Research

Price-disclosure policies aim to enhance transparency and foster competition, but their effectiveness has often been undermined by low consumer access to the tools provided. To overcome this limitation, we propose and evaluate a scalable price transparency tool implemented at the point of purchase: tagging the product with the lowest regular unit price within a category in grocery stores. Using a natural field experiment spanning 35 stores over 10 weeks, we assessed the impact of this policy on consumer purchases. Preliminary results show that tagged products experienced, on average, a 15% increase in quantity sold compared to those in control stores.

This paper quantifies the impacts of hospital closures on utilization and access to care for patients and competing hospitals. We use the universe of Texas discharge data from 2006 to 2020, which include inpatient stays from all payors (uninsured, Medicare, Medicaid, and commercial), as well as inpatient diagnosis and sociodemographic characteristics (such as age, gender, and the residence’s zip code). We find that hospital closures increased travel distance by 17% in rural areas, and had much smaller effects for closures with nearby hospitals. Rural hospital closures decreased the number of patients with an inpatient stay by 16%. Analyses for surviving nearby hospitals displays increase in hospital volume, which are especially pronounced for more urban closures. More rural closures negatively affect the payor mix, with nearby hospitals treating a larger share of uninsured individuals. 

Previous research has examined the impact of financial incentives on public sector performance, but there is limited evidence on how non-financial incentives influence civil servants’ behavior—particularly in encouraging compliance with secondary tasks such as responding to freedom-of-information (FOI) requests. Although these tasks are not formally linked to performance evaluations, they are essential for promoting government transparency and building public trust. To address this gap, we conducted a field experiment in the City of Buenos Aires, Argentina, where we redesigned the FOI request notice to incorporate behavioral insights—such as salience, clarity, deterrence, and social norms— expected to increase civil servants' compliance. 

Although the intervention did not significantly increase overall compliance, it substantially shifted the timing of responses: the proportion submitted exactly on the FOI law's final deadline rose by 10.7 pp (a 200\% increase). This finding suggests that the stronger adherence to the deadlines created by making them more salient outweighed any potential reduction in response time from the other behavioral elements in the redesigned notice. We also found evidence of (i) intra-agency spillovers, showing that the notices change the civil servants' information set, and (ii) higher compliance as a result of our intervention when agencies were not simultaneously exposed to government-led training workshops. This study contributes to the literature on civil servant performance, non-financial incentives, and transparency initiatives, highlighting the potential of low-cost, easily scalable interventions to improve bureaucratic responsiveness in developing countries.

Political trust is foundational to democratic legitimacy, representative governance, and the provision of effective public policy. Various shocks can influence this trust, steering countries onto positive or negative trajectories. This study examines whether natural disasters can impact general political trust and if disaster relief efforts can mitigate these effects. We investigate the relationships between disaster, trust, and aid using novel survey data collected before and after a 7.1-magnitude earthquake struck Mexico City in September 2017. Our findings reveal that the disaster resulted in an 11% decrease in general political trust. Additionally, we demonstrate that geographical proximity to disaster relief efforts may counterbalance this decline in trust. This study contributes to the scholarship on the politics of disasters and offers policy implications, highlighting the role of disaster assistance in potentially restoring general political trust after a disaster.

We conducted an audit experiment to examine whether street vendors in Bogotá (Colombia) exert price discrimination based on buyers’ attributes, such as gender and nationality, and based on product characteristics. We exploited the seasonal demand for album stickers related to the FIFA World Cup Russia 2018. In our within-subjects design, experimenters carried out in-person audits and quoted a pre-determined list of missing stickers. They interacted with 59 sticker vendors located in five geographic clusters and collected 287 vendor–buyer interactions. We find that prices quoted to foreign buyers are higher than prices quoted to Colombian buyers. By contrast, we do neither find evidence supporting direct gender-based discrimination nor that vendors charge a higher price per sticker when the list of missing stickers is shorter. We complement the study with a qualitative analysis based on interviews that reveal vendors’ pricing strategies, their awareness of price discrimination, and the trade of counterfeits. The qualitative results suggest that price discrimination appears to be unconscious.