Ilyana Kuziemko

How Much Is a Seat on the Security Council Worth? Foreign Aid and Bribery at the United Nations

Ten of the 15 seats on the U.N. Security Council are held by rotating members serving two‐year terms. We find that a country’s U.S. aid increases by 59 percent and its U.N. aid by 8 percent when it rotates onto the council. This effect increases during years in which key diplomatic events take place (when members’ votes should be especially valuable), and the timing of the effect closely tracks a country’s election to, and exit from, the council. Finally, the U.N. results appear to be driven by UNICEF, an organization over which the United States has historically exerted great control.

Human Capital Spillovers in Families: Do Parents Learn from or Lean on Their Children?

I model how children’s acquisition of a given form of human capital incentivizes adults in their household to either learn from them (if children can teach the skill to adults, adults’ cost of learning falls) or lean on them (if children’s human capital substitutes for that of adults in household production, adults’ benefit from learning falls). Using variation in compliance with an English-immersion mandate in California schools, I find that English instruction improved immigrant children’s English proficiency but discouraged adults living with them from acquiring the language. Whether family members “learn” or “lean” affects the externalities associated with education policies.

Support for Redistribution in an Age of Rising Inequality: New Stylized Facts and Some Tentative Explanations

Despite the large increases in economic inequality since 1970, American survey respondents exhibit no increase in support for redistribution, contrary to the predictions from standard theories of redistributive preferences. We replicate these results but further demonstrate substantial heterogeneity by demographic group. In particular, the two groups that have most moved against income redistribution are the elderly and African Americans. We find little evidence that these subgroup trends are explained by relative economic gains or growing cultural conservatism, two common explanations. We further show that the trend among the elderly is uniquely American, at least relative to other developed countries with comparable survey data. While we are unable to provide definitive evidence on the cause of these two groups’ declining redistributive support, we provide additional correlations that may offer fruitful directions for future research on the topic. One story consistent with the data on elderly trends is that older Americans worry that redistribution will come at their expense, in particular through cuts to Medicare. We find that the elderly have grown increasingly opposed to government provision of health insurance and that controlling for this tendency explains about 40 percent of their declining support for redistribution. For blacks, controlling for their declining support for race-targeted aid explains nearly 45 percent of their differential decline in redistributive preferences, which raises a further question: Why has support for race-targeted aid fallen during a period when black economic catch-up to whites has stalled?