MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

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1 MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY MATT LOWE OFFICE CONTACT INFORMATION 77 Massachusetts Avenue, E HOME CONTACT INFORMATION 132 Banks Street Cambridge, MA Mobile: MIT PLACEMENT OFFICER Professor Benjamin Olken MIT PLACEMENT ADMINISTRATOR Ms. Eva Konomi Mr. Thomas Dattilo DOCTORAL STUDIES Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) PhD, Economics, Expected completion June 2018 DISSERTATION: Essays in Development and Political Economy DISSERTATION COMMITTEE AND REFERENCES Professor Daron Acemoglu 77 Massachusetts Avenue, E Professor Abhijit Banerjee 77 Massachusetts Avenue, E Professor Esther Duflo 77 Massachusetts Avenue, E Professor Frank Schilbach 77 Massachusetts Avenue, E PRIOR EDUCATION University of Oxford, UK MSc, Economics for Development, Distinction (ranked 1 st ) University of Cambridge, UK BA, Economics, First Class Honours (ranked 1 st ) CITIZENSHIP British GENDER: Male

2 DECEMBER PAGE 2 FIELDS TEACHING EXPERIENCE Primary Field: Development Economics Secondary Fields: Political Economy, Behavioral Economics J-PAL Executive Education, New Delhi Guest Lecturer Economics of Incentives (Undergraduate) Teaching Assistant to Professor Bengt Holmström Average Student Rating: 6.4/ Microeconomic Theory and Public Policy (Undergraduate) Teaching Assistant to Professor David Autor Average Student Rating: 6.1/ Introduction to Political Economy (Graduate) Teaching Assistant to Professors Benjamin Olken and Thomas Fujiwara Average Student Rating: 6.4/7 Indian Economic Service Training, New Delhi Teaching Assistant Summer 2017 Spring 2017 Fall 2014 Fall 2014 Summer 2014, Summer 2015 RELEVANT POSITIONS FELLOWSHIPS, HONORS, AND AWARDS Research Assistant to Professors Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee Research Assistant to Professor Dave Donaldson Research Assistant to Professor Robert Townsend Projects Officer, IMF, Washington D.C. Summer 2011 Consultant, World Bank 2011 J-PAL Fellowship MIT Fellowship Kennedy Scholarship George Webb Medley Prize for Best Performance in MSc 2011 Adam Smith Tripos Prize 2010 Malthus Prize for Economics 2010 Senior Keller Prize 2010 Grants: MIT-India Program Summer 2017 J-PAL Governance Initiative 2016, 2017 Weiss Family Program Fund 2015, 2016 Center for International Studies Summer Grant 2015, 2016 George and Obie Shultz Fund 2015, 2016 Private Enterprise Development in Low Income Countries 2015 Exploratory Grant (with Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee)

3 DECEMBER PAGE 3 PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES Referee: American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, American Economic Review, Journal of Development Economics, Journal of Macroeconomics, Journal of Public Economics, Review of Economics and Statistics. Russell Sage Behavioral Camp Participant Summer 2016 Presentations: DEVPEC Conference, Stanford 2015 Political Economy Lunch, Harvard 2015 Association for the Study of Religion, Economics and 2015 Culture Conference, Boston AidData Workshop, Berlin 2015 Macroeconomic Challenges Facing LICs Conference, IMF 2014 African Econometric Society Meetings, Uganda 2012 C.r.e.t.e. Conference, Greece 2012 RESEARCH PAPERS Types of Contact: A Field Experiment on Collaborative and Adversarial Caste Integration (Job Market Paper). Press: Marginal Revolution; Hindustan Times Integration is a common policy used to reduce discrimination, but different types of integration may have different effects. This paper estimates the effects of two types of integration: collaborative and adversarial. I recruited 1,261 young Indian men from different castes and randomly assigned them either to participate in month-long cricket leagues or to serve as a control group. Players faced variation in collaborative contact, through random assignment to homogeneous-caste or mixed-caste teams, and adversarial contact, through random assignment of opponents. Collaborative contact reduces discrimination, leading to more cross-caste friendships and 33% less own-caste favoritism when voting to allocate cricket rewards. These effects have efficiency consequences, increasing both the quality of teammates chosen for a future match, and crosscaste trade and payouts in a real-stakes trading exercise. In contrast, adversarial contact generally has no, or even harmful, effects. Together these findings show that the economic effects of integration depend on the type of contact. Social Learning of Political Elites: A Natural Experiment in Iceland with Donghee Jo. Many legislative chambers are segregated along party lines, limiting cross-party interaction. Would there be less polarization if politicians were physically integrated? This paper tackles this question by exploiting random seating in Iceland s national Parliament. Since almost all voting is along party lines, we use a text-based measure of language similarity to proxy for the similarity of beliefs between any two politicians. Using this measure, we find an in-coalition effect: language similarity is greater for two politicians that share the same political coalition (government coalition or opposition) than for two politicians that do not, suggesting that the measure captures meaningful partisan differences in language. Next, we find that when two MPs randomly sit next to each other,

