19 March 2025
- Title: Does wealth inhibit criminal behavior? Evidence from Lottery winners in Sweden and the US (with David Cesarini, NYU, Adam Isen, John Hopkins, Robert Östling, SSE and Christofer Schroder, ECB)
- Speaker: Professor Erik Lindqvist, Stockholm University
- Location: Room 2.2, 3 East
- Time: 2.45pm – 4pm
About this seminar
In this seminar, Professor Erik Lindqvist will discuss the below research
The aim of this paper is to estimate the causal effect of financial windfalls on criminal behavior. To this end, we match data from lotteries in Sweden and the United States to data on the universe of criminal convictions (Sweden) and incarcerations (US). For both Sweden and the US, we fail to detect statistically significant effects of lottery wealth on winners' criminal behavior. For both countries, our estimates allow us to rule out effects much smaller than the cross-sectional gradients between income and crime. We also estimate null effects of parental lottery wealth on child delinquency.
Please contact Dr Jonathan James (j.james@bath.ac.uk) if you would like to join Professor Erik Lindqvist for lunch or dinner (or meet with him during the day).
To be arranged
This seminar has been postponed. We will update this page with a new time and date soon.
- Title: Public Service Delivery, Exclusion, and Externalities: Theory and Experimental Evidence from India
- Speaker: Professor Maitreesh Ghatak, London School of Economics
- Location: Room 2.2, 3 East
- Time: 2.45pm – 4pm
About this seminar
Professor Maitreesh Ghatak will discuss the research work outlined below.
This study explores the interaction between the quality of public services, the implementation of user fees, and the resulting potential for exclusion, that can lead to negative externalities. Our theoretical framework takes account of the possible externalities that result from excluded users accessing alternative options in the context of sanitation, i.e., open defecation, and challenges the conventional wisdom that higher quality unequivocally leads to increased use. Instead, it highlights the ambiguity that results from a simultaneous increase in usage due to improved services (quality effect) and a decrease caused by the fees (price-elasticity effect). We then provide empirical evidence from a randomized controlled trial, where we incentivized the quality of water and sanitation services in the two largest cities of Uttar Pradesh, India. We show that higher service quality increases fee compliance but excludes some users, leading to unintended negative health externalities. Our detailed data provides evidence that results are driven by changes in caretaker behaviour. This finding highlights the need to be cautious regarding user fees, especially for public services involving significant externalities, and in settings where the users are very poor.
Please contact Professor Ajit Mishra if you would like to join for lunch or dinner or meet with Maitreesh during the day.