Charlie Rafkin
I'm a PhD candidate at MIT Economics, with
interests in public and behavioral economics.
I'm on the 2023-2024 academic job market. Please see my MIT website here
and CV here.
Email: crafkin@mit.edu
Job Market Paper
“Eviction as Bargaining Failure: Hostility and Misperceptions in the Rental Housing Market” (with Evan Soltas), Fall 2023.
Abstract: Court evictions from rental housing are common but could be
avoided if landlords and tenants bargained
instead. Such evictions are inefficient if they
are costlier than bargaining. We test for two
potential causes of inefficient eviction — hostile
social preferences and misperceptions — by
conducting lab-in-the-field experiments in
Memphis, Tennessee with 1,808 tenants at risk of
eviction and 371 landlords of at-risk tenants. We
detect heterogeneous social preferences: 24% of
tenants and 15% of landlords exhibit hostility,
giving up money to hurt the other in real-stakes
Dictator Games, yet more than 50% of both are
highly altruistic. Both parties misperceive court
or bargaining payoffs in ways that undermine
bargaining. Motivated by the possibility of
inefficient eviction, we evaluate the Emergency
Rental Assistance Program, a prominent policy
intervention, and find small impacts on eviction
in an event-study design. To quantify the share of
evictions that are inefficient, we estimate a
bargaining model using the lab-in-the-field and
event-study evidence. Due to hostile social
preferences and misperceptions, one in four
evictions results from inefficient bargaining
failure. More than half would be inefficient
without altruism. Social preferences weaken
policy: participation in emergency rental
assistance is selected on social preferences,
which attenuates the program's impacts despite the
presence of inefficiency.
Working Papers
Publications
Code & Resources
GitHub
repo containing simple Javascript code for
improving Qualtrics surveys. Also includes a few
other tricks for general research workflow.
A
checklist that I run through before launching any Qualtrics survey.
scfses: A Stata
program to obtain quantiles of variables (point estimates and standard errors) in the Survey of Consumer Finances.