Publications

We examine the impact of criminalizing sex work, exploiting an event in which local officials unexpectedly criminalized sex work in one district in East Java, Indonesia, but not in neighboring districts. We collect data from female sex workers and their clients before and after the change. We find that criminalization increases sexually transmitted infections among female sex workers by 58 percent, measured by biological tests. This is driven by decreased condom access and use. We also find evidence that criminalization decreases earnings among women who left sex work due to criminalization and decreases their ability to meet their children’s school expenses while increasing the likelihood that children begin working to supplement household income. Although criminalization has the potential to improve population STI outcomes if the market shrinks permanently, we show that five years postcriminalization the market has rebounded and the probability of STI transmission in the general population is likely to have increased.

This essay discusses the world of federally funded intellectual property (IP) before and after the Bayh-Dole Act and its impact on the world of science and commerce, before then exploring the complicated debates over ownership of the science behind the life-saving COVID-19 vaccines that will bring normalcy back to the world. Before 1980, federally funded science in the U.S. was largely focused on meeting the Cold War national defense needs of a nation in a science and technology race with the Soviet Union. The 1980 Bayh-Dole Act initiated in earnest the recognition that the advancement of national ecosystems of science was also vital for global economic competitiveness. The act allowed university generated IP with federal grants to be owned and licensed by universities for commercial purposes. Before, the federal government retained ownership of IP. The result was a transformation in how universities researchers viewed the research and IP they generated, leading to start-up companies and supporting a revolution in biotech and other emerging areas of science. Although many research-intensive universities already had technology transfer offices, these now proliferated. Universities generated policies on IP ownership, including a policy in which any profits resulting from patents and licenses are shared between the researcher, the department or school they belong to, and the university. Universities and other nonprofits were also required to reinvest Bayh–Dole patent revenues in science research and education, generating substantial resources to new research projects. But the success of the Bayh-Dole Act, and the discoveries it helped generate, also contributed to an increasingly complicated world of IP ownership. The act and similar legislation, as well as federal funding, contributed to the foundational science that led to the variety of COVID-19 vaccines. Its provisions also raise questions about the role, and ownership, of federally funded research that made the vaccine possible. The new Biden administration has put a priority on production and distribution of COVID vaccines, but it may later attempt to control the price and profits of pharmaceutical companies under the “march-in” rights reserved to the federal government. At the same time, the emergence of “vaccine nationalism,” in which nations and drug makers prioritize control of IP and production of vaccines for their own population, is testing the ability of the world to effectively respond to the virus as it mutates. In the aftermath of the COVID pandemic, the strengths and weaknesses of the IP world set out by the Bayh-Dole Act will be debated and focused on two questions: who profited from the pandemic and at what global public expense?

I use data from a short, repetitive online game to explore the role of Flow Theory in motivation and game play. For each player, the Flow-Theory channel in which they are most likely to continue playing the game is identified, and players are categorized into types accordingly. Control, Boredom and Relaxation types are most common. Flow types are among the least common, making up 11% of players. Flow types have the lowest skill level, but challenge themselves the most, and are most likely to make use of self-control devices available within the game. Control types play most frequently and over a longer period of weeks. Apathy types are high skill but seek out low challenges and are least likely to make use of self-control devices. Flow and control types are more likely to play during the workday. Relaxation, boredom and apathy types are more likely to play during workday evenings.

The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) distributes more than $60 billion to over 20 million low-income families annually. Nevertheless, an estimated one-fifth of eligible households do not claim it. We ran six pre-registered, large-scale field experiments to test whether “nudges” could increase EITC take-up (N=1million). Despite varying the content, design, messenger, and mode of our messages, we find no evidence that they affected households’ likelihood of filing a tax return or claiming the credit. We conclude that even the most behaviorally informed low-touch outreach efforts cannot overcome the barriers faced by low-income households who do not file returns.

Some experts claim that U.S. local governments are experiencing dramatic increases in pension expenditures and that pension spending is crowding out government services. Others maintain that serious pension problems are limited. This issue is important to political scientists, urban scholars, and policy practitioners, but no existing studies—nor the datasets they rely on— allow evaluation of whether pension expenditures are rising or how they are affecting local government. This article analyzes a new dataset of the annual pension expenditures of over 400 municipalities and counties from 2005 to 2016. I find that pension expenditures rose almost everywhere over this period, but there is significant variation in that growth. On average, local governments are not responding to rising pension spending by increasing revenue. They are instead shrinking their workforces. Moreover, I find that the magnitude of the employment reductions due to pensions varies with key features of the political environment.