4 DECEMBER PAGE 4 their language similarity in the next parliamentary session (when no longer sitting together) is significantly higher, an effect that is roughly 16 to 25 percent of the size of the in-coalition effect. The persistence of effects suggests that politicians are learning from their neighbors, not just facing transient social pressure. However, this learning does not reflect the exchange of ideas across the aisle. The effects are large for neighbors in the same coalition group, at 29 to 53 percent of the in-coalition effect, with no evidence of learning from neighbors in the other group. Based on this evidence, integration of legislative chambers would likely slow down, but not prevent, the ingroup homogenization of political language. Bargaining Breakdown: Intra-Household Decision-Making and Women s Employment with Madeline McKelway. Women in the developing world often lack the power to make key household decisions. This comes at a cost myriad evidence suggests that the preferences of women are more aligned with development goals than those of men. We use a field experiment to test whether the lack of decision-making power of wives in India is due to a lack of information, or a lack of communication with husbands. We partnered with India s largest carpet manufacturer to offer employment opportunities to 495 married women. Gender differences in preferences meant there was an intra-household tension: women were often interested in working outside of the home, while their husbands opposed the idea. We experimentally varied how the job opportunity was presented to couples. To test for the effects of information, and the incentives of husbands to withhold it, we randomized whether enrollment tickets and job information were given to the women or to their husbands. For the non-targeted spouse, we crossrandomized whether they were informed about the job opportunity, giving variation in whether husbands had plausible deniability. To test for the importance of communication, some couples received the ticket and information together, with a chance to discuss the job. Overall, enrollment was low at 17%. Information was not a barrier to enrollment providing women with information about the opportunity had no effect because husbands did not strategically withhold information, despite having plausible deniability. Surprisingly, we find that having couples discuss the opportunity together decreased enrollment, by 6 to 9 percentage points. We conclude that policymakers should tread with care: intra-household communication may not be easily manipulated without unintended consequences for decision-making. The Selection of Top Politicians: A Natural Experiment in the United Kingdom s Parliament. Senior national politicians hold wide-ranging powers to direct policy-making and legislation, yet little is known about the nature of their selection: is the selection process efficient? Is there path-dependence in political careers after early successes? I exploit a natural randomized experiment in the UK Parliament to shed light on these questions. Each year, hundreds of Members of Parliament (MPs) enter a lottery for the opportunity to legislate. Using archival data from 1950 to 1990 I find that high-ranked winners are 34% (8 p.p.) more likely to ever become ministers and hold 28% (0.4) more political offices over their careers. Three pieces of evidence suggest that the key mechanism is exposure,

5 DECEMBER PAGE 5 as opposed to learning-by-doing or political survival. First, the effect of winning is larger for women, an under-represented group for which priors are likely to be more diffuse. Second, the effect is smaller if there are randomly more winners from the same party in the same year, dividing the attention of senior party members. Third, the effect is smaller when the MP has won before, consistent with diminishing returns to signals. These results suggest that early exposure can have long-run career effects even in information-rich political settings. RESEARCH IN PROGRESS Norms, Social Ties, and Bureaucratic Corruption with Raymond Fisman and Nishith Prakash. Bureaucratic corruption is common in the developing world, but little is known about why some bureaucrats and not others engage in rule-breaking behavior. We aim to explore the role of social norms and social ties in explaining corrupt behavior among India's elite bureaucrats and police officers. Rigid allocation rules provide two sources of identifying variation: first, officers are quasirandomly assigned to either their home state (as "insiders") or another state (as "outsiders"). This allows us to identify the causal effect of social ties on asset returns, a proxy for corrupt behavior. The effect is ex ante ambiguous local social networks may facilitate illicit exchange, or social pressure from local ties may even reduce corruption. Second, "outsiders" are quasi-randomly assigned to which non-home state they work in. By comparing the behavior of "outsiders" assigned to more vs. less corrupt states when together in the same context (e.g., for mid-career training), we can test whether officers internalize corrupt norms from their environment. Together, the results have implications for policies that aim to reduce corruption if social ties facilitate corruption, officers may be best assigned to non-home states; and if officers internalize the norms of behavior around them, policies that aim to reduce corruption of some individuals can have strong and persistent spillovers on others. Elite Capture or Elite Backlash? Evidence from West Bengal s Gram Panchayats with Cory Smith. Do strong vertical linkages exist across the political hierarchy? Are downward electoral spillovers positive (consistent with elite capture) or negative (consistent with elite backlash)? We focus on a highly politicized, low-income context West Bengal, India and use a close election regression discontinuity design to test for vertical linkages from state to village elections. We find evidence for large negative spillovers during a wave election against the incumbent Left Front: parties that quasi-randomly win state assembly elections perform significantly worse in local elections two years later. This finding is contrary to an elite capture hypothesis in which higher-level incumbents are able to exert control over lower-level elections. Instead, we argue that the Left Front are punished more in areas where they only barely won since in those areas their scandals are more salient. Does Mistrust Prevent Cooperation? The Case of Fruit Vendors in Delhi with Ben Roth. Duplicative efforts are commonplace among small-scale firms in the developing world. In ongoing work we study fruit vendors in Delhi who procure their produce from the same central marketplace. Despite clear returns to scale in

6 DECEMBER PAGE 6 procurement, vendors typically make several trips to the central marketplace each week for their own produce, occupying substantial time they could otherwise spend selling goods. We hypothesize that this market inefficiency is driven by potential partners inability to trust one another. Motivated by repeated game theory we intend to explore a variety of experimental interventions to build trust. Specifically we will offer random vendors assistance in monitoring and rewarding their partners for good behavior. We also explore behavioral explanations, such as overconfidence in one s own ability to procure the most profitable produce as a potential explanation for vendors extreme reluctance to cooperate. Social Learning from Locals: Natural Experiments in the Parliaments of Norway and Sweden with Donghee Jo. Group identity is multi-dimensional, and individuals may be more likely to learn from an outgroup member (along one dimension) when that outgroup member shares group membership along another dimension. We test this hypothesis in a political context with two salient group affiliations region and party. In Norway and Sweden, Members of Parliament from the same region sit together. In this context, cross-party learning may be possible, since cross-party neighbors are still ingroup members along one dimension that of region. To identify effects of political peers on voting, co-sponsorship, and language, we exploit the rule-based seating within region in Sweden seating is determined by age and tenure, and in Norway it is determined by vote share. In both cases we employ a regression discontinuity design to identify social learning between politicians.