Departmental Research Seminar

Jan. 30th, 2025

Emerging LMIC Research on Forced Displacement

Exploring the current research being done by 3 UC Berkeley CEGA Fellows. 

On the Effects of Regulated Overtime Standards: An examination of California’s new overtime law for agricultural workers

Hired farm workers are among the most socially and socioeconomically disadvantaged members of the U.S. agri-food system. Solving this systemic inequity has gained public and political traction in recent years, leading to a variety of policy changes. This paper presents the first causal evidence on the viability of one such policy---standards for overtime pay---as a mechanism to improve farm worker well-being. The paper focuses on the short-run effects of the policies in California, the first of several states to enact new overtime standards for agricultural workers in recent years. Results suggest that employers responded to the legislation by reducing worker hours to avoid incurring the new costs associated with long working hours. I find statistically significant increases in the proportions of workers working at or just below the new overtime thresholds, and reductions in the proportions working above the thresholds. On average, workers worked 5 fewer hours and earned roughly $100 less each week.

Risk, Complexity and Demand for Agricultural Insurance

Agricultural insurance for smallholder farmers has proven to promote investment, prevent decapitalization, and expand credit access in field trials, yet market demand remains low. One prominent factor diminishing its appeal is the presence of uninsured risks that generate mismatch between insurance payouts and earnings shortfalls. Recent innovations focus on expanding the scope of covered risks, but doing so can introduce complexity that deters potential buyers. In this study, we explore the tradeoff between coverage and complexity in contracts that jointly insure output and sale price shocks for maize farmers in Northern Ghana. In a series of incentivized choices, we elicit farmers' demand for insurance on a hypothetical plot while experimentally varying the payout states of the contract, the way the contract is presented, and participants' risk tolerance. We find participants value insurance: there is greater demand for products that jointly insure both output and price shortfalls rather than output alone, and demand falls when the payout structure induces risk-neutrality. However, willingness-to-pay for insurance remains well below its actuarially equivalent value under risk neutrality. This finding is qualitatively consistent with recent behavioral and experimental research on complexity aversion in risky settings. Insurance valuation is lower among participants with weaker math skills and those without commercial farming experience. Quantitatively, undervaluation due to complexity is large enough to offset the utility gains from precisely targeting insurance payouts to states of revenue loss. Increasing transparency in how a contract is presented does not increase demand, suggesting that undervaluation does not stem merely from difficulties in understanding the contingencies under which insurance pays out. Together, our results suggest complexity aversion may limit the viability of an agricultural insurance market for smallholder farmers in developing settings.

Mechanism Design for Personalized Policy: A Field Experiment Incentivizing Exercise

Personalizing policies can theoretically increase their effectiveness. However, personalization is difficult when individual types are unobservable and the preferences of policymakers and individuals are not aligned, which could cause individuals to mis- report their type. Mechanism design offers a strategy to overcome this issue: offer a menu of policy choices, and make it incentive-compatible for participants to choose the “right” variant. Using a field experiment that personalized incentives for exercise among 6,800 adults with diabetes and hypertension in urban India, we show that personalizing with an incentive-compatible choice menu substantially improves program performance, increasing the treatment effect of incentives on exercise by 80% without increasing program costs relative to a one-size-fits-all benchmark. Personalizing with mechanism design also performs well relative to another potential strategy for personalization: assigning policy variants based on observables.

The Open Research Unconditional Income Study

This presentation synthesizes findings to date from the Open Research Unconditional Income Study (ORUS), a large-scale, randomized controlled trial on unconditional cash transfers across 2 US states. The study tracked 3,000 low-income adults over three years, with 1,000 receiving $1,000 per month and 2,000 receiving $50 per month. 

