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Forthcoming in AEJ: Applied Economics: "Time Is Not Money: An Experiment with Community Contribution Requirements in Cash and Labour" by Serena Cocciolo, Selene Ghisolfi, Ahasan Habib, and Anna Tompsett.

(Forthcoming Article) - Capital resale frictions, by increasing liquidity risk and decreasing collateral values, can depress investment and amplify capital misallocation in the entrepreneur sector. I provide qualitative evidence using investment data from startups, and quantify these channels using a calibrated entrepreneurial choice model with production risk, financial frictions, and capital resale frictions. I decompose the effects coming from production risk, financial frictions, and resale frictions. I find that resale frictions increase average excess returns by 2.13 pp, and reduce aggregate productivity by 12.7%. The impact of resale frictions are substantially larger than financial frictions or production risk.

(Forthcoming Article) - We study a new market design for K-12 broadband procurement that switched from school-specific bidding to a system that bundled schools into groups. Using an event study approach, we estimate that this program reduced internet prices by $9.17 (55%) per Mbps per month while increasing bandwidth by 380.06 Mbps (136%). These benefits resulted primarily from mitigating exposure risk—the possibility that providers win too few contracts to cover their fixed infrastructure costs. We document participants’ potential savings of $1.61–$3.48 million relative to their $2.47 million E-rate subsidy.

(Forthcoming Article) - Digital platforms reduce geographic frictions, enabling better matching between service providers and users. I quantify reallocation gains in Swedish online healthcare, using nationwide time-conditional random assignment between patients and physicians. Matching high-risk patients with doctors effective at reducing Emergency Room visits lowers such visits by 4.4% (s.e. 1.3); reallocations also reduce counter-guideline antibiotics by 3.1% (1.4). I find limited trade-offs in matching: horizontal differentiation among doctors and varied patient needs allow improvement in multiple outcomes simultaneously. Efficiency-enhancing reallocations also affect equity. The findings highlight the potential for care reorganization aligning provider heterogeneity with patient needs when geographic constraints are lifted.

(Forthcoming Article) - Networks play a key role in information diffusion. Yet, the impact of information on network formation is not well understood. We conducted a randomized experiment in Malawian boarding secondary schools, providing one fifth of students with exclusive access to an online information source. Using a complete panel of detailed network data, we show that changes in information access affect network structure, as students form and maintain strategic links. At the endline, treated students are more well-connected than control students. We calibrate and simulate a model of strategic network formation to demonstrate implications for network-based targeting, information diffusion, academic welfare and inequality.

(Forthcoming Article) - Cross-country disparities in collateral technologies alone can account for large capital flows among mature economies, and allow the most advanced country to run a permanent trade deficit. When the collateral technology advantage is in creating negative beta (super safe) financial assets backed by positive beta assets, a Global Collateral Cycle emerges, with pro-cyclical gross and net flows and increased global asset price volatility. The supply of super safe assets is necessarily curtailed in downturns, providing a complementary (supply) channel to the flight to safety (demand) channel for explaining why US safe asset prices rise during crises.

(Forthcoming Article) - We study the relationship between corporate income taxation and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in the U.S. We show that CO2-intensive firms benefit more from the tax advantage of debt, and pay lower income taxes on their capital income. Building on these new facts, we provide evidence that a cut in the corporate income tax rate leads to a larger expansion of clean firms. We develop a multi-sector general equilibrium model that accounts for our evidence and quantify the impact of corporate tax reforms on aggregate emissions. A policy that eliminates the tax advantage of debt could reduce aggregate emissions without affecting GDP.

(Forthcoming Article) - This paper shows that effective reskilling substantially reduces antidepressant use among injured workers and their partners. Exploiting institutional variation in access to higher education following work accidents in Denmark, we find that reskilling prevents antidepressant use for one in three participants, with partner spillovers of comparable magnitude. These effects emerge while workers are in school—prior to any income gains—and coincide with increased partner employment. Assuming a one-to-one mapping between prescriptions and depressive episodes, the value of these health improvements adds 50% to the direct labor earnings gains from reskilling; partner earnings gains add another 33%.

(Forthcoming Article) - Community contribution requirements are a ubiquitous but un- derstudied feature of projects to provide local public goods in de- veloping countries. A randomized experiment in rural Bangladesh shows that cash contribution requirements strongly reduce take-up and impact of safe drinking water infrastructure projects, compared to a contribution waiver. Labour contribution requirements do not, despite having similar value when priced at the market wage, be- cause most households value their time below the market wage and because labour contributions appear less costly to coordinate. Nei- ther contribution requirement increases cost-effectiveness once we account for coordination and monitoring costs, undermining a cen- tral rationale for their imposition.