Do Legal Reforms Deliver? The Economic Effects of Gender Equality Laws
with Nila Zarepour-Arizi, Henry Moncrieff, and Kevin Grier
Discrimination misallocates talent and resources, so reducing it should generate substantial economic gains. We assess the effectiveness of gender equality legislation by examining its impact on economic outcomes. Using large and sustained jumps in the World Bank’s Women, Business, and the Law index as a measure of gender reform, we find no average effects on real GDP per capita, female labor force participation, or women’s share of labor income. In robustness tests, we find no effects on female secondary school enrollment or women’s life satisfaction. These null results underscore the limits of de jure indicators as stand-alone measures of progress.
Fences and Fortunes: The Local Effects of US Border Enforcement Policy
with Samuel Absher and Kevin Grier
We investigate the causal effects of enhanced border enforcement on the U.S. side of the U.S.-Mexico border, focusing specifically on the effects of Operation Hold the Line in El Paso in 1993. Using a weighted difference-in-differences approach with household-level data, and a synthetic control method with county-level data, we estimate the operation’s causal effects on income, property values, population, crime, and business activity. We find that the operation significantly reduced income levels, house values, and the number of business establishments, while also contributing to a decline in El Paso’s population. At the same time, it also led to notable reductions in property and violent crime. However, the income loss dwarfs the monetary benefits of lower crime.
Squeeze Play: Military Coups and their Differential Economic Fallout
with Henry Moncrieff and Kevin Grier
Do successful military coups affect specific income groups differently? We present a model where coups can occur in equilibrium even when there exists an ex-ante bargain all parties would prefer. We use a stacked event study with entropy balancing pre-processing to investigate the causal effect of military coups on incomes at each decile of the distribution. We find negative and significant effects across the deciles of the income distribution, but the bottom decile experiences the largest declines. We find evidence that even the top one percent of the distribution incurs a significant and substantial decline in their incomes.
Partisan Differences Among State Supreme Court Justices: Causal Evidence from Close Elections
with Jamie Bologna-Pavlik, Kevin Grier, and Ivan Zapata
Using close election regression discontinuity designs and data on partisan elections of state supreme court justices, we investigate two questions: (1) Is there convergence in ideology between barely elected Democratic and Republican justices? (2) If not, do the institutions of precedent and the committee structure of state supreme courts mitigate or eliminate ideology divergences when it comes to voting? We find large and significant ideological differences between barely elected Democratic and Republican justices that are only partly mitigated when it comes to measures of post-election voting.
Promises, Promises: An economic and political evaluation of India under Modi
with Kevin Grier
In 2014, Narendra Modi and the BJP came to power in India. Modi campaigned on economic and developmental competence (the “Gujarat Model”) and on good governance (“minimum government, maximum governance”). In this paper we provide the first counterfactual-based causal evidence on how India has fared on both these dimensions under Modi. We show that in terms of real GDP per capita, the Indian economy underperformed its synthetic counterfactual. And for governance indicators including rule of law, freedom of religion, freedom of association, and multiple indicators of democratic health, India dramatically underperformed. Modi’s rule is, at heart, a tale of broken promises.