Alireza Mohammadi Sepahvand

Uniform reforms that lower access barriers to public resources can unintentionally reinforce inequality. When access is determined through strategic competition, these reforms shift the threshold for participation: they make all players more efficient but raise the entry threshold as well. We formalize this threshold-shifting mechanism in a model of redistribution as a decentralized contest, where heterogeneous contest efficiencies jointly determine who competes and how the gains are divided. The model yields two core results. First, uniform efficiency gains—equal reductions in access costs—fail to expand participation and amplify inequality among active participants by strengthening the relative advantages of the already efficient. Second, participation-expanding interventions that bring excluded players into the contest reduce inequality between participants and non-participants and can also reduce aggregate dissipation, particularly when the entrant is sufficiently efficient or when pre-intervention contest strengths of participants are highly concentrated.

I study the causal impact of demonstrations in Iran on short-term migration intentions from September 16 to December 15, 2022. Using a combination of text-data analysis, web scraping, and two comprehensive protest datasets, I document 397 demonstrations across all 31 provincial capitals to estimate their influence on migration intentions, measured through a migration-related Google search index. To address endogeneity concerns, I employ an adverse weather index as an instrumental variable, demonstrating its significant negative impact on daily protest occurrences. The findings indicate that protests lead to a significant reduction in migration search intensity for up to 19 days at the 5 percent significance level, with decreases ranging from 27% (3-day average) to 8% (19-day average). This effect is more pronounced when protests are nonviolent, involve women and students, and occur on a larger scale. While political instability is commonly viewed as a push factor for migration, two key explanations help contextualize the observed reduction in migration intentions. First, nonviolent, widespread protests featuring prominent participation by women and students may signal potential for reform and civic resistance, altering public perceptions about the country’s future and fostering a sense of agency. Second, the focus on dress codes and mandatory hijab regulations may resonate strongly with women, diminishing their migration inclination. Supporting these interpretations, I find no evidence that government responses, such as internet blackouts or repression, or changes in public focus and media coverage mediate the observed changes in short-term migration preferences. Instead, media coverage slightly increases migration intentions (by approximately 0.5%), potentially driven by state media’s portrayal of protest violence aimed at discrediting dissent or social media’s tendency to amplify engagement-driven and violent-oriented content.

This paper studies the simultaneous intervention of a social planner in a criminal network. The social planner implements a targeting policy, and criminals decide upon their level of effort simultaneously based on their beliefs about their neighbors before the realization of the network. We provide conditions that guarantee the existence and uniqueness of the Bayesian Nash equilibrium of the game. The equilibrium is fully characterized by a degree threshold; that is, only criminals with a degree above this threshold are targeted with positive probabilities. Furthermore, the criminals with same degrees adopt identical criminal efforts proportional to their degree in the equilibrium. We further conduct comparative statics with respect to the network’s characteristics and the social planner’s budget. Our final analysis compares the aggregate crime reduction from the simultaneous intervention to that of the sequential intervention.