Erzo F. P. Luttmer

Group Loyalty and the Taste for Redistribution

Interpersonal preferences—preferences that depend on the characteristics of others—are typically hard to infer from observable individual behavior. As an alternative approach, this paper uses survey data to investigate interpersonal preferences. I show that self‐reported attitudes toward welfare spending are determined not only by financial self‐interest but also by interpersonal preferences. These interpersonal preferences are characterized by a negative exposure effect—individuals decrease their support for welfare as the welfare recipiency rate in their community rises—and racial group loyalty—individuals increase their support for welfare spending as the share of local recipients from their own racial group rises. These findings help to explain why levels of welfare benefits are relatively low in racially heterogeneous states.

The Misallocation of Housing Under Rent Control

When there are binding price controls, there are shortages and the allocation of goods across consumers may not be efficient. In general, the misallocation costs of price controls are first order, while the classic welfare losses due to undersupply are second order. This paper presents an empirical methodology for estimating the degree of misallocation of housing units due to rent control in New York City. This methodology involves comparing the relative consumption of different demographic groups within the rent controlled area with the relative levels of consumption in a free market area. Our best estimate of the costs of rent control in New York due to the misallocation of rental apartments is 200 dollars per apartment annually.

Would People Behave Differently If They Better Understood Social Security? Evidence from a Field Experiment

This paper presents the results of a field experiment in which a sample of older workers was randomized between a treatment group that was given information about key Social Security provisions and a control group that was not. The experiment was designed to examine whether it is possible to affect individual behavior using a relatively inexpensive informational intervention about the provisions of a public program and to explore the mechanisms underlying the behavior change. We find that our relatively mild intervention (sending an informational brochure and an invitation to a web-tutorial) increased labor force participation one year later by 4 percentage points relative to the control group mean of 74 percent and that this effect is driven by a 7.2 percentage point increase among female subjects. In addition to affecting actual labor supply behavior, the information intervention increased survey measures of the perceived returns to working longer, especially among female respondents.

Private investment and government protection

Hurricane Katrina did massive damage because New Orleans and the Gulf Coast were not appropriately protected. Wherever natural disasters threaten, the government—in its traditional role as public goods provider—must decide what level of protection to provide to an area. It does so by purchasing protective capital, such as levees for a low-lying city. (“Protection” also consists of prohibiting projects that raise risk levels, such as draining swamps.)We show that if private capital is more likely to locate in better-protected areas, as would be expected, then the marginal social value of protection will increase with the level of protection provided. That is, the benefit function is convex, contrary to the normal assumption of concavity. When the government protects and the private sector invests, there may be multiple Nash equilibria due to the ill-behaved nature of the benefit function. Policy makers must compare them, rather than merely follow local optimality conditions, to find the equilibrium offering the highest social welfare.There is usually considerable uncertainty about the amount of private investment that will accompany any level of protection, further complicating the government’s choice problem. We show that when deciding on the level of protection to provide now, the government must take account of the option value of increasing the level of protection in the future. We briefly examine but dismiss the value of rules of thumb, such as building for 1000-year floods or other rules that ignore benefits and costs.

The insurance value of state tax-and-transfer programs

This paper estimates the total value that individuals derive from their states tax-and-transfer program, and shows how this value varies by income. The paper decomposes this total value into two components: redistributive value, which is due to predictable changes in income (and family circumstances), and insurance value, which occurs when taxes and transfers compensate for unexpected income shocks. Our approach is a forward-looking one, where we examine income and transfers net of taxes over a 10-year period. We model state taxes (personal income taxes, the EITC, and sales taxes) and state means-tested transfers (AFDC/TANF and Medicaid/SCHIP). The calculations are made using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and allow for analysis of the role of changes in tax-and-transfer programs, demographics, and income in the value of state net benefits over a period of more than 30years. We find that the redistributive value of state tax-and-transfer programs sharply declines with income, but that the insurance value is increasing in income. The resulting total value still declines with income, but not nearly as sharply as the redistributive value. Hence, the insurance value mitigates the incentives for mobility that would “undo” state redistributive spending.

Decision Complexity as a Barrier to Annuitization

We show that people have difficulty valuing annuities, and this, instead of a preference for lumpsums, helps explain observed low annuity demand. Although the median price at which people are willing to sell an annuity stream is close to the actuarial value, many responses diverge greatly from optimizing behavior. Moreover, people will pay substantially less to buy than to sell annuities. We conclude that boundedly rational consumers adopt “buy low, sell high” heuristics when confronting a complex trade-off. This suggests that many consumers do not make optimizing decisions, underscoring the difficulty of explaining cross-sectional annuity valuation differences using standard models.

Complexity as a Barrier to Annuitization: Do Consumers Know How to Value Annuities?

This paper provides experimental evidence that individuals have difficulty valuing annuities, and this difficulty – rather than a preference for lump sums – can help explain observed low levels of annuity purchases. Although the median price at which people are willing to sell an annuity is close to median actuarial values, this masks notable heterogeneity in responses including substantial numbers of respondents whose responses are difficult to reconcile with optimizing behavior under any reasonable parameter assumptions. We also discover that people are willing to pay substantially less to buy a larger annuity, a result not due to liquidity constraints or endowment effects. Strikingly, we also learn that individual responses to the buy versus sell decisions are negatively correlated, an effect that is stronger for the less financially sophisticated. Our findings are consistent with boundedly rational consumers who adopt a “buy low, sell high” heuristic when faced with a complex trade-off. Moreover, at the margin, subjective valuations vary nearly one-for-one with actuarial values but are uncorrelated with utility-based measures designed to measure the insurance value of annuities. This supports the hypothesis that people use simplifying heuristics to think about annuities, rather than engaging in optimizing behavior. Results also underscore the difficulty of explaining the cross-sectional variation in annuity valuations using standard empirical models. Our findings raise doubt about whether most consumers can make optimal decisions about annuitization.

Permits to Elicit Information

This paper identifies a novel function for permits: they can be used by the government as an instrument to elicit information about the intentions of private investors to put capital into an area. Such information is a crucial input for the government’s decision on how much infrastructure to build in an area, such as the capacity of an elementary school or a public transit system in an expanding community. Decisions on infrastructure that protects against natural disasters require precisely this information. For example, a levee should be built higher and stronger the more capital it will protect. Current experience in New Orleans makes this evident, particularly given the considerable uncertainties about the private sector’s intention of returning to or investing in areas at risk. Permits can replace unreliable “cheap talk” elicitation devices, such as surveys or town meetings, and can be used as an input into prediction or futures markets. An important innovation in our procedure is to use markets to elicit information separately from hedgers (the investors in our model) and speculators.