Are There Environmental Benefits from Driving Electric Vehicles? The Importance of Local Factors

By Stephen P. Holland, Erin T. Mansur, Nicholas Z. Muller, and Andrew J. Yates

American Economic Review, December 2016

We combine a theoretical discrete-choice model of vehicle purchases, an econometric analysis of electricity emissions, and the AP2 air pollution model to estimate the geographic variation in the environmental benefits from driving electric vehicles. The s...

Choice Inconsistencies among the Elderly: Evidence from Plan Choice in the Medicare Part D Program: Comment

By Jonathan D. Ketcham, Nicolai V. Kuminoff, and Christopher A. Powers

American Economic Review, December 2016

Consumers' enrollment decisions in Medicare Part D can be explained by Abaluck and Gruber's (2011) model of utility maximization with psychological biases or by a neoclassical version of their model that precludes such biases. We evaluate these competing ...

Choice Inconsistencies among the Elderly: Evidence from Plan Choice in the Medicare Part D Program: Reply

By Jason Abaluck and Jonathan Gruber

American Economic Review, December 2016

We explore the in- and out-of-sample robustness of tests for choice inconsistencies based on parameter restrictions in parametric models, focusing on tests proposed by Ketcham, Kuminoff, and Powers (2016). We argue that their nonparametric alternatives ar...

Male Is a Gender, Too: A Review of Why Gender Matters in Economics by Mukesh Eswaran

By Julie A. Nelson

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2016

Mukesh Eswaran's Why Gender Matters in Economics presents a generally well-researched review of the literature on women and economics, and admirably attempts take a global perspective. Eswaran's analysis is compromised, however, by an unreflective ...

Making Case-Based Decision Theory Directly Observable

By Han Bleichrodt, Martin Filko, Amit Kothiyal, and Peter P. Wakker

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2017

Case-based decision theory (CBDT) provided a new way of revealing preferences, with decisions under uncertainty determined by similarities with cases in memory. This paper introduces a method to measure CBDT that requires no commitment to parametric famil...

Understanding Consumption Behavior: Evidence from Consumers' Reaction to Shopping Vouchers

By Kamhon Kan, Shin-Kun Peng, and Ping Wang

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2017

This paper advances our understanding of consumption behavior using the 2009 Taiwan Shopping Voucher Program. This program was universal and well publicized, and its payment to each individual was medium-sized. Based on survey data, it is found that the m...

A Structural Model of the Retail Market for Illicit Drugs

By Manolis Galenianos and Alessandro Gavazza

American Economic Review, March 2017

We estimate a model of illicit drugs markets using data on purchases of crack cocaine. Buyers are searching for high-quality drugs, but they determine drugs' quality (i.e., their purity) only after consuming them. Hence, sellers can rip off first-time buy...

The Economic Consequences of Social-Network Structure

By Matthew O. Jackson, Brian W. Rogers, and Yves Zenou

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2017

We survey the literature on the economic consequences of the structure of social networks. We develop a taxonomy of "macro" and "micro" characteristics of social-interaction networks and discuss both the theoretical and empirical findings concerning the r...

Reducing Crime and Violence: Experimental Evidence from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in Liberia

By Christopher Blattman, Julian C. Jamison, and Margaret Sheridan

American Economic Review, April 2017

We show that a number of noncognitive skills and preferences, including patience and identity, are malleable in adults, and that investments in them reduce crime and violence. We recruited criminally engaged men and randomized one-half to eight weeks of c...

Sacred versus Pseudo-sacred Values: How People Cope with Taboo Trade-Offs

By Philip E. Tetlock, Barbara A. Mellers, and J. Peter Scoblic

American Economic Review, May 2017

Psychologists have documented widespread public deference to "sacred values" that communities, formally or informally, exempt from tradeoffs with secular limits, like money. This work has, however, been largely confined to low-stakes settings. As the stak...

Trumping Norms: Lab Evidence on Aggressive Communication before and after the 2016 US Presidential Election

By Jennie Huang and Corinne Low

American Economic Review, May 2017

This paper provides evidence from a negotiation experiment that the 2016 US presidential election of Donald Trump had a profound impact on individual behavior in the lab. Using a Battle of the Sexes game with unstructured communication, we find that post-...

Gender Differences in the Allocation of Low-Promotability Tasks: The Role of Backlash

By Linda Babcock, Maria P. Recalde, and Lise Vesterlund

American Economic Review, May 2017

This paper examines whether backlash exacerbates gender differences in time spent on low-promotability tasks. We ask whether gender differences found in previous research--women receiving more requests than men to do these tasks and women being more likel...

No Gender Difference in Willingness to Compete When Competing against Self

By Coren L. Apicella, Elif E. Demiral, and Johanna Mollerstrom

American Economic Review, May 2017

We report on two experiments investigating whether there is a gender difference in the willingness to compete against oneself (self-competition), similar to what is found when competing against others (other-competition). In one laboratory and one online ...

Shopping While Female: Who Pays Higher Prices and Why?

By Anne Fitzpatrick

American Economic Review, May 2017

I estimate gender price discrimination in the Ugandan antimalarial drug market with an audit study. To determine whether results are consistent with statistical or taste-based discrimination, I contrast gender results with results by ethnicity (tribe). Ve...

The Mechanism Is Truthful, Why Aren't You?

By Avinatan Hassidim, Déborah Marciano, Assaf Romm, and Ran I. Shorrer

American Economic Review, May 2017

Honesty is the best policy in the face of a strategy-proof mechanism--irrespective of others' behavior, the best course of action is to report one's preferences truthfully. We review evidence from different markets in different countries and find that a s...

Mistaken Play in the Deferred Acceptance Algorithm: Implications for Positive Assortative Matching

By Alex Rees-Jones

American Economic Review, May 2017

Recent literature has documented failures of truthful preference reporting in the strategy-proof deferred acceptance algorithm. I consider the implications of these strategic mistakes for a common welfare consideration: the ability of the mechanism to sor...

Worker Betas: Five Facts about Systematic Earnings Risk

By Fatih Guvenen, Sam Schulhofer-Wohl, Jae Song, and Motohiro Yogo

American Economic Review, May 2017

The magnitude of and heterogeneity in systematic earnings risk has important implications for various theories in macro, labor, and financial economics. Using administrative data, we document how the aggregate risk exposure of individual earnings to GDP a...

Consumption Smoothing and Frequency of Benefit Payments of Cash Transfer Programs

By Emma Aguila, Arie Kapteyn, and Francisco Perez-Arce

American Economic Review, May 2017

We analyze two noncontributory Mexican pension programs for the elderly. Both paid similar amounts, but one paid monthly while the other paid every two months. The Life Cycle Hypothesis suggests frequency of benefits payments should not affect consumption...

Validating Migration Responses to Flooding Using Satellite and Vital Registration Data

By Joyce J. Chen, Valerie Mueller, Yuanyuan Jia, and Steven Kuo-Hsin Tseng

American Economic Review, May 2017

Rainfall measures may be imperfect proxies for floods, given factors such as upstream water balance, proximity to rivers, and topography. We check the robustness of flooding-migration relationships by combining nationally-representative survey data with m...

Challenges to Replication and Iteration in Field Experiments: Evidence from Two Direct Mail Shots

By Jake Bowers, Nathaniel Higgins, Dean Karlan, Sarah Tulman, and Jonathan Zinman

American Economic Review, May 2017

We conducted an experiment marketing microloans to farmers in the USA during Spring 2015 and found a simple direct mail letter increased borrowing from a government program. The subsequent spring, we built on this finding and enriched the design to test f...