Allowed
Who Participates in Local Government? Evidence from Meeting Minutes
Katherine Levine Einstein, Maxwell Palmer & David Glick
Perspectives on Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Scholars and policymakers have highlighted institutions that enable community participation as a potential buffer against existing political inequalities. Yet, these venues may be biasing policy discussions in favor of an unrepresentative group of individuals. To explore who participates, we compile a novel data set by coding thousands of instances of citizens speaking at planning and zoning board meetings concerning housing development. We match individuals to a voter file to investigate local political participation in housing and development policy. We find that individuals who are older, male, longtime residents, voters in local elections, and homeowners are significantly more likely to participate in these meetings. These individuals overwhelmingly (and to a much greater degree than the general public) oppose new housing construction. These participatory inequalities have important policy implications and may be contributing to rising housing costs.
First-Person FOIA
Margaret Kwoka
Yale Law Journal, June 2018, Pages 2204-2269
Abstract:
The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) embodies a radical notion. By allowing any person to request any records for any reason, it was meant to open up government for all to see. Investigative journalists, watchdog groups, and concerned citizens would all jump at the chance to hold officials accountable and unearth secretive government actions. The numbers seem to support a FOIA success story: after all, the government now consistently receives over 700,000 FOIA requests a year. As it turns out, however, it is not journalists and nonprofits who are making hundreds of thousands of requests. In my previous article, FOIA, Inc., I documented how commercial requesters have dominated the FOIA landscape at some agencies, particularly large regulatory agencies. In doing so, they have transformed FOIA into a sort of giveaway to businesses, to the potential detriment of those whose requests promote government oversight. This Article reveals the unexpected uses of FOIA at another group of agencies, particularly those focused on law enforcement and benefits provision. At these agencies, FOIA requests are dominated by individuals seeking records about themselves: for example, their own medical files, immigration records, or investigation files. In fact, these requesters — whom I call first-person FOIA requesters — appear to vastly outnumber commercial requesters. At the Department of Homeland Security alone, more than 200,000 first-person requests are filed each year. Using original datasets and interviews with requesters, this Article documents the extent and nature of first-person FOIA requesting at seven federal agencies. It also demonstrates that, while these requests may serve vital private interests for each requester, they largely do not serve the public’s interest in knowing what its government is up to. These accounts not only suggest that FOIA may be suffering under the weight of unintended uses, but also reveal how first-person requesters are often ill-served when they are forced to use FOIA simply because no good alternative exists. Moreover, it reveals how agencies themselves duplicate work and hinder their own objectives by requiring that first-person information needs be met through FOIA. Important conclusions follow from these insights. Agencies should meet first-person information needs head-on by designing sensible processes for obtaining commonly needed personal information. Alleviating the need to resort to FOIA would provide benefits that inure to individuals, agencies, and the public’s interest in transparency.
Regulation and investment in the U.S. telecommunications industry
George Ford
Applied Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Reversing a two-decade deregulatory trend of telecommunications services, in 2010 U.S. regulators embarked on an aggressive regulatory agenda including, but not limited to, the regulation of high-speed Internet services under the auspices of net neutrality using utility-style regulations codified in the 1930s. Firms, regulators, and analysts feared a reduction in capital spending, contradicting established policy goals of expanding Internet availability and adoption. In this article, a difference-in-differences regression model augmented with randomization inference is applied to government data on capital spending in telecommunications. Large negative effects on investment are found. The estimated effects are robust across changes in estimation periods and model specifications, and multiple tests of the model’s assumptions lend credibility to the findings.
Nudges that hurt those already hurting – distributional and unintended effects of salience nudges
Linda Thunström, Ben Gilbert & Chian Jones Ritten
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, September 2018, Pages 267-282
Abstract:
Nudges are becoming increasingly popular policy tools. Yet, distributional effects of nudges are largely unknown. We first design an economic laboratory experiment to examine the incidence of an opportunity cost reminder nudge (a salience nudge) designed to curb spending, while accounting for heterogeneity in emotional responses – specifically the pain of paying. Pain of paying is optimal for ‘unconflicted’ consumers, but too low for ‘spendthrifts’ and too high for ‘tightwads’, causing sub-optimal spending. Our empirical results imply the nudge increases pain of paying for tightwads, thereby reducing spending by tightwads, who already spend too little, while it entirely fails to reduce the spending of those who would have benefited from a spending reduction (spendthrifts). Overall, the nudge therefore might reduce consumer welfare. We next examine if the adverse impact of the opportunity cost reminder nudge is explained by a general tendency for all nudges to exacerbate peoples’ underlying spending preferences. We specifically test whether a salience nudge designed to boost spending correspondingly adversely affects spendthrifts? We unexpectedly find that subjects perceive the spending booster nudge as a “spending reminder”, which again, reduces spending by tightwads only, while not affecting spending by the other consumer types. Our results highlight two important aspects of salience nudges – given the complexity of consumer emotions and information processing, salience nudges can have undesired welfare effects, and the direction of their impact may be the opposite of what was intended.
