research

Rationing policies are often designed with equity considerations in mind, yet whether equalizing exposure delivers equal economic impacts remains underexplored. We study electricity outages in South Africa, where rationing equalizes exposure across locations. Combining high frequency outage data with geocoded transactions from over 11,000 firms from 2021 to 2023, we show that equal exposure does not imply equal impact. Average sales remain unchanged, but outages induce reallocation: below-median firms lose roughly 11 percent of average revenue, while above-median firms gain 10 percent. We provide novel evidence that consumer substitution drives these effects and that advance notice amplifies disparities.

We examine the impact of incentives on intrinsic motivation after their removal. We follow up with parents three years after exposure to a bracelet incentive given to children upon timely vaccination in Sierra Leone. We leverage the design of an experiment under which clinics were randomly assigned to either offer incentives or not. Since only parents who had a newborn at the time were eligible, we also exploit individual variation in exposure within clinics. First, we find that eligibility to an incentive for an earlier child reduces parents' motivation to vaccinate their subsequent child on time, with decreases of 5 to 11 percent in the number of timely visits compared to unexposed parents. There are no impacts on vaccination rates by 15 months of age, suggesting parents delay vaccination, but do not abstain. Second, parents living in incentive communities who were ineligible at the time are unaffected, ruling out that results are driven by changes in community norms or clinic practices. Third, incentives that focus parents' attention on caring for their child's health do not lead to adverse effects. Together, our results suggest that incentives that shift parents' attention to an external reward, can crowd-out intrinsic motivation and negatively impact behaviors once removed.