In Medellín, Colombia, gangs provide residents of low- and middle-income neighborhoods with key governing services to reduce the need for state presence, thereby protecting their drug profits. Increased state presence leads to increased gang presence, suggesting new strategies for countering criminal governance.

Watch Remarks from Micheal Kremer

  ↓ Scroll to Explore Insights ↓  

A combination of nudges and taxes always outperforms each policy in isolation; however, there is large variation in how much these combinations add to social welfare, reinforcing the importance of empirically quantifying welfare effects.

Relative to borrowers who had to continue paying their loans, borrowers allowed to pause their payments sharply increased mortgage, auto, and credit card borrowing, with little effect on loan delinquencies.

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Receiving a message about a tax amnesty program (especially deterrence messages) increases the likelihood of joining the amnesty and repaying some debt; importantly, such amnesties do not cause a reduction in tax payments over the following two years, contrary to existing theoretical predictions.