The Impact of the 2018 Tariffs on Prices and Welfare

By Mary Amiti, Stephen J. Redding, and David E. Weinstein

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2019

We examine conventional approaches to evaluating the economic impact of protectionist trade policies. We illustrate these conventional approaches by applying them to the tariffs introduced by the Trump administration during 2018. In the wake of this i...

An Event Long-Short Index: Theory and Applications

By Raymond Fisman and Eric Zitzewitz

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2019

We propose a stock market-based measure to capture initial beliefs about an event's effect on firm profits, which may be used to measure whether initial expectations are subsequently realized. Our "Event Long-Short Index" is the difference in market-capit...

Early Voting Laws, Voter Turnout, and Partisan Vote Composition: Evidence from Ohio

By Ethan Kaplan and Haishan Yuan

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2020

We estimate effects of early voting on voter turnout using a 2010 homogenization law from Ohio that forced some counties to expand and others to contract early voting. Using voter registration data, we compare individuals who live within the same 2x2 mile...

A Precinct Too Far: Turnout and Voting Costs

By Enrico Cantoni

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2020

I study the effects of voting costs—specifically, distance to polling location—using geographic discontinuities. Opposite sides of boundaries between voting precincts are observationally identical, except for their assigned polling locations. This dis...

Dynamism with Incommensurate Development: The Distinctive Indian Model

[Symposium: Economics of India]

By Rohit Lamba and Arvind Subramanian

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2020

India's sequencing of economic and political development has been unusual. In contrast to the West and more recently East Asia, democratization has preceded economic growth. Notwithstanding its unique path, India has grown substantially over the last fo...

Why Does the Indian State Both Fail and Succeed?

[Symposium: Economics of India]

By Devesh Kapur

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2020

The Indian state's performance spans the spectrum from woefully inadequate, especially in core public goods provision, to surprisingly impressive in successfully managing complex tasks and on a massive scale. It has delivered better on macroeconomic rat...

The Welfare Effects of Social Media

By Hunt Allcott, Luca Braghieri, Sarah Eichmeyer, and Matthew Gentzkow

American Economic Review, March 2020

The rise of social media has provoked both optimism about potential societal benefits and concern about harms such as addiction, depression, and political polarization. In a randomized experiment, we find that deactivating Facebook for the four weeks befo...

The Race to the Base

By Dan Bernhardt, Peter Buisseret, and Sinem Hidir

American Economic Review, March 2020

We study multi-district legislative elections between two office-seeking parties when one party has an initial valence advantage that may shift and even reverse during the campaign; and, each party cares not only about winning a majority, but also about i...

Politics in the Family: Nepotism and the Hiring Decisions of Italian Firms

By Stefano Gagliarducci and Marco Manacorda

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2020

This paper studies the effect of family connections to politicians on individuals' labor market outcomes. Using data for Italy spanning more than three decades on a sample of almost one million individuals plus data on the universe of individuals holding ...

Votes for Women: An Economic Perspective on Women's Enfranchisement

[Symposium: One Hundred Years of Women's Suffrage]

By