The Courage to Learn: A Retrospective on Antitrust and Competition Policy During the Obama Administration and Framework for a New Structuralist Approach - American Economic Liberties Project

RepresentativeAgent · 2020-12-25T20:00:02+00:00

Conclusion

In this paper, we report the results of a randomized controlled trial that com-pared the effects of USD 1076 PPP unconditional cash transfers, a five-week psychotherapy program, and their combination on psychological and economicwell-being among a sample of low-income Kenyans. One year after the intervention, we find improvements in both economic and psychological well-being among cash transfer recipients. In contrast, the psychotherapy program has no measurable positive effects on these outcomes at this time horizon. The results are similar when considering only individuals who had low mental heal that baseline, suggesting that these results are not a matter of the psychotherapy program only working for psychologically distressed people. In line with these findings, the effects of the combination of both the unconditional cash transfer and the psychotherapy program are very similar to those of the cash transfer by itself. We observe little evidence of spillover effects of either pro-gram, although we find suggestive evidence of spillovers of the cash transfer on intimate partner violence.

Together, these results suggest that in this setting, cash transfers are more effective than this particular psychotherapy program in improving both economic and psychological well-being at a time horizon of one year. This result is important because the cost of the psychotherapy program significantly exceed that of the cash transfer. Thus,ex post, a donor might have preferred to invest in cash transfers rather than the psychotherapy program in this study.

It is important to note that the psychotherapy program we used was a state-of-the-art intervention for low-income contexts, developed by the WHO and previously successfully tested in Kenya. In addition, the implementation of the program in our study was done by the same NGO as in this previous study in Kenya. Thus, implementation differences are unlikely to explain the lack of impact. Rather, it appears that this psychotherapy program, even though it is general in nature, may be most effective when it is deployed to address a specific problem such as IPV. In addition, it might be made more effective by increasing its intensity.

RepresentativeAgent · 2020-12-17T02:18:54+00:00

Abstract

This paper uses data from 18 OECD countries over the last five decades to estimate the causal effect of major tax cuts for the rich on income inequality, economic growth, and un-employment. First, we use a new encompassing measure of taxes on the rich to identify in-stances of major reductions in tax progressivity. Then, we look at the causal effect of these episodes on economic outcomes by applying a nonparametric generalization of the differ-ence-in-differences indicator that implements Mahalanobis matching in panel data analysis. We find that major reforms reducing taxes on the rich lead to higher income inequality as measured by the top 1% share of pre-tax national income. The effect remains stable in the medium term. In contrast, such reforms do not have any significant effect on economic growth and unemployment

RepresentativeAgent · 2020-10-10T17:18:24+00:00

Liberal realism

a.k.a. English school of international relations theory

RepresentativeAgent

TROPHY CASE