial data from various sources, I simulate trade flows over more than 70,000 links covering the entire continent. I maximise over the space of networks and find the optimal road system for every African state. My simulations predict that Africa would gain 1.3% of total welfare from reorganising its national road systems, and 0.8% from optimally expanding it by a tenth. I then construct a dataset of local network inefficiency and find that colonial infrastructure projects significantly skew trade networks towards a sub-optimal equilibrium today. I find suggestive evidence that regional favouritism played a role sustaining these imbalances.

This paper examines how objective and subjective heterogeneity in life expectancy affects savings behavior of healthy and unhealthy people. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study, we first document systematic biases in survival beliefs across self‐reported health: those in poor health not only have a shorter actual lifespan but also underestimate their remaining life time. To gauge the effect on savings behavior and wealth accumulation, we use an overlapping‐generations model where survival probabilities and beliefs evolve according to a health and survival process estimated from data. We conclude that differences in life expectancy are important to understand savings behavior, and that the belief biases, especially among the unhealthy, can explain up to a fifth of the observed health‐wealth gap.

We use high‐frequency data on fine particulate matter air pollution (PM 2.5) at the locality level to study the effects of high pollution on daily labor supply decisions in the metropolitan area of Mexico City. We document a negative, non‐linear relationship between PM 2.5 and same‐day labor supply, with strong effects on days with extremely high pollution levels. On these days, the average worker experiences a reduction of around 7.5% of working hours. Workers partially compensate for lost hours by increasing their labor supply on days that follow high‐pollution days. We find that low‐income workers reduce their labor supply significantly less than high‐income workers. Unequal responses to high pollution along other dimensions (job quality, flexibility, gender) matter, but less than income. We provide suggestive evidence that reductions in labor supply due to high pollution are consistent with avoidance behavior.

Understanding the roots of violent and criminal behaviour is crucial for developing effective prevention and intervention strategies. A large body of research has highlighted the complex interplay between genetic, environmental, and psychological factors in explaining such behaviours. This project will focus the long-term consequences of early exposure to abuse and violence.

Our project advances the hypothesis that financial literacy could be one of the factors responsible for the gender gap in wealth, as financial knowledge helps individuals accumulate wealth, but women tend to be less financially literate than men.

In this project we study ethnic discrimination by states as an organizational problem. To do so, we have collaborated with Peru's anti-corruption agency to accurately characterize differential treatment of public officials.

Are slums stepping-stones to better lives or poverty traps? To do so, we will leverage unique administrative data from Brazil alongside an intergenerational quantitative urban model which integrates human capital investment decisions and thus social mobility.

The main focus of my research is the question of what makes some schools more effective in helping pupils to make academic progress.

Telehealth connects patients to qualified health care professionals via phone. Although its popularity dramatically increased since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is limited rigorous evidence of its impact, and no impact of its effect in low-income countries. This project investigates the long-term effects of telehealth on health services and outcomes, as well as the impact across gender, income and age groups.

We propose to study worker and firm views on and willingness to pay for the expansion of job loss insurance in Ethiopia. Job loss insurance consists of payments given to workers after job loss. We propose to interview a representative sample of firms and their workers in the capital city of Addis Ababa, the economic hub of the country.

The wider agenda that this grant is part of will contribute to this debate by studying the determinants of access to justice for employment disputes in Brazil.

The effectiveness of government policies designed to mitigate inequality depends on how firms, workers, and consumers react to those policies. The minimum wage is an example of such a policy, intended to benefit individuals at the bottom of the wage distribution. Our research provides new insights on how consumer preferences may shape the effectiveness of various policies targeting inequality.

We will investigate how individuals' self-image and self-stereotypes may prevent access to educational opportunities, leading to a perpetuation of income segregation. We will investigate self-stereotypes in the context of a preferential university admission policy in Chile targeted at disadvantaged students (PACE), which recent work has shown to suffer from low take-up.

Despite the importance of fast internet connectivity in the modern economy, there are substantial inequalities in access to this technology, both across and within countries. Overcoming these inequalities – commonly referred to as the 'Digital Divide' – have been the focus of a multitude of different policies around the world. However, our knowledge of the relative effectiveness of these policies remains limited.

One of the most enduring political economy puzzles of the past 40 years in the United States is why so many ordinary Americans support tax cuts for the rich. This paper aims to unpack this puzzle by providing new experimental evidence on what drives Americans’ preferences for cutting the top rate of federal income tax.

This paper asks what are the gaps in exposure between racial groups, and how have they evolved over time. It shows that the gap between the non-Hispanic white population and African Americans is narrowing over time, and investigates what is the specific contribution of the Clean Air Acts.‍

In the largest correspondence study conducted to date in the rental housing market, encompassing 50 major cities in the US, this paper documents patterns of discrimination across US regions, and explores relationships between discrimination, segregation, and economic opportunity.

There is a wealth of evidence showing that young people’s attitudes change when they interact with people different from themselves, but little evidence for older, established professionals. This paper aims to understand the decisions of older, established professionals because these are often the people with the power to provide opportunities to others.

Racial disparities are pervasive in many stages of the criminal justice system, but are often challenging to interpret. This paper shows how the quasi-random assignment of bail judges can be used to isolate release disparities among defendants with identical misconduct potential, a discrimination measure broadly linked to legal theories of disparate impact.

The authors ask how membership in exclusive social groups affects access to top positions in the economy and society and, if so, who can join.

The authors examine the effects of the Top Ten Percent policy, which guaranteed students in the top ten percent of their high school graduating class admission to Texas Public Universities, identifying the effects on the students who were newly admitted as a result of the policy change as well as the effects on those students who were pushed out as a result of the policy.‍

When first implemented, affirmative action policies are temporary measures to help underrepresented groups close achievement gaps. Nevertheless, successive governments tend to keep them in place. This paper investigates why this tends to be the case.

Addressing the problem of how to close the gap in university participation between rich and poor students, this paper shows that providing correct information about their university admission chances when introducing preferential admissions can lead to a pool of college entrants that is better-prepared.

Using a database of four decades of research from 1960, this study finds that economics lags far behind the disciplines of sociology and political science in publishing research related to racial differences.

This research addresses the question of how vaccines should be allocated to best effect in terms of societal welfare when individuals interact in a social network through which an infectious disease can be transmitted.