Two recent faculty hires are making an impact already with forthcoming American Economic Review publications.
Assistant Professor Claire Duquennois’ paper, “Fictional Money, Real Costs: Impacts of Financial Salience on Disadvantaged Students,” examines whether low-income students perform worse on cognitive tests when confronted with money-themed word problems.
Disadvantaged students perform differentially worse when randomly given a financially salient mathematics exam. For students with socioeconomic indicators below the national median, a 10 percentage point increase in the share of monetary themed questions depresses exam performance by 0.026 standard deviations, about 6 percent of their performance gap. Using question-level data, I confirm the role of financial salience by comparing performance on monetary and highly similar non-monetary questions. Leveraging the randomized ordering of questions, I identify an effect on subsequent questions, providing evidence that the attention capture effects of poverty affect policy relevant outcomes outside of experimental settings.
Claire joined the department in 2020 after earning her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Formerly, Claire was a Professor at the University of Colorado Denver, at the locations of both Denver and Beijing. She received her PhD in Agricultural and Resource Economics, and teaches in Labor, Development, and Behavioral Economics.
Professor Duquennois aims to provide students with the important skills of critical thinking and real-world application in hopes they will rely on and strengthen those skills in their future endeavors. She enjoys teaching Applied Economics, Casual Inference, and Economic Inference from Data because of how they can organize the ability to use data to answer pivotal economic questions, and say, ‘This caused this to happen.”
Claire said that “it’s always exciting to work with interested and motivated students. It’s beyond rewarding to know that they will take the skills they learn in my class and apply them to future projects.” She teaches them to be careful thinkers and that when they look at a project or write a report, they can critically and accurately assess their data. She believes that “data can often be complicated to process, and it’s important to know what the data is actually showing. Being able to recognize, differentiate, and communicate what you know versus what you don’t know is so important.”
Claire is interested in labor and development economics and draws a lot of inspiration from the behavioral economic’s field. Although new to the Pittsburgh area, Claire Duquennois’ students will attest to her love of exploring the nature the area has to offer, as well as finding the best restaurants in town.
Assistant Professor Gabriel Tourek’s paper titled “Local Elites as State Capacity: How City Chiefs Use Local Information to Increase Tax Compliance in the D.R. Congo,” documents the results from a policy experiment in the Democratic Republic of Congo that explores whether a state that is usually unable to achieve its policy goals can increase revenues by delegating tax collection responsibilities to local city chiefs.
This paper investigates the trade-offs between local elites and state agents as tax collectors in low-capacity states. We study a randomized policy experiment assigning neighborhoods of a large Congolese city to property tax collection by city chiefs or state agents. Chief collection raised tax compliance by 3.2 percentage points, increasing revenue by 44 percent. Chiefs collected more bribes but did not undermine tax morale or trust in government. Results from a hybrid treatment arm in which state agents consulted with chiefs before collection suggest that chief collectors achieved higher compliance by using local information to more efficiently target households with high payment propensities, rather than by being more effective at persuading households to pay conditional on having visited them.
Gabriel earned his PhD from Harvard University and joined the department in 2019. His research focuses on public economics and development, specifically the equity of transfers and taxes and the process through which fiscal capacity and governance jointly develop. He is also interested in the organization of bureaucracies and labor market frictions that constrain firms' decision-making and growth.