Search Results
Briefing
Removing Conflict of Interest for Agents of Homebuyers
In real estate transactions, sellers' agents have weak incentives to market homes sufficiently long to secure top prices for their clients. Buyers' agents, however, face completely backward incentives: They get paid more when their clients pay more for their homes. We discuss an a la carte compensation model for buyers' agents that eliminates this conflict of interest.
Briefing
Are Place-Based Policies a Boon for Everyone?
Despite the widespread implementation of locally targeted "place-based" interventions, their optimal design and effectiveness in addressing regional economic disparities remains open. Proponents argue that they can leverage powerful agglomeration economies and benefit underserved areas. Critics highlight potential pitfalls like inefficiency, gentrification and negative spillovers. Evaluating their effectiveness is challenging due to policy heterogeneity and data limitations, as existing evidence presents a mixed picture: Some programs seem to contribute to job creation and poverty reduction, ...
Working Paper
Survey Incentives, Survey Effort, and Survey Costs
This paper uses the 2007 and 2010 waves of the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) to investigate how monetary incentives affect the time and effort that interviewers expend during the survey field period, and how these incentives affect effort expended by the survey respondent. The results imply that a larger monetary incentive offer helps reduce contact attempts and time in the field while maintaining data quality and effort during the survey by the respondent. Our results are based on a quasi-experiment that varies which families receive an incentive offer letter. Supporting evidence is ...