Rafael Di Tella
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 1056857 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Rafael Di Tella |
| PRENOMES | Rafael |
| SOBRENOME | Di Tella |
| ASSINATURA | DI TELLA R |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Harvard University |
| VERIFICADO | Não |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 23 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 562 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 23 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1996 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2024 |
| ÍNDICE H | 10 |
Risk factors for Covid-19 in-hospital mortality in Argentina
COVID-19 poses dire threats for low and middle-income countries (LMICs). Yet, there remains limited rigorous evidence describing the characteristics and outcomes of hospitalized patients for LMICs, and often the evidence was based on small samples and/or unicentric. The objective of this study was to examine risk factors of COVID-19 mortality in Argentina, a hard-hit middle-income Latin American country. We analyze data on 5,146 COVID-19 patients…
Labour Market Shocks and the Demand for Trade Protection
We study preferences for government action in response to layoffs resulting from different types of labour-market shocks. We consider: technological change, a demand shift, bad management and three kinds of international outsourcing. Support for government intervention rises sharply in response to shocks and is heavily biased towards trade protection. Trade shocks generate more demand for protectionism and, among trade shocks, outsourcing to a de…
Criminal Recidivism after Prison and Electronic Monitoring
We study criminal recidivism in Argentina by focusing on the rearrest rates of two groups: individuals released from prison and individuals released from electronic monitoring. Detainees are randomly assigned to judges, and ideological differences across judges translate into large differences in the allocation of electronic monitoring to an otherwise similar population. Using these peculiarities of the Argentine setting, we argue that there is a…
The Economics of Crime
rates in Latin America are among the highest in the world, creating climates of fear and lawlessness in several countries. Despite this situation, there has been a lack of systematic effort to study crime in the region or the effectiveness of policies designed to tackle it. The Economics of Crime is a powerful corrective to this academic blind spot and makes an important contribution to the current debate on causes and solutions by applying lesso…
Happiness adaptation to income and to status in an individual panel
Choosing Agents and Monitoring Consumption
There are a large number of cases where corruption has been discovered when investigating levels of consumption that appear to be hard to justify. The informativeness of an agent's level of consumption depends on his legal income and initial level of wealth, as conspicuous consumption by wealthy agents leads to little updating of the principal's belief about their honesty. This introduces a tendency to prefer poor agents as they are easier to mon…
The Formation of Beliefs
We study the formation of beliefs in a squatter settlement in the outskirts of Buenos Aires exploiting a natural experiment that induced an allocation of property rights that is exogenous to the characteristics of the squatters. There are significant differences in the beliefs that squatters with and without land titles declare to hold. Lucky squatters who end up with legal titles report beliefs closer to those that favor the workings of a free m…
Gross national happiness as an answer to the Easterlin Paradox
Some Uses of Happiness Data in Economics
Happiness research is based on the idea that it is fruitful to study empirical measures of individual welfare. The most common is the answer to a simple well-being question such as "Are you Happy?" Hundreds of thousands of individuals have been asked this question, in many countries and over many years. Researchers have begun to use these data to tackle a variety of important questions in economics. Some require strong assumptions concerning inte…
Plata o Plomo
We present a model where groups attempt to influence policies using both bribes (plata, Spanish for silver) and the threat of punishment (plomo, Spanish for lead). We then use it to make predictions about the quality of a country's public officials and to understand the role of institutions granting politicians with immunity from legal prosecution. The use of punishment lowers the returns from public office and reduces the incentives of high-abil…
Inequality and happiness
Unemployment Benefits as a Substitute for a Conservative Central Banker
In the many years since their introduction, positive theories of inflation have rarely been tested. This paper documents a negative relationship between inflation and the welfare state (proxied by the parameters of the unemployment benefit program) that is to be expected in such theories. Because unemployment benefits make the monetary authority less concerned about the plight of the unemployed, building a welfare state has a similar effect to ap…
Do Police Reduce Crime? Estimates Using the Allocation of Police Forces After a Terrorist Attack
An important challenge in the crime literature is to isolate causal effects of police on crime. Following a terrorist attack on the main Jewish center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in July 1994, all Jewish institutions received police protection. Thus, this hideous event induced a geographical allocation of police forces that can be presumed exogenous in a crime regression. Using data on the location of car thefts before and after the attack, we fi…
The Role of Wages and Auditing during a Crackdown on Corruption in the City of Buenos Aires
We study the prices paid for basic inputs during a crackdown on corruption in the public hospitals of the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina, during 1996–97. We find a well‐defined, negative effect on the measures used to capture corruption. Prices paid by hospitals for basic, homogeneous inputs decrease by 15 percent during the first 9 months of the crackdown. After this period prices increase, but they are still 10 percent lower than those prevail…
