HKS Faculty Scholarship
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/3345934
This collection provides open access to peer reviewed scholarly articles authored or co-authored by faculty of the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS). All material in the repository is also harvested by search engines (such as Google Scholar) and Open Archives Initiative data harvesters.
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Publication Can Chile Escape an Inequality Trap? …And Why It Matters for Long-Term Development and Growth(Harvard Kennedy School, 2024-11) Lecaros, Ignacia; Paz Cruzat, Daniela; Pommer Muñoz, Ricardo; Tillan, Pablo; Walton, MichaelThis paper explores the nature and drivers of inequality in Chile. It is a companion paper to Lecaros et al (2023) that analyzed the widespread citizen perceptions and concerns over high inequalities and lack of fairness in Chile. A central theme is that Chile is in a form of “inequality trap”, in which reinforcing elements of the system perpetuate inequality. This is in spite of the democratic transition of 1990, significant growth, and the large expansion of social provisioning. Chile has been successful with respect to poverty: there has been a dramatic reduction in absolute income poverty, and a near-universal floor for education, health, and pensions, albeit with pervasive issues of quality. However, most dimensions of inequality are perpetuated through structural features of the socio-economic system. These include: the inter-generational transmission of financial, human, social and cultural capital—notably through the education system; concentrated ownership in the business sector; a segmented labor market; and inequalities in access to mechanisms for managing employment and health risks and income insecurity in old age. There is a polarized discourse around the “neoliberal” model, but the real issues concern how structural inequalities interact with both market and government forces. There is no panacea, but there is substantial scope for public action that can tackling unjustified inequalities while also supporting efficiency. The kinds of systemic change required echo—if in new forms—the large-scale policy and institutional changes that now-industrialized countries went through in the 20th century, that were only partially modified by the “neoliberal” reversal from around the 1980s. These were underpinned by major political conjunctures, and there is an important outstanding question as to whether Chile’s politics can support the kinds of changes needed.Publication How Big is the “Biggest Climate Spending Bill Ever?” Key Factors Influencing the Inflation Reduction Act’s Clean Energy Impacts(Harvard Kennedy School, 2024-11) Aldy, JosephThe Inflation Reduction Act could deliver more than $1 trillion in tax expenditures and outlays targeting clean energy deployment, but considerable uncertainty characterizes the economic, emissions, energy, and fiscal implications of the law. I review the features of the political system governing implementation, the regulatory system overlaying performance standards, the innovation responding to IRA incentives, and the energy networks in which IRA-supported investments operate to identify the key factors influencing IRA’s outcomes. Drawing from past research and policy experience, I illustrate how these factors could play out and how future program evaluation could reduce uncertainty and inform better climate policy.Publication AI and the Transformation of Accountability and Discretion in Urban Governance(Data-Smart City Solutions, 2024-10) Goldsmith, Stephen; Yang, Juncheng "Tony"The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in urban governance presents significant opportunities to transform decision-making and enhance accountability. With advancements in Generative AI (GenAI), AI technology has become more accessible, promoting data-driven governance approaches across various tasks. The paper highlights AI’s potential to reposition human discretion and reshape specific types of accountability, elevating the decision-making capabilities of both frontline bureaucrats and managers while ensuring ethical standards and public trust are maintained. The concept of "accountable discretion" is introduced to describe how AI can augment discretion without sacrificing accountability. Additionally, the paper discusses the critical role of city-level governments in implementing AI technologies and managing public perceptions. The discussion advocates for a human-AI partnership that enhances public service delivery and fosters accountable governance through legitimate institutional measures.Publication Strategy Is Only Partly an Illusion: “Relative Foresight” as an Objective Standard for Evaluating Foreign Policy Competence(Harvard Kennedy School, 2024-05) Friedman, Jeffrey A.; Zeckhauser, RichardForeign policy-makers must grapple with complexity, uncertainty, and subjectivity. As Betts (2000) puts it, these challenges raise the possibility that “strategy is an illusion”: that there is no reliable method for assessing skill at managing international politics. By contrast, we show that researchers can objectively evaluate a critical component of foreign policy competence using a standard we call “relative foresight,” defined as decision-makers’ ability to anticipate consequences of their choices as compared to alternative views based on similar information. Relative foresight can be measured without relying on value judgments or subjective probabilities. By contrast, other common frameworks for gauging foreign policy competence, such as comparing leaders’ behavior to the rational actor model or assessing procedural rationality, almost always leave room for reasonable disagreement. We demonstrate that relative foresight provides a useful tool for evaluating major foreign policy choices through case studies of Barack Obama’s decisions regarding the Afghan Surge and the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound. Our framework has broad implications for research on normative, prescriptive, and descriptive dimensions of foreign policy analysis.Publication Substandard housing and the risk of COVID-19 infection and disease severity: A retrospective cohort study(Elsevier BV, 2024-03) Robb, Katharine; Ahmed, Rowana; Wong, John; Ladd, Elissa; de