Charlie Rafkin

I'm a fifth-year economics PhD student at MIT, with interests in public, behavioral, and labor economics. I received an AB in mathematics from Dartmouth College in 2016.

Email: crafkin@mit.edu

Working Papers

+ Abstract + Replication archive + Online appendix + Fact sheet + Interactive map of mobility in Delhi

We study intergenerational mobility in India. We propose a new measure of upward mobility: the expected education rank of a child born to parents in the bottom half of the education distribution. This measure works well under data constraints common in developing countries and historical contexts. Intergenerational mobility in India has been constant and low since before liberalization. Among sons, we observe rising mobility for Scheduled Castes and declining mobility among Muslims. Daughters’ intergenerational mobility is lower than sons’, with less cross-group variation over time. A natural experiment suggests that affirmative action for Scheduled Castes has substantially improved their mobility.

Publications

“Optimal Regulation of E-cigarettes: Theory and Evidence” (with Hunt Allcott). NBER Working Paper #27000. American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2022.

+ Abstract + Replication archive

We model optimal e-cigarette regulation and estimate key parameters. Using tax changes and scanner data, we estimate relatively elastic demand. A demographic shift-share identification strategy suggests limited substitution between e-cigarettes and cigarettes. We field a new survey of public health experts, who report that vaping is more harmful than previously believed. In our model’s average Monte Carlo simulation, these results imply that optimal e-cigarette taxes are higher than recent norms. However, e-cigarette subsidies may be optimal if vaping is a stronger substitute for smoking and is safer than the experts report, or if consumers overestimate the health harms from vaping.

“Mortality Change Among Less Educated Americans” (with Sam Asher and Paul Novosad). American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2022.

+ Abstract + Replication archive (and general-use programs to create bounds)

Measurements of mortality change among less educated Americans can be biased because the least educated groups (e.g. dropouts) become smaller and more negatively selected over time. We show that mortality changes at constant education percentiles can be bounded with minimal assumptions. Middle-age mortality increases among non-Hispanic whites from 1992–2018 are driven almost entirely by the bottom 10% of the education distribution. Drivers of mortality change differ substantially across groups. Deaths of despair explain most of the mortality change among young non-Hispanic whites, but less among older whites and non-Hispanic blacks. Our bounds are applicable in many other contexts.

“When Guidance Changes: Government Stances and Public Beliefs” (with Advik Shreekumar and Pierre-Luc Vautrey). Journal of Public Economics, April 2021.

+ Abstract + Replication archive + Ungated version + Survey instruments

Governments often make early recommendations about issues that remain uncertain. Do governments’ early positions affect how much people believe the latest recommendations? We investigate this question using an incentivized online experiment with 1900 US respondents in early April 2020. We present all participants with the latest CDC projection about coronavirus death counts. We randomize exposure to information that highlights how President Trump previously downplayed the coronavirus threat. When the President’s inconsistency is salient, participants are less likely to revise their prior beliefs about death counts from the projection. They also report lower trust in the government. These results align with a simple model of signal extraction from government communication, and have implications for the design of changing guidelines in other settings.

Code

scfses: A Stata program to obtain quantiles of variables (point estimates and standard errors) in the Survey of Consumer Finances.