The Macroeconomics of Happiness
We show that macroeconomic movements have strong effects on the happiness of nations. First, we find that there are clear microeconomic patterns in the psychological well-being levels of a quarter of a million randomly sampled Europeans and Americans from the 1970s to the 1990s. Happiness equations are monotonically increasing in income, and have similar structure in different countries. Second, movements in reported well-being are correlated wit…
Capture by Threat
We analyze a simple stochastic environment in which policy makers can be threatened by "nasty" interest groups. In the absence of these groups, the policy maker's desire for reelection guarantees that good policies are implemented for every realization of the shock. When pressure groups can harass the policy maker, good policies will be chosen for only a subset of states of nature. Hence, honest and able leaders might implement bad policies, and …
Informal Family Insurance and the Design of the Welfare State
Journal Article Informal Family Insurance and the Design of the Welfare State Get access Rafael Di Tella, Rafael Di Tella Harvard University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Robert MacCulloch Robert MacCulloch London School of Economics Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 112, Issue 481, July 2002, Pages 481–503, https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-…
Preferences over Inflation and Unemployment
Preferences over Inflation and Unemployment: Evidence from Surveys of Happiness by Rafael Di Tella, Robert J. MacCulloch and Andrew J. Oswald. Published in volume 91, issue 1, pages 335-341 of American Economic Review, March 2001
Rents, Competition, and Corruption
Version of Record
Does Competition Kill Corruption
Corrupt agents (officials or gangsters) exact money from firms. Corruption affects the number of firms in a free-entry equilibrium. The degree of deep competition in the economy increases with lower overhead costs relative to profits and with a tendency toward similar cost structures. Increases in competition may not lower corruption. The model explains why a rational corrupt agent may extinguish the source of his bribe income by causing a firm t…
National Champions and Corruption
We present a hold‐up model of investment where active industrial policy promotes both corruption and investment. Since corruption deters investment, the effect of industrial policy on investment is lower than when corruption is absent. We find evidence suggesting that corruption is indeed higher in countries pursuing active industrial policies. Policy implications are illustrated by decomposing the total effect of industrial policy into a positiv…
The New Economics of Corruption
Governments of all political colours in countries of all levels of wealth are a ected by corruption scandals with a frequency and intensity that seems to be always on the increase. Corruption has become a `hot issue' and is now a major topic of political competition, even in the industrialized democracies. Yet, to a large extent, economists have remained vague about what can be done to reduce it. A main concern is the lack of evidence in support …
The Causes and Consequences of Corruption
This article presents a review of recent developments in the empirical literature on corruption which uses subjective indices and survey data. The results are presented on two broad themes: contributions to understanding the causes of corruption and theories on the consequences of corruption. Though this type of research is still in its infancy, it has already provided the field of corruption with some of the empirical discipline needed to turn i…
Some Uses of Happiness Data in Economics
Happiness research is based on the idea that it is fruitful to study empirical measures of individual welfare. The most common is the answer to a simple well-being question such as "Are you Happy?" Hundreds of thousands of individuals have been asked this question, in many countries and over many years. Researchers have begun to use these data to tackle a variety of important questions in economics. Some require strong assumptions concerning inte…
Do Police Reduce Crime? Estimates Using the Allocation of Police Forces After a Terrorist Attack
An important challenge in the crime literature is to isolate causal effects of police on crime. Following a terrorist attack on the main Jewish center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in July 1994, all Jewish institutions received police protection. Thus, this hideous event induced a geographical allocation of police forces that can be presumed exogenous in a crime regression. Using data on the location of car thefts before and after the attack, we fi…
Plata o Plomo
We present a model where groups attempt to influence policies using both bribes (plata, Spanish for silver) and the threat of punishment (plomo, Spanish for lead). We then use it to make predictions about the quality of a country's public officials and to understand the role of institutions granting politicians with immunity from legal prosecution. The use of punishment lowers the returns from public office and reduces the incentives of high-abil…
The New Economics of Corruption
Governments of all political colours in countries of all levels of wealth are a ected by corruption scandals with a frequency and intensity that seems to be always on the increase. Corruption has become a `hot issue' and is now a major topic of political competition, even in the industrialized democracies. Yet, to a large extent, economists have remained vague about what can be done to reduce it. A main concern is the lack of evidence in support …
Does Competition Kill Corruption
Corrupt agents (officials or gangsters) exact money from firms. Corruption affects the number of firms in a free-entry equilibrium. The degree of deep competition in the economy increases with lower overhead costs relative to profits and with a tendency toward similar cost structures. Increases in competition may not lower corruption. The model explains why a rational corrupt agent may extinguish the source of his bribe income by causing a firm t…
National Champions and Corruption