Jong, JorritPublication Thinking about Parents: Gender and Field of Study(Harvard Kennedy School, 2024-03) Carlana, Michela; Corno, LuciaGlobally, women remain underrepresented in STEM. Our lab-in-the-field study delves into parental influence on adolescents’ perceptions of scientific versus humanistic aptitude. We find that thinking about parental recommendation affects students’ beliefs on their comparative advantage in a gender-stereotypical way. Girls are 23% less likely to choose math when they think about their mothers’ recommendation before selecting their field. The paper underscores the critical role parents play in shaping gender-specific beliefs about academic strengths, highlighting potential avenues for fostering diversity in STEM.Publication The Dollar versus the Euro as International Reserve Currencies(Harvard Kennedy School, 2024-03) Menzie, Chinn; Frankel, Jeffrey; Ito, HiroWe begin by examining determinants of aggregate foreign exchange reserve holdings by central banks (size of issuing country’s economy and financial markets, ability of the currency to hold value, and inertia). But understanding the determination of reserve holdings probably requires going beyond the aggregate numbers, instead observing individual central bank behavior, including characteristics of the holding country (bilateral trade with the issuing country, bilateral currency peg, and proxies for bilateral exposure to sanctions), in addition to the characteristics of the reserve currency issuer. On a currency-by-currency basis, US dollar holdings are somewhat well explained by several issuer characteristics; but the other currencies are less successfully explained. It may be that the results from currency-by-currency estimation are impaired by insufficient sample size. This consideration offers a motivation for pooling the data across the major currencies and imposing the constraints that reserve holdings are determined in the same way for each currency. In this setting, most economic determinants enter with significance: economic size as measured by GDP, size of financial markets as measured by foreign exchange turnover, bilateral currency peg, and bilateral trade share. However, geopolitical variables (bilateral alliance, bilateral sanctions) usually do not enter with significance.Publication Using Satellite Imagery to Detect the Impacts of New Highways: An Application to India(Harvard Kennedy School, 2024-01) Baragwanath Vogel, Kathryn; Hanson, Gordon; Khandelwal, Amit; Liu, Chen; Park, HogeunThis paper integrates daytime and nighttime satellite imagery into a spatial general-equilibrium model to evaluate the returns to investments in new motorways. Our approach has particular value in developing-country settings in which granular data on economic activity are scarce. To demonstrate our method, we use multi-spectral imagery—publicly available across the globe—to evaluate India’s varied road construction projects in the early 2000s. Estimating the model requires only remotely-sensed data, while evaluating welfare impacts requires one year of population data, which are increasingly available through public sources. We find that India’s road investments from this period improved aggregate welfare, particularly for the largest and smallest urban markets. The analysis further reveals that most welfare gains accrued within Indian districts, demonstrating the potential benefits of using of high spatial resolution of satellite images.Publication The Mismeasurement of Work Time: Implications for Wage Discrimination and Inequality(Harvard Kennedy School, 2024-01) Borjas, George; Hamermesh, Daniel S.Comparing measures of work time in the recall CPS-ASEC data with contemporaneous measures reveals many logical inconsistencies and probable errors. About 8 percent of ASEC respondents report weeks worked last year that contradict their current work histories in the Basic monthly interviews; the error rate is over 50 percent among workers who move in and out of the workforce. Over 20 percent give contradictory information about whether they usually work a full-time weekly schedule. Part of the inconsistency arises because an increasing fraction of ASEC respondents (over 20 percent by 2018) consists of people whose record was fully imputed. The levels and trends of the errors differ by gender and race, and they affect measured wage differentials between 1978 to 2018. Adjusting for the errors and imputations, gender wage gaps among all workers narrowed by 4 log points more than is commonly reported, and residual wage inequality decreased by 6 log points more. In a very carefully defined sample of full-time year-round workers, gender and racial wage differentials narrowed slightly less than previously estimated using ASEC data, but much more than indicated by commonly used estimates from CPS Outgoing Rotation Groups.Publication Homeward Bound: How Migrants Seek Out Familiar Climates(Harvard Kennedy School, 2024-01) Obolensky, Marguerite; Tabellini, Marco; Taylor, CharlesThis paper introduces the concept of “climate matching” as a driver of migration and establishes several new results. First, we show that climate strongly predicts the spatial distribution of immigrants in the US, both historically (1880) and more recently (2015), whereby movers select destinations with climates similar to their place of origin. Second, we analyze historical flows of German, Norwegian, and domestic migrants in the US and document that climate sorting also holds within countries. Third, we exploit variation in the long-run change in average US climate from 1900 to 2019 and find that migration increased more between locations whose climate converged. Fourth, we verify that results are not driven by the persistence of ethnic networks or other confounders, and provide evidence for two complementary mechanisms: climate-specific human capital and climate as amenity. Fifth, we back out the value of climate similarity by: i) exploiting the Homestead Act, a historical policy that changed relative land prices; and, ii) examining the relationship between climate mismatch and mortality. Finally, we project how climate change shapes the geography of US population growth by altering migration patterns, both historically and into the 21st century.