Margarita Kudaeva

How are contracts enforced when the state cannot compel compliance? We study contract enforcement in a large illegal gambling market where legal recourse is unavailable and participation is largely anonymous. We observe more than 70 percent of gamblers repay their debts, indicating substantial baseline enforcement even in the absence of formal courts. We interpret this descriptive pattern as consistent with a broader set of informal enforcement forces, including repeated interaction, credit constraints, and reputational considerations. We then provide experimental evidence on one specific channel by experimentally varying reputational stakes and the time available to repay. Increasing reputational sanctions and extending the payment deadline raises repayment by a modest but significant amount, from roughly 70 percent to about 77 percent. These effects imply that reputational incentives can strengthen cooperation to a meaningful degree. Overall, our evidence suggests that impersonal markets can sustain substantial repayment without state enforcement, and that reputational sanctions further increase compliance.

Broadband internet expansion may generate unintended social externalities alongside its economic benefits. This paper studies the causal effect of broadband expansion on crime using the staggered rollout of the Broadband China Policy (BCP). Using criminal judgment data in a difference-in-differences framework, I show that broadband expansion significantly increased recorded fraud, financial offenses, traffic accident-related and gambling crime. The evidence is consistent with multiple mechanisms, including lower coordination costs, behavioral responses linked to risky activity, and improved monitoring and detection capacity. To further examine mechanisms, I complement the Chinese setting with short-run social-media disruptions in Russia and find no detectable short-run effects on bodily harm, theft, or fraud. This contrast suggests that the Chinese results are more consistent with gradual adjustment associated with sustained digital expansion than with contemporaneous social-media access alone.

This paper examines the causal impact of entry through special elections on the behavior and productivity of members of the U.S. House of Representatives. Drawing on a newly assembled panel covering all members of the U.S. House of Representatives from the 112th–118th Congresses, and an instrumental-variables strategy that leverages deaths in office as a plausibly exogenous shock, we document persistent differences in both the types of representatives selected off-cycle and their subsequent legislative performance. Compared with their regularly elected counterparts from the same districts and Congresses, entrants elected mid-cycle participate more consistently in roll-call votes and exhibit stronger party-line discipline. They are modestly less moderate on conventional ideological scales, introduce legislation at similar rates, but are less likely to see their proposals enacted into law. The evidence supports a turnout-composition mechanism: when electorates are smaller and more ideologically engaged, selection tilts toward candidates with sharper partisan identities, enhancing institutional cohesion and reliability within party caucuses while limiting cross-party legislative success. Overall, our findings demonstrate that an elected official’s path to office exerts a systematic influence on both representational style and legislative productivity.