Measuring the Market for Legal Firearms

By Luis Armona and Adam M. Rosenberg

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

The Massachusetts Firearms Records Bureau recently published administrative data covering the universe of legal firearm transactions in the state. We use these data to validate state-level background checks as a proxy for firearm transactions and show tha...

Financial Aid, Borrowing Constraints, and College Attendance: Evidence from Structural Estimates

By Michael P. Keane

American Economic Review, May 2002

Tribal Casinos and Identifying Who Moves to Opportunity

By Emilia Simeonova, Randall Akee, and Maggie R. Jones

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

In this analysis, we examine what types of households migrate to American Indian reservation lands after the start of casino operations using longitudinal household data for 1989–2017. We find heterogeneous effects on migration by households of differen...

Who Uses Childcare Centers? Evidence from Burkina Faso

By Kehinde F. Ajayi, Aziz Dao, Estelle Koussoubé, and P. Rita Nikiema

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

What determines childcare center use for low-income urban households? And how does subsidizing provision change access to childcare services? We study these questions using data from a randomized evaluation that subsidized childcare center use for women p...

Heterogeneous Responses to Job Mobility Shocks in a HANK Model with a Frictional Labor Market

By Serdar Birinci, Fatih Karahan, Yusuf Mercan, and Kurt See

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

We use a heterogeneous agent New Keynesian model with a frictional labor market featuring on-the-job-search to study how job switching affects consumption decisions for individuals with different wealth levels. We find that an increased job switching rate...

Go Vegan? Prejudice, (Blind) Experimentation, and Food Choices

By Michèle Belot and Adelson Teh

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

We examine the role of prejudice and experimentation in the evaluation of a nonmainstream product. We conduct a randomized controlled experiment where participants evaluate a plant-based product. We vary (i) whether they can taste the product, (ii) whethe...

Beyond the Stats: Realities, Perception, and Social Media Discourse on Poverty

By Paul Bose, Lorenzo Lupo, Mahyar Habibi, Dirk Hovy, and Carlo Schwarz

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

This paper investigates disparities among objective poverty measures, individuals' subjective perceptions, and poverty-related social media discourse in US counties. We find that while poverty and perceived poverty are positively correlated, poverty-relat...

The Fading Treatment Effects of a Multifaceted Asset-Transfer Program in Ethiopia

By Nathan Barker, Dean Karlan, Christopher Udry, and Kelsey Wright

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2024

We study the long-run effects of a big-push "graduation" program in Ethiopia in which very poor households received a one-time transfer of productive assets (mainly livestock), technical training, and access to savings accounts. After seven years, treatme...

Children and Household Income Packages: A Cross-National Analysis

By Erin Todd and Dennis Sullivan

American Economic Review, May 2002

Everyday Econometricians: Selection Neglect and Overoptimism When Learning from Others

By Kai Barron, Steffen Huck, and Philippe Jehiel

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2024

This study explores selection neglect in an experimental investment game where individuals can learn from others' outcomes. Experiment 1 examines aggregate-level equilibrium behavior. We find strong evidence of selection neglect and corroborate several co...

A Kinky Consistency: Experimental Evidence of Behavior under Linear and Nonlinear Budget Constraints

By Emiliano Huet-Vaughn, Ethan M. L. McClure, and Juan Carlos Suárez Serrato

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2024

Individuals face nonlinear incentives in myriad situations. We test a fundamental assumption in such settings: that individuals display stable preferences when facing linear and nonlinear incentives. We use a laboratory experiment to characterize how reve...

Revealing Choice Bracketing

By Andrew Ellis and David J. Freeman

American Economic Review, September 2024

Experiments suggest that people fail to take into account interdependencies between their choices—they do not broadly bracket. Researchers often instead assume people narrowly bracket, but existing designs do not test it. We design a novel experiment an...

In-Kind Transfers as Insurance

By Lucie Gadenne, Samuel Norris, Monica Singhal, and Sandip Sukhtankar

American Economic Review, September 2024

Households in developing countries often face variation in the prices of consumption goods. We develop a model demonstrating that in-kind transfers will provide insurance benefits against price risk if the covariance between the marginal utility of income...

Dynamic Spending Responses to Wealth Shocks: Evidence from Quasi Lotteries on the Stock Market

By Asger Lau Andersen, Niels Johannesen, and Adam Sheridan

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2024

How much and over what horizon do households adjust their consumption in response to stock market wealth shocks? We address these questions using granular data on spending and stock portfolios from a large bank and exploiting lottery-like variation in gai...

Expected Returns to Crime and Crime Location

By Nils Braakmann, Arnaud Chevalier, and Tanya Wilson

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2024

We provide first evidence that variations in the expected returns to crime affect the location of property crime. Our identification strategy relies on the widely held perception in the United Kingdom that South Asian households store gold jewelry at home...

Noise, Cognitive Function, and Worker Productivity

By Joshua T. Dean

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2024

Noisy workplaces common in low- and middle-income countries can impair workers' cognitive functions. However, whether this lowers earnings depends on the importance of these functions for productivity and whether workers understand these effects. I study ...

Independent Media, Propaganda, and Religiosity: Evidence from Poland

By Irena Grosfeld, Etienne Madinier, Seyhun Orcan Sakalli, and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2024

Exploring a drastic change in media landscape in Poland, we show that mainstream media can significantly affect religious participation. After nationalist populist party PiS came to power in 2015, news on state and private independent TV diverged due to p...

Customer Capital Spillovers: Evidence from Sales Managers in International Markets

By Bérengère Patault and Clémence Lenoir

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2024

Expanding their customer base is crucial for firms to grow. This paper leverages sales managers' job-to-job transitions to better understand how buyer-seller relationships form. Combining unique French firm-to-firm trade data with matched employer-employe...

The Inverse Product Differentiation Logit Model

By Mogens Fosgerau, Julien Monardo, and André de Palma

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2024

We introduce the inverse product differentiation logit (IPDL) model, a micro-founded inverse market share model for differentiated products that captures market segmentation according to one or more characteristics. The IPDL model generalizes the nested l...

Tax Reform and Automatic Stabilization

By Thomas J. Kniesner and James P. Ziliak

American Economic Review, June 2002

An income tax provides implicit insurance by dampening the variability of disposable income and consumption. Using an empirical framework derived from the consumption insurance literature and data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics we examine the eff...