The Impact of Distance in Retail Markets

By Danny Edgel, Jean-François Houde, Peter Newberry, and Katja Seim

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

We examine the demand-side implications of Amazon's distribution and logistics investments. Our results indicate that online demand—transactions at Amazon and its competitors—does not respond to the consumer's proximity to Amazon's upstream fulfillmen...

Self-Preferencing at Amazon: Evidence from Search Rankings

By Chiara Farronato, Andrey Fradkin, and Alexander MacKay

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

We study whether Amazon engages in self-preferencing on its marketplace by favoring its own brands (e.g., Amazon Basics) in search. To address this question, we collect new micro-level consumer search data using a custom browser extension installed by a p...

Policies for Electrifying the Light-Duty Vehicle Fleet in the United States

By Cassandra Cole, Michael Droste, Christopher Knittel, Shanjun Li, and James H. Stock

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

Decarbonization of light-duty vehicles (LDVs) in the United States is an important policy priority. We investigate the roles of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act in accelerating the transition of LDVs to electric v...

Has Consumer Acceptance of Electric Vehicles Been Increasing? Evidence from Microdata on Every New Vehicle Sale in the United States

By Kenneth T. Gillingham, Arthur A. van Benthem, Stephanie Weber, Mohamed Ali Saafi, and Xin He

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

Electric vehicle (EV) sales have been rapidly growing around the world, spurred by technology advances and policy actions. This study leverages rich data on all individual new light-duty vehicles sold in the United States from 2014 to 2020. We examine how...

Anticipatory Migration Responses to Rural Climate Shocks

By Esteban J. Quiñones, Jenna Nobles, Fernando Riosmena, and Raphael Nawrotzki

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

Despite increased incidence and severity of climate shocks associated with climate change, observed levels of adaptation remain low. To assess if individuals adapt to the heat-induced crop losses of neighboring households in rural, agriculturally reliant ...

The Short-Term Labor Supply Response to the Expanded Child Tax Credit

By Brandon Enriquez, Damon Jones, and Ernie Tedeschi

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

We estimate the extensive and intensive margin labor supply response to the monthly Child Tax Credit disbursed in 2021 as a part of the American Rescue Plan Act. Using Current Population Survey microdata, we compare labor supply outcomes among households ...

The Incarceration Penalty and Black-White Economic Inequality: The Case of Baltimore

By Lauren Russell, Jorge N. Zumaeta, Aaron Colston, and William A. Darity Jr.

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

This paper investigates income and wealth gaps by household incarceration history within and across racial groups using the Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition. We study this in the context of 2017 Baltimore. We find that households exposed to incarceration have...

Influence Motives in Social Signaling: Evidence from COVID-19 Vaccinations in Germany

By Emilio Esguerra, Leonhard Vollmer, and Johannes Wimmer

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2023

We investigate whether a desire to influence others' choices affects our own behavior. To separate such influence motives from social pressure, we study participants' willingness to register for a COVID-19 vaccination in a field experiment in Germany. We ...

Generic Aversion and Observational Learning in the Over-the-Counter Drug Market

By Mariana Carrera and Sofia Villas-Boas

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2023

Through a labeling intervention at a national retailer, we test three hypotheses for consumer aversion to generic over-the-counter drugs: lack of information on the comparability of generic and brand drugs, inattention to their price differences, and unce...

How Does Consumption Respond to News about Inflation? Field Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial

By Olivier Coibion, Dimitris Georgarakos, Yuriy Gorodnichenko, and Maarten van Rooij

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2023

We implement a survey of Dutch households in which random subsets of respondents receive information about inflation. The resulting exogenously generated variation in inflation expectations is used to assess how expectations affect consumption decisions. ...

Human Capital Accumulation at Work: Estimates for the World and Implications for Development

By Remi Jedwab, Paul Romer, Asif M. Islam, and Roberto Samaniego

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2023

We (i) study wage-experience profiles and obtain measures of returns to potential work experience using data from about 24 million individuals in 1,084 surveys and census samples across 145 countries; (ii) show that workers in developed countries accumula...

The Rise of Niche Consumption

By Brent Neiman and Joseph Vavra

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2023

Over the last 15 years, individual households have concentrated their spending on a few preferred products. However, this is not driven by "superstar" products capturing larger market shares. Instead, households increasingly purchase different products fr...

Sin Taxes and Self-Control

By Renke Schmacker and Sinne Smed

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2023

According to theory, "sin taxes" are welfare improving if consumers with low self-control respond at least as much to the tax as consumers with high self-control. We investigate empirically if demand response to soft drink and fat tax variations in Denmar...

Spending Responses to High-Frequency Shifts in Payment Timing: Evidence from the Earned Income Tax Credit

By Aditya Aladangady, Shifrah Aron-Dine, David Cashin, Wendy Dunn, Laura Feiveson, Paul Lengermann, Katherine Richard, and Claudia Sahm

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2023

This study explores the spending response to tax refunds for Earned Income Tax Credit recipients using a novel dataset combining transaction-based measures of retail spending with administrative IRS data on tax refunds. Our dataset allows us to exploit va...

Interregional Contact and the Formation of a Shared Identity

By Manuel Bagues and Christopher Roth

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2023

We study the long-run effects of contact with individuals from other regions in early adulthood on preferences, beliefs, and national identity. We combine a natural experiment, the random assignment of male conscripts to different locations throughout Spa...

Intrinsic Information Preferences and Skewness

By Yusufcan Masatlioglu, Yeşim Orhun, and Collin Raymond

American Economic Review, October 2023

We examine whether people have an intrinsic preference for negatively skewed or positively skewed information structures and how these preferences relate to intrinsic preferences for informativeness. The results from lab experiments show a strong intrinsi...

How Do Households Respond to Job Loss? Lessons from Multiple High-Frequency Datasets

By Asger Lau Andersen, Amalie Sofie Jensen, Niels Johannesen, Claus Thustrup Kreiner, Søren Leth-Petersen, and Adam Sheridan

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2023

How much and through which channels do households self-insure against job loss? Combining data from a large bank and from government sources, we quantify a broad range of responses to job loss in a unified empirical framework. Cumulated over a two-year pe...

Coming Apart? Cultural Distances in the United States over Time

By Marianne Bertrand and Emir Kamenica

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2023

We analyze trends in cultural distances between groups in the United States defined by income, education, gender, race, and political ideology. We measure cultural distance as the ability to infer an individual's group based on media diet, consumer behavi...

Contagious Dishonesty: Corruption Scandals and Supermarket Theft

By Giorgio Gulino and Federico Masera

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2023

Is dishonest behavior contagious? We answer this question by studying whether corruption scandals affect the propensity of supermarket customers to steal while using a self-service checkout system. Crucially, this system allows shoppers to engage in disho...

Collateralized Marriage

By Jeanne Lafortune and Corinne Low

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2023

Marriage rates have become increasingly stratified by homeownership. We investigate this in a household model where investments in public goods reduce future earnings and, thus, divorce risk creates inefficiencies. Access to a joint savings technology, li...