Work in progress
``More than Average Income? Preferences for Income Equality and Mobility Statistics,'' joint with Kenneth A. Shores, revision requested at The Review of Economics and Statistics.
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To describe preferences for income mobility/equality, we generate statistics that can be interpreted as marginal rates of substitution and converted to willingness-to-pay (WTP). All else constant, U.S. residents are willing to pay $2,736 dollars to increase income equality 10 percentiles and $1,778 dollars to increase income mobility 10 percentiles. Liberals' WTP for income equality is two times larger than conservatives'; there are no significant differences in the WTP for mobility. Educational attainment, income, ideology, and beliefs about upward mobility negatively predict a WTP for income equality; the only predictor of the WTP for mobility is gender.
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``Over-Reporting Social Services: Evidence from School Audits in Chile,'' joint with Eduardo Fajnzylber, submitted.
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Public subsidies incentivize private institutions to provide social services; however, incentives can elicit rent extraction activities. This paper studies such phenomena in Chile, where private and public schools receive attendance-based subsidies. Analyzing data from school-reported attendance against unique audit data, we find that pre-K and K12 institutions over-report attendance by approximately 11% and 2.5%, respectively. We identify for-profit motives and low-SES student proportion as significant predictors of over-reporting. Achievement and expenditure data show that low-achievement for-profit institutions over-report for rent extraction purposes. Our results suggest a problematic link between profit motives and public subsidies, resulting in inefficiency in social services.
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``Analysis of School Leadership Recruitment,'' joint with Christopher Candelaria, Sergio Múñoz, and Gonzalo Valdés U.