Zach Freitas-Groff

Working Papers

Persistence in Policy: Evidence from Close Votes

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Policy choices sometimes appear stubbornly persistent, even when they become politically unpopular or economically damaging. This paper offers the first systematic empirical investigation of how persistent policy choices are, defined as whether an electorate’s or legislature’s decisions affect whether a policy is in place decades later. I create a new dataset that tracks the historical record of more than 800 policies that were the subjects of close U.S. state referendums since 1900. In a regression discontinuity design, I estimate that passing a referendum increases the chance a corresponding policy is operative 20, 40, or even 100 years later by over 40 percentage points. I collect additional data on U.S. Congressional legislation and international referendums and use existing data on state legislation to document similar policy persistence for a range of institutional environments, cultures, and topics. I develop a theoretical model to distinguish between possible causes of persistence, and I present evidence that persistence arises because of how rarely policies overcome procedural barriers to reform. Calibrating my model suggests that many policies remain in place—or not—regardless of popular support.

Paying It Forward (and Back): An Experiment on Sequential Giving
with Ben Grodeck, Oliver Hauser, and Johannes Lohse
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Within both families and states, important policies involve pay-it-forward schemes where one cohort invests in the next cohort (e.g., via education), sometimes with an expectation of a future reward (e.g., retirement support). We study whether altruism, reciprocity, social information, or self-interested equilibriums can sustain forward transfers in an experimental setting. A sequence of players choose whether to allocate some of an endowment to be multiplied and given to a future, prior, or contemporary player. By varying the option set and the information set, we can separate possible mechanisms for sustaining investment in the future.We find that the ability to give back increases the willingness to give forward, but a social preference for reciprocity rather than individual rationality drives the result.

The Effects of Large Group Meetings on the Spread of COVID-19: The Case of Trump Rallies
with B. Douglas Bernheim, Nina Buchmann, Sebastián Otero
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We investigate the effects of large group meetings on the spread of COVID-19 by studying the impact of eighteen Trump campaign rallies. To capture the effects of subsequent contagion within the pertinent communities, our analysis encompasses up to ten post-rally weeks for each event. Our method is based on a collection of regression models, one for each event, that capture the relationships between post-event outcomes and pre-event characteristics, including demographics and the trajectory of COVID-19 cases, in similar counties. We explore a total of 24 procedures for identifying sets of matched counties. For the vast majority of these variants, our estimate of the average treatment effect across the eighteen events implies that they increased subsequent confirmed cases of COVID-19 by more than 250 per 100,000 residents. Extrapolating this figure to the entire sample, we conclude that these eighteen rallies ultimately resulted in more than 30,000 incremental confirmed cases of COVID-19. Applying county-specific post-event death rates, we conclude that the rallies likely led to more than 700 deaths (not necessarily among attendees).

Work in Progress

Positive Social Discount Rates: An Experiment on Equity Preferences Across Cohorts
with Karan Makkar
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In an incentivized survey experiment, we investigate whether a representative sample's behavior is consistent with the standard approach to the intergenerational social discount rate. In three separate modules, respondents allocate resources between two people of the same age at different points in time, between time periods for the same person, and between time periods for themselves. We find that respondents consistently discount future consumption less when deciding across people than when deciding for themselves or another person. The divergence among respondents' discount rates and with actual interest rates raises theoretical issues, such as potential arbitrage opportunities and inconsistent treatment of members of different age groups. When confronted with these issues, respondents are insensitive to efficiency considerations that dominate the traditional economic approach to the social discount rate. Respondents' political beliefs, donation choices, and longer-term decisions are consistent with a significant divergence between respondents' preferences for intergenerational equity and the conventional welfarist treatment of intertemporal choice.
Interventionist Preferences and the Welfare State: The Case of In-Kind Nutrition Assistance
with Sandro Ambuehl, B. Douglas Bernheim, and Tony Fan
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Poverty assistance is often administered in-kind even though cash transfers might raise recipients’ welfare more effectively. We characterize the political economy constraint that paternalistic motives impose on the welfare system. In our experiment, a representative sample of U.S. citizens reveal their motives by deciding whether to constrain real U.S. food stamp recipients’ choices between in-kind donations and cash equivalents we disburse. The modal respondent (40%) imposes the strictest possible constraints, while 30% impose no constraints. Hence the majority’s behavior is consistent with deontological motives rather than trade-off thinking. Yet, because of biased beliefs about recipient preferences, respondents underestimate the restrictiveness of their interventions, suggesting that they are partly misguided. When respondents decide between restricting recipients whom they believed should be restricted and giving choice to those whom they believe should have choice, they place substantially more weight on the former motive, which, too, tends to increase the severity of restrictions. Overall, respondents’ goal is not to ensure sufficient healthy nutrition, but to prevent consumption of items deemed inappropriate. While respondents reveal racial and gender stereotypes in various survey questions, neither donor nor recipient demographics have substantial effects on restriction decisions, though restrictions increase with respondents’ political conservatism. In-experiment behavior correlates strongly with views about government policy.
Why Are Fewer Grocery Shoppers Buying Meat? Declining Grocery Sales, Prices, and Cultural Change
with Carl Meyer
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The past decades have seen a number of new policies and food technology businesses concerned with alleviating animal welfare or environmental impacts of animal agriculture. We study whether there is evidence that consumer behavior is changing in parallel by examining real grocery purchases matched with machine-scanned label data. We find that meat consumption has been at its highest in recent years, consistent with prior observations, but we offer the first observational evidence that a growing share of the population is purchasing less or no meat and other animal products. While some of this trend can be explained by changes in the volume of grocery purchases, we suggest that media and generational turnover are further driving this trend. We finally discuss the plausible effects of meat alternatives, finding that while they affect meat consumption at a low volume now, they could play a major role in the future.

Working Papers

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