https://hdl.handle.net/10419/262400 2026-09-15T02:09:45Z https://hdl.handle.net/10419/337493 Title: Managing what you measure: Evidence from federal infrastructure surveys Authors: Breuer, Matthias; Dong, Qingkai Abstract: We study how federal information-collection requirements affect public infrastructure spending of local governments. Exploiting the introduction and revision of the federal survey on highway infrastructure, we find that county roads that are randomly sampled by the survey attract more local government spending. The increased spending is concentrated in capital outlays for road improvements and is somewhat pronounced for roads in poor condition. The spending seems successful in expanding the county road network and usage and reducing fatalities. Collectively, our evidence suggests that federal information-collection efforts shape the allocation of resources by providing information on road segments in need of resources but also by directing attention and resources to roads that happen to be sampled, irrespective of their need for resources. 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/10419/339592 Title: The happiness crash of 2020 Authors: Peltzman, Sam Abstract: I document a sudden, sharp and historically unprecedented decline in self-reported happiness in the US population. It occurred during 2020, the year of the Covid pandemic, and mainly persists through 2024. This happiness crash spread across nearly all typical demographics and geographies. The happiest groups pre-Covid (e.g., whites, high income, well-educated and politically/ideologically right-leaning) tend to show the largest happiness reductions. The glaring exception is marital status, which has consistently been an important marker for happiness. The already wide happiness premium for marriage has, if anything, become slightly wider. With both married and unmarried reporting large declines in happiness the country has become segregated: slightly over half - the married adults - remain happy on balance; the unmarried, nearly half, are now distinctly unhappy. I also show that across a number of aspects of personal and social capital post-Covid deterioration is the norm, including a collapse of belief in the fairness of others and of trust in the US Supreme Court. 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/10419/342448 Title: Dynamic investment and product market rivalry: The network Q model Authors: Bustamante, Maria Cecilia; Pellegrino, Bruno Abstract: We present a new dynamic model of corporate investment in imperfectly-competitive product markets, extending the neoclassical (Q) theory of capital to a multi-firm, multi-product, fullystructural model. Our model embeds a state-of-the-art hedonic demand system, endogenizes firms' markups and generalizes Tobin's Q to a matrix (or network) of product market spillovers, which captures how each firm's investment affects that of its rivals. We provide existence and uniqueness results along with exact, global analytical solutions for the Markov Perfect Equilib-rium investment policies. We then take our model to the data for the universe of U.S. public companies and obtain five novel insights: 1) product market competition is a key force driving aggregate investment and capital allocation; 2) the persistence of firm's capital stocks increased over the past 25 years (i.e. capital became "stickier"); 3) monopoly rents account for a large, rising share of firms' value; 4) positive shocks to firms' cost of capital increase markups and con-centration; 5) mergers consummated since 1995 have led to a modest decline in aggregate capital formation; at the firm-level the resulting increases in markups are highly heterogeneous. 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/10419/342513 Title: Property rights and social institutions in urban Africa: Experimental evidence from a land formalization program in the DRC Authors: Balán, Pablo; Bergeron, Augustin; Tourek, Gabriel; Weigel, Jonathan Abstract: Formal property rights to land remain rare in sub-Saharan Africa. We argue that social institutions shape citizens' demand for land formalization. When offered the opportunity to formalize, citizens weigh the insurance and tenure-security benefits of informal institutions against their monetary and social obligations. We study a randomized land titling program in a large Congolese city that sharply reduced the costs of acquiring a title. The program caused large increases in both initiation and receipt of titles. Demand was strongest among citizens more engaged in social institutions and more connected to city chiefs, yet such ties did not predict completion of the titling process. Program assignment also reduced citizens' participation in social institutions and worsened their evaluations of chiefs. These findings suggest that, in urban settings where land values are higher and social institutions are more costly, citizens may exit social institutions when formal alternatives become available, illustrating how formalization can reshape engagement with informal authority. 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z