Elected officials at all levels of governance routinely make decisions that affect large populations, often without public scrutiny. This study examines the effect of increased transparency on judicial decision-making by leveraging a legislative reform that mandated public disclosure of court fee waivers. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find that the share of cases with court cost waivers increased by nearly 100%. The effects varied across political districts and re-election timing, indicating that electoral incentives play a significant role in judicial responsiveness. We also find that the effect size decreases with defendant income, suggesting potential targeting of waivers for those with lower ability to pay. Additionally, transparency-induced reductions in monetary obligations led to lower recidivism rates and improved timely compliance among defendants.

This paper examines the causal effect of jurisdiction size on political participation, political selection, and political competition. I leverage a quasi-natural experiment that exogenously determined the size of over 50,000 local government units based on population threshold in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Using a regression discontinuity design, I find strong effects of the size of the electorate on voter turnout, with a 10% decrease in jurisdiction size resulting in a 0.6% higher turnout rate in local elections. The quality of contesting candidates and the characteristics of the winners do not vary systematically with jurisdiction size. Additionally, I provide a test of the rational choice model of voting by simulating millions of elections and show that voter turnout increases with an increase in pivotal probabilities.

Since 1970, housing’s relative price, share of expenditure, and “unaffordability” have all grown. We estimate housing demand using a novel compensated framework over space and an uncompensated framework over time. Our specifications pass tests imposed by rationality and household mobility. Housing demand is income and price inelastic, and appears to fall with household size. We provide a numerical non-homothetic constant elasticity of substitution utility function for improved quantitative modeling. An ideal cost-of-living index demonstrates that the poor have been disproportionately impacted by rising relative rents, which have greatly amplified increases in real income inequality.

The first year of a child’s life is a critical period not only for the child’s development but also for the mother’s labor market prospects. Research shows that gender gaps over the life cycle, often referred to as the “motherhood penalty,” are closely associated with childbirth. In this paper, we analyze labor market trajectories of mothers and fathers around childbirth, utilizing restricted-access, full-count data from the American Community Survey (ACS) and Census Household Composition Key (CHCK). By combining ACS and CHCK, we can observe parents’ employment patterns both before and after childbirth. It allows us to examine month-by-month labor dynamics and track the onset and persistence of gendered labor outcomes associated with the motherhood penalty. Additionally, we examine whether policies help close some of these gaps? The Affordable Care Act (ACA) provided a number of provisions designed to support breastfeeding at workplace. We assess the impact of breastfeeding provisions under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) on mothers’ labor supply, including employment and timing of return to work, and examine how these effects vary across characteristics such as first-time motherhood, race and education.