Working Papers

  • Contract Terms, Employment Shocks, and Default in Credit Cards
    with Sara G. Castellanos, Aprajit Mahajan, Eduardo Alcaraz Prous, Enrique Seira, 2025
    Conditional Acceptance, Review of Economic Studies
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    Regulatory concerns over a tension between expanding financial access and limiting default have led to significant restrictions on contract terms in a number of countries, despite limited evidence on their effectiveness. We use a large nation-wide RCT to examine new borrower responses to changes in interest rates and minimum payments for a credit card that accounted for 15% of all first-time formal loans in Mexico. Default rates were 19% over the 26 month experiment and a 30 pp decrease in interest rates decreased default by 2.5 pp with no effects on the newest borrowers. Doubling minimum payments increased default by 0.8 pp during the experiment but reduced it by 1 pp afterwards, possibly by reducing debt. Matching the experimental sample to their formal employment histories we find that the effect of job separation—more common among new borrowers—on default is seven times larger than the effect of the 30 pp interest rate change. We provide a simple framework for interpreting the experimental results, and rationalize the smaller contract term effects by their limited effects on cash flow rather than by differences in per-peso impacts.

  • Data, Privacy Laws and Firm Production: Evidence from GDPR
    with Mert Demirer, Dean Li, Sida Peng, 2024
    Revise & Resubmit, Journal of Political Economy
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    By regulating how firms collect, store, and use data, privacy laws may change the role of data in production and alter firm demand for information technology inputs. We study how firms respond to privacy laws in the context of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by using seven years of data from a large global cloud-computing provider. Our difference-in-difference estimates indicate that, in response to the GDPR, EU firms decreased data storage by 26% and data processing by 15% relative to comparable US firms, becoming less "data-intensive." To estimate the costs of the GDPR for firms, we propose and estimate a production function where data and computation serve as inputs to the production of "information." We find that data and computation are strong complements in production and that firm responses are consistent with the GDPR representing a 20% increase in the cost of data on average. Variation in the firm-level effects of the GDPR and industry-level exposure to data, however, drives significant heterogeneity in our estimates of the impact of the GDPR on production costs.

  • Should The Government Sell You Goods? Evidence from the Milk Market in Mexico
    with Enrique Seira, 2022
    Reject & Resubmit, American Economic Review
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    Covered at voxdev.org, nadaesgratis.es (spanish), and rtve.es (spanish)
    Winner of the 2020 Citibanamex Prize in Economic Research

    Governments spend considerable resources providing goods directly. We show that such behavior may increase welfare when private suppliers have market power. We do this by studying the staggered rollout of hundreds of government milk "ration stores" in Mexico using a proprietary panel of household food purchases. The rollout lowered the price per liter of privately supplied milk by 2.4% and increased household consumption. To compare direct provision with budget-neutral alternatives, we develop and estimate an equilibrium model of the market that accounts for quality differences. Direct provision generates larger consumer surplus than milk vouchers and unrestricted cash transfers.


Publications

  • Should We Treat Data as Labor? Moving Beyond “Free”
    with Imanol Arrieta Ibarra, Len Goff, Jaron Lanier, E. Glen Weyl, 2018
    AEA Papers and Proceedings
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    In the digital economy, user data is typically treated as capital created by corporations observing willing individuals. This neglects users' role in creating data, reducing incentives for users, distributing the gains from the data economy unequally and stoking fears of automation. Instead treating data (at least partially) as labor could help resolve these issues and restore a functioning market for user contributions, but may run against the near-term interests of dominant data monopsonists who have benefited from data being treated as ''free''. Countervailing power, in the form of competition, a data labor movement and/or thoughtful regulation could help restore balance.


Research in Progress

(send me an email for an early draft / slides / thoughts / questions)

  • Currency Depreciations and Savings Behavior: Evidence from Household Deposits in Armenia
    with Joshua Kim, Aleksandr Shirkhanyan  
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  • Coordination Incentives of Tariff-Quota Agreements
    with Mayara Felix, Jorge Florez-Acosta  
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  • Equilibrium Effects of Voluntary Price Control Policies
    with Nano Barahona, Youssef Benzarti, Bernardo Diaz de Astarloa, Ezequiel Garcia-Lembergman, Santiago Garriga, Dario Tortarolo  
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plus some other research projects!