Evan Soltas

This paper explores a classic rationale for why some transfer programs require take-up rather than enroll people automatically: Take-up may be advantageously "self-targeted" on characteristics that cannot be used as eligibility criteria. We find self-targeting on consumption and lifetime income in eight U.S. transfers, as recipients are needier on average than observably-similar eligible nonrecipients. Compared to automatic receipt, self-targeting focuses redistribution toward the lifetime poor, and it also modestly raises the within-lifetime insurance value of transfer dollars. In several transfers, these social benefits of self-targeting appear to offset the social costs of take-up, challenging some economic arguments against ordeals.

We study how social preferences shape bargaining and policy design in theory, the laboratory, and the field. Interpersonal hostility could undermine mutually beneficial bargaining, while altruism could facilitate it. We examine landlord-tenant bargaining to avoid court-ordered eviction, using lab-in-the-field experiments with 1,808 rent-delinquent tenants and 371 landlords in Memphis, Tennessee. 24% of tenants and 15% of landlords exhibit hostility, burning money to harm the other in real-stakes Dictator Games, yet more than half of both are highly altruistic. Social preferences correlate with eviction outcomes. Using a bargaining model, we attribute 23% of evictions to hostility and misperceptions. Absent altruism, these forces would drive more than half of evictions. Social preferences also influence policy: altruists are more likely to take up emergency rental assistance, and this selection dampens the policy's causal impacts on eviction. Overall, heterogeneous social preferences shape eviction — sometimes creating surplus, sometimes destroying it — and hinder well-intentioned policy intervention.

This paper studies the impacts and incidence of subsidies for low-income housing development, which are often portrayed as transfers to developers of inframarginal projects. I estimate a dynamic model of developer behavior using new data on competitions for Low-Income Housing Tax Credits and three sources of policy variation: quasi-random assignment of subsidies, shocks to subsidy generosity, and nonlinearities in scoring rules for subsidy applications. I find that subsidies add few net units to the housing stock and instead pull investment forward in time. Households benefit from modest rent discounts on subsidized units, but developers capture around half of the subsidy in profits, and another quarter is dissipated in their fixed costs of competing for subsidies. Due to lower developer incidence and entry costs, a voucher program could likely generate similar household benefits at less fiscal cost.

Niskanen Center, National Affairs.

In many cities, incentives and regulations lead developers to integrate low-income housing into market-rate buildings. How cost-effective are these policies? I study take-up of a tax incentive in New York City using a model in which developers trade off between tax savings and pre-tax income. I estimate the model using policy variation and microdata on all development from 2003 to 2015. The citywide marginal fiscal cost is $1.6 million per low-income unit. Differences in neighborhoods, not developer incidence, explain the cost premium over other housing programs. Weighing costs against external estimates of neighborhood effects, I find middle-class neighborhoods offer "opportunity bargains."

City Observatory, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

We assess the welfare consequences of occupational licensing for workers and consumers. We estimate a model of labor market equilibrium in which licensing restricts labor supply but also affects labor demand via worker quality and selection. On the margin of occupations licensed differently between U.S. states, we find that licensing raises wages and hours but reduces employment. We estimate an average welfare loss of 12 percent of occupational surplus. Workers and consumers respectively bear 70 and 30 percent of the incidence. Higher willingness to pay offsets 80 percent of higher prices for consumers, and higher wages compensate workers for 60 percent of the cost of mandated investment in occupation-specific human capital. Welfare effects appear more favorable in occupations in which licensing is more common.

White House Council of Economic Advisers, Federal Trade Commission (cited by Comissioner Noah Phillips), The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Brookings Institution (Hutchins Center newsletter), Phenomenal World (Jain Family Institute newsletter), Marginal Revolution (blog), National Affairs, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.

We show that Covid-19 illnesses and related work absences persistently reduce labor supply. Using an event study, we estimate that workers with week-long Covid-19 absences are 7 percentage points less likely to be in the labor force one year later compared to otherwise-similar workers who do not miss a week of work for health reasons. Our estimates suggest Covid-19 absences have reduced the U.S. labor force by approximately 500,000 people (0.2 percent of adults) and imply an average labor supply loss per Covid-19 absence equivalent to $9,000 in earnings, about 90 percent of which reflects losses beyond the initial absence week.

Federal Reserve Board (Chair Powell on "Inflation and the Labor Market"), U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Minneapolis Fed, The Wall Street Journal (1,2), The New York Times, The Washington Post, National Public Radio (Marketplace), Quartz, Becker's Hospital Review, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Guardian, Marginal Revolution (1, 2), Fortune, Talking Points Memo, Business Insider, The New York Post, Brookings Institution, Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR).

We exploit a natural experiment to study discrimination in elections. In Illinois Republican presidential primaries, voters vote for delegates bound to presidential candidates, but delegates' names convey information about their race and gender. We identify discrimination from variation in vote totals among delegates bound to the same presidential candidate and who face the same voters. Examining delegate vote totals from 2000 to 2016, we estimate nonwhite delegates receive 9 percent fewer votes. We find essentially no gender discrimination. Negligible incentives for statistical discrimination, costs to preferred presidential candidates, and heterogeneity are consistent with an interpretation of this behavior as taste-based.

The Boston Globe, National Affairs, Vox.

This program constructs confidence sets on ranks following Mogstad, Romano, Shaikh, and Wilhelm (2020).

A crosswalk, with allocation weights for imperfectly matched codes, between the 2012 Census and NAICS (2- to 6-digit) industry codes.

The first official published input-output table for the U.S., covering 192 industries and constructed by Wassily Leontief and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. I found this document, to my knowledge lost for many years, in the Harvard University Archives in July 2019. I thank David Atkin for financial support to preserve and digitize these documents.