Working Papers：
Distributional and Productivity Implications of Regulating Casual Labor: Evidence from Ridesharing in Indonesia (with Rizki Siregar)
Abstract: Regulations intended to improve workers’ earnings, such as minimum wage, may have muted impact on policy objectives or unintended consequences due to adjustment mechanisms and general equilibrium effects. Using comprehensive transaction data from one of Indonesia’s dominant platforms, we study the market-wide implications of a federal policy on minimum fares for drivers on ridesharing apps. We estimate the causal effects of the policy with difference-in-differences and synthetic control methods, exploiting an exogenous variation in the policy’s rollout. We find that, on average, the policy increases the trip price but does not significantly affect the overall transaction volume nor increase driver earnings or wages. These effects are driven by a higher excess labor supply, reducing the number of transactions per driver. The excess labor supply comes from lower-earning drivers but does not lead to their increased earnings. We also find lower driver productivity, driven by two margins: an increased share of less productive drivers in the workforce and reduced individual productivity due to crowding on the supply side.
Pricing, Advertising, and Spillovers under Information and Search Frictions: Experimental Evidence from an Online Platform in Pakistan (with Ali Hasanain and Adeel Tariq)
- Draft available upon request
- Slides
- AEA RCT Registry
Abstract: Information and search frictions generate distortions and market failures through high price levels and dispersion. Interventions that leverage information communications technology (ICT) are shown to reduce such frictions, yet the mechanisms through which such interventions trigger strategic responses, spillovers, and adjustments to the market in developing economies remain under-explored. We causally identify spillover effects and their mechanisms via a randomized control trial on a major online listing platform for used vehicles in Pakistan, where there is limited publicly available price information. In collaboration with PakWheels.com, we randomly provide estimates of transaction prices privately to sellers who create new posts and capture their pricing, advertising, and transaction outcomes. We also direct and spillover effects via a saturation design at the vehicle-model level. We find that the information intervention brings sellers’ listing prices closer to our price estimates for treatment and spillover sellers but increases transaction probability only for the spillover group. The findings point to two mechanisms: 1) effects of price information are mediated by advertising tools that could countervail effects of list-pricing choices, and 2) spillovers could propagate direct effects of information intervention via adjustments by competing sellers.
Beliefs, signal quality, and information sources: Experimental evidence on air quality in Pakistan (with Isra Imtiaz, Sanval Nasim, and Arman Rezaee)
- Draft available upon request
- AEA RCT Registry
When governments in developing economies under-provide environmental information, consumers may demand private alternatives depending on their beliefs about the quality of information. We study how information sources shape demand for air quality information via a randomized controlled trial in which we provide day-ahead air pollution forecasts. We make salient one of the information sources: the government vs. a private citizens group. We find that our respondents in Lahore, Pakistan, have a high willingness to pay for the forecast service, yet there is no difference by the assigned source. However, respondents show a significantly higher revealed relative preference for the assigned source, as measured through a donation game. Respondents also believe the government’s forecast error is 12 percent higher than the private alternative’s. Our findings suggest that respondents have weak priors and malleable preferences for information sources yet expect lower service quality from the government.