We present a hold‐up model of investment where active industrial policy promotes both corruption and investment. Since corruption deters investment, the effect of industrial policy on investment is lower than when corruption is absent. We find evidence suggesting that corruption is indeed higher in countries pursuing active industrial policies. Policy implications are illustrated by decomposing the total effect of industrial policy into a positiv…
Gross national happiness as an answer to the Easterlin Paradox
Capture by Threat
We analyze a simple stochastic environment in which policy makers can be threatened by "nasty" interest groups. In the absence of these groups, the policy maker's desire for reelection guarantees that good policies are implemented for every realization of the shock. When pressure groups can harass the policy maker, good policies will be chosen for only a subset of states of nature. Hence, honest and able leaders might implement bad policies, and …
Criminal Recidivism after Prison and Electronic Monitoring
We study criminal recidivism in Argentina by focusing on the rearrest rates of two groups: individuals released from prison and individuals released from electronic monitoring. Detainees are randomly assigned to judges, and ideological differences across judges translate into large differences in the allocation of electronic monitoring to an otherwise similar population. Using these peculiarities of the Argentine setting, we argue that there is a…
Labour Market Shocks and the Demand for Trade Protection
We study preferences for government action in response to layoffs resulting from different types of labour-market shocks. We consider: technological change, a demand shift, bad management and three kinds of international outsourcing. Support for government intervention rises sharply in response to shocks and is heavily biased towards trade protection. Trade shocks generate more demand for protectionism and, among trade shocks, outsourcing to a de…
Informal Family Insurance and the Design of the Welfare State
Journal Article Informal Family Insurance and the Design of the Welfare State Get access Rafael Di Tella, Rafael Di Tella Harvard University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Robert MacCulloch Robert MacCulloch London School of Economics Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 112, Issue 481, July 2002, Pages 481–503, https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-…
Choosing Agents and Monitoring Consumption
There are a large number of cases where corruption has been discovered when investigating levels of consumption that appear to be hard to justify. The informativeness of an agent's level of consumption depends on his legal income and initial level of wealth, as conspicuous consumption by wealthy agents leads to little updating of the principal's belief about their honesty. This introduces a tendency to prefer poor agents as they are easier to mon…
The Causes and Consequences of Corruption
This article presents a review of recent developments in the empirical literature on corruption which uses subjective indices and survey data. The results are presented on two broad themes: contributions to understanding the causes of corruption and theories on the consequences of corruption. Though this type of research is still in its infancy, it has already provided the field of corruption with some of the empirical discipline needed to turn i…
Does Competition Kill Corruption
Corrupt agents (officials or gangsters) exact money from firms. Corruption affects the number of firms in a free-entry equilibrium. The degree of deep competition in the economy increases with lower overhead costs relative to profits and with a tendency toward similar cost structures. Increases in competition may not lower corruption. The model explains why a rational corrupt agent may extinguish the source of his bribe income by causing a firm t…
National Champions and Corruption
We present a hold‐up model of investment where active industrial policy promotes both corruption and investment. Since corruption deters investment, the effect of industrial policy on investment is lower than when corruption is absent. We find evidence suggesting that corruption is indeed higher in countries pursuing active industrial policies. Policy implications are illustrated by decomposing the total effect of industrial policy into a positiv…
The New Economics of Corruption
Governments of all political colours in countries of all levels of wealth are a ected by corruption scandals with a frequency and intensity that seems to be always on the increase. Corruption has become a `hot issue' and is now a major topic of political competition, even in the industrialized democracies. Yet, to a large extent, economists have remained vague about what can be done to reduce it. A main concern is the lack of evidence in support …
Rents, Competition, and Corruption
Version of Record
Preferences over Inflation and Unemployment
Preferences over Inflation and Unemployment: Evidence from Surveys of Happiness by Rafael Di Tella, Robert J. MacCulloch and Andrew J. Oswald. Published in volume 91, issue 1, pages 335-341 of American Economic Review, March 2001
Informal Family Insurance and the Design of the Welfare State
Journal Article Informal Family Insurance and the Design of the Welfare State Get access Rafael Di Tella, Rafael Di Tella Harvard University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Robert MacCulloch Robert MacCulloch London School of Economics Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 112, Issue 481, July 2002, Pages 481–503, https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-…
The Role of Wages and Auditing during a Crackdown on Corruption in the City of Buenos Aires
We study the prices paid for basic inputs during a crackdown on corruption in the public hospitals of the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina, during 1996–97. We find a well‐defined, negative effect on the measures used to capture corruption. Prices paid by hospitals for basic, homogeneous inputs decrease by 15 percent during the first 9 months of the crackdown. After this period prices increase, but they are still 10 percent lower than those prevail…
The Macroeconomics of Happiness