How Social Relationships Affect Group Cooperation: Evidence from Randomly Assigned Real Groups

We present experimental and survey evidence from a Swiss Army training programme to study how social interactions in randomly allocated real groups strengthen social ties, affect determinants of cooperation and shape cooperative behaviour. In our experiment, participants were matched with either a socially “close” or “distant” person and played a set of one-shot games. Participants in closer social ties were more likely to expect cooperation, less likely to choose payoff-maximizing strategies and more likely to cooperate themselves. A substantial share of the effect of the strength of social ties is mediated through changes in cooperative attitudes and beliefs. In a complementary survey study, we investigate how the strength of social ties develops and increases steadily as a function of social interactions throughout the training programme. A simulation exercise reveals a sizable week-on-week effect of social interactions on cooperative behaviour through a reduced likelihood of choosing payoff-maximizing actions and a higher expectation of others’ cooperative behaviour.

Gender and Culture Shape Prosociality More than Heat Stress in a Five-Country Experiment

Previous research from observational studies has shown a positive correlation between higher temperatures and various forms of antisocial behavior, including crime, violence, aggression, and conflict. Fewer studies, with conflicting results, have focused on the psychological and physiological effects of heat which may be the mechanism to help explain those connections. In our work, we examine economic preferences through an experiment designed to isolate the impact of elevated temperatures on social preferences related to economic behavior: egalitarianism, maximizing behavior, selfishness, spite, and competitiveness.

The experiment consisted of a series of incentivized dictator games and a task to elicit competitiveness played under exogenously varied room temperatures by N = 1,636 male and female students in five different countries (Colombia, India, Kenya, Mexico, United States). Our main findings indicate that elevated temperatures had little or no effect on social and economic preferences, despite showing a significant effect on mood. Conversely, social preferences and economic behavior remained substantially and significantly influenced by gender and culture.

Education 110

The Origin and Diffusion of Policy Ideas in China

Drawing on two decades of Chinese policy documents and government work reports, we identify more than 116,000 distinct policy ideas and trace their complete life cycles, revealing three main findings. First, in the 2000s, policy making was highly decentralized—more than 82% of ideas originated from local governments, driven primarily by local officials. Second, after 2013, the central government shifted its incentives by ceasing rewards for bottom-up policy innovation and instead promoting the diligent enforcement of centrally assigned policies, leading to significant centralization of policy making. Third, focusing on industrial policies, we highlight tradeoffs between centralization and decentralization. Top-down industrial policies tend to be less aligned with local comparative advantages and are less effective at spurring industrial growth, revealing the cost of centralization. Conversely, under decentralization, strategic competition among local politicians can distort policy diffusion, reducing the fit between policies and local contexts and undermining their effectiveness. Quantitatively, our results indicate that, over the past decade, the economic costs of centralizing policy making in China have far outweighed its benefits.

USAID - The End of Foreign U.S. Aid?

In recent weeks, 83% of USAID’s projects have been canceled. Thousands of jobs have been lost, projects abandoned and USAID and project offices closed. Is this the end of U.S. foreign aid?  Join us with Kurt Grela (IDEC class of 2005), who worked on USAID’s largest project, for an insightful presentation on his experience working on the PEPFAR project, its impact and results, and the future of U.S. foreign aid.

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Empirically distinguishing health impacts of transboundary and domestic air pollution in mixture

Particulate matter (PM) is a major, clinically important air pollutant. A large portion of emitted PM crosses borders, damaging health outside of its originating jurisdiction, but due in part to technical obstacles these pollutant flows remain unregulated. Proposed attribution approaches assume that units of PM originating in different jurisdictions cause the same harm, despite a widespread understanding that differing chemical and physical features of PM could generate distinct health effects. We use an atmospheric model to decompose the origins of PM individuals are exposed to at each location in South Korea, the nexus of one of the world's most contentious transboundary air pollution disputes, every day during 2005–2016. We then link these data to universal healthcare records in an econometric analysis that simultaneously measures and accounts for harms from seven types of PM, each from a distinct origin. We discover that the health harm of a unit of transboundary PM is approximately 5× (North Korea) and 2.6× (China) greater than a unit of PM originating within South Korea, and that health responses to PM from natural sources differs from those to anthropogenic sources. Because harms differ by origin, we compute that transboundary sources contribute only 43% of anthropogenic PM exposure in South Korea but generate over 70% of its associated respiratory health costs. Our results suggest that PM should be treated as a mixture of distinct pollutants, each with a unique measurable impact on human health.