Worker Investments in Safety, Workplace Accidents, and Compensating Wage Differentials
José Guardado & Nicolas Ziebarth
International Economic Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
The theory of compensating wage differentials (CWDs) assumes that firms supply and workers demand workplace safety, predicting a positive relationship between accident risk and wages. This paper allows for safety provision by workers, which predicts a countervailing negative relationship between individual risk and wages: firms pay higher wages for higher safety‐related productivity. Using National Longitudinal Survey of Youth panel data and data on fatal and nonfatal accidents, our precise CWDs imply a value of a statistical injury of $45.4 thousand and a value of a statistical life of $6.3 million. In line with our model, individual risk and wages are negatively correlated.
Land-Use Regulations, Property Values, and Rents: Decomposing the Effects of the California Coastal Act
Christopher Severen & Andrew Plantinga
Journal of Urban Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Land-use regulations can lower real estate prices by imposing costs on property owners, but may raise prices by restricting supply and generating amenities. We study the effects of the California Coastal Act, one of the nation’s most stringent land-use regulations, on the price and rental income of multifamily housing. The Coastal Act applies to a narrow section of the California coast, allowing us to compare properties just on either side of the jurisdictional boundary. The setting is advantageous for the study of land-use regulation: boundary location is plausibly exogenous, which we confirm with historical data on boundary placement, and orthogonal to other jurisdictional divisions. We decompose the effects of the regulation into (i) a neighbor effect, the value of restrictions on adjacent properties, (ii) a local effect, which reflects the net effect of own-lot restrictions and the neighbor effect, and (iii) an external effect, the value of amenities generated by restrictions on all properties within the regulated area. Our analysis of multifamily housing prices reveals local and external effects of approximately +6% and +13%, respectively. We use data on rental income to estimate a zero neighbor effect. Together with evidence on building ages and assessed building and land values, this suggests that property owners anticipate that the Coastal Act will provide protection from undesirable development on adjacent properties, even though material differences have not yet appeared.
Do MSRPs decrease prices?
Babur De los Santos, In Kyung Kim & Dmitry Lubensky
International Journal of Industrial Organization, July 2018, Pages 429-457
Abstract:
The nature of manufacturer’s suggested retail prices (MSRPs) and whether they increase or decrease prices is poorly understood. We exploit a policy experiment in which a ban on MSRPs was imposed and then lifted a year later, and show that MSRPs decrease prices by 3.6 percent on average. There is no indication that MSRPs lowered prices by acting as binding price ceilings. Instead we find suggestive evidence that MSRPs are aimed at consumers, possibly providing a benchmark by which consumers can evaluate prices.
The Impact of Quality Rating and Improvement Systems on Families’ Child Care Choices and the Supply of Child Care Labor
Chris Herbst
Labour Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Quality Rating and Improvement Systems (QRIS) are increasingly deployed by U.S. states to monitor and improve the quality of non-parental child care settings. By making information on program quality accessible to the public, QRIS attempts to alter parental preferences for quality-related attributes and encourage competition between providers. This paper draws on a variety of datasets to empirically characterize the way in which families and providers respond to the enactment of QRIS. Specifically, it exploits the differential timing in states’ QRIS roll-out to examine two sets of outcomes: (i) families’ child care choices and maternal employment and (ii) the supply and compensation of child care labor. Estimates from difference-in-differences models reveal several noteworthy findings. First, although QRIS induces families to shift from parental to non-parental care, economically disadvantaged families are more likely to use informal care, while their advantaged counterparts are more likely to use formal care. Second, QRIS increases the supply of high-skilled labor, particularly within the center-based sector. Third, all but the most highly-skilled child care workers experience rising compensation levels but also greater turnover. Finally, states that administer a wage compensation program alongside their QRIS experience larger increases in child care supply and compensation as well as lower turnover rates than states operating a QRIS in isolation.
Certification, Reputation and Entry: An Empirical Analysis
Xiang Hui et al.
NBER Working Paper, August 2018
Abstract:
Markets with asymmetric information will often employ third-party certification labels to distinguish between higher and lower quality transactions, yet little is known about the effects of certification policies on the evolution of markets. How does the stringency in quality certification affect the intensity and composition of entry, incumbents' reactions, and market outcomes? We use detailed administrative data and exploit a policy change on eBay to explore how a more selective certification policy affects entry and behavior across a rich set of online market segments. We find that after the policy change, entry increases and does so more intensely in markets where it is harder to become certified. The average quality of entrants also increases more in the more affected markets, while the quality distribution of entrants exhibits fatter tails ex post. Finally, some incumbents increase the quality of their service to maintain certification and deliver higher quality after the policy change. The results help inform the design of certification policies in electronic and other markets with asymmetric information.