We show that macroeconomic movements have strong effects on the happiness of nations. First, we find that there are clear microeconomic patterns in the psychological well-being levels of a quarter of a million randomly sampled Europeans and Americans from the 1970s to the 1990s. Happiness equations are monotonically increasing in income, and have similar structure in different countries. Second, movements in reported well-being are correlated wit…
Capture by Threat
We analyze a simple stochastic environment in which policy makers can be threatened by "nasty" interest groups. In the absence of these groups, the policy maker's desire for reelection guarantees that good policies are implemented for every realization of the shock. When pressure groups can harass the policy maker, good policies will be chosen for only a subset of states of nature. Hence, honest and able leaders might implement bad policies, and …
Inequality and happiness
Unemployment Benefits as a Substitute for a Conservative Central Banker
In the many years since their introduction, positive theories of inflation have rarely been tested. This paper documents a negative relationship between inflation and the welfare state (proxied by the parameters of the unemployment benefit program) that is to be expected in such theories. Because unemployment benefits make the monetary authority less concerned about the plight of the unemployed, building a welfare state has a similar effect to ap…
Do Police Reduce Crime? Estimates Using the Allocation of Police Forces After a Terrorist Attack
An important challenge in the crime literature is to isolate causal effects of police on crime. Following a terrorist attack on the main Jewish center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in July 1994, all Jewish institutions received police protection. Thus, this hideous event induced a geographical allocation of police forces that can be presumed exogenous in a crime regression. Using data on the location of car thefts before and after the attack, we fi…
Some Uses of Happiness Data in Economics
Happiness research is based on the idea that it is fruitful to study empirical measures of individual welfare. The most common is the answer to a simple well-being question such as "Are you Happy?" Hundreds of thousands of individuals have been asked this question, in many countries and over many years. Researchers have begun to use these data to tackle a variety of important questions in economics. Some require strong assumptions concerning inte…
Plata o Plomo
We present a model where groups attempt to influence policies using both bribes (plata, Spanish for silver) and the threat of punishment (plomo, Spanish for lead). We then use it to make predictions about the quality of a country's public officials and to understand the role of institutions granting politicians with immunity from legal prosecution. The use of punishment lowers the returns from public office and reduces the incentives of high-abil…
The Formation of Beliefs
We study the formation of beliefs in a squatter settlement in the outskirts of Buenos Aires exploiting a natural experiment that induced an allocation of property rights that is exogenous to the characteristics of the squatters. There are significant differences in the beliefs that squatters with and without land titles declare to hold. Lucky squatters who end up with legal titles report beliefs closer to those that favor the workings of a free m…
Gross national happiness as an answer to the Easterlin Paradox
Choosing Agents and Monitoring Consumption
There are a large number of cases where corruption has been discovered when investigating levels of consumption that appear to be hard to justify. The informativeness of an agent's level of consumption depends on his legal income and initial level of wealth, as conspicuous consumption by wealthy agents leads to little updating of the principal's belief about their honesty. This introduces a tendency to prefer poor agents as they are easier to mon…
The Economics of Crime
rates in Latin America are among the highest in the world, creating climates of fear and lawlessness in several countries. Despite this situation, there has been a lack of systematic effort to study crime in the region or the effectiveness of policies designed to tackle it. The Economics of Crime is a powerful corrective to this academic blind spot and makes an important contribution to the current debate on causes and solutions by applying lesso…
Happiness adaptation to income and to status in an individual panel
Criminal Recidivism after Prison and Electronic Monitoring
We study criminal recidivism in Argentina by focusing on the rearrest rates of two groups: individuals released from prison and individuals released from electronic monitoring. Detainees are randomly assigned to judges, and ideological differences across judges translate into large differences in the allocation of electronic monitoring to an otherwise similar population. Using these peculiarities of the Argentine setting, we argue that there is a…
Labour Market Shocks and the Demand for Trade Protection
We study preferences for government action in response to layoffs resulting from different types of labour-market shocks. We consider: technological change, a demand shift, bad management and three kinds of international outsourcing. Support for government intervention rises sharply in response to shocks and is heavily biased towards trade protection. Trade shocks generate more demand for protectionism and, among trade shocks, outsourcing to a de…
Risk factors for Covid-19 in-hospital mortality in Argentina
COVID-19 poses dire threats for low and middle-income countries (LMICs). Yet, there remains limited rigorous evidence describing the characteristics and outcomes of hospitalized patients for LMICs, and often the evidence was based on small samples and/or unicentric. The objective of this study was to examine risk factors of COVID-19 mortality in Argentina, a hard-hit middle-income Latin American country. We analyze data on 5,146 COVID-19 patients…
Economics (20 obras) · Political science (13 obras) · Law (10 obras) · Sociology (10 obras) · Corruption and Economic Development (9 obras) · Language change (8 obras) · Law (8 obras) · Crime, Illicit Activities, and Governance (6 obras) · Happiness (6 obras) · Politics (6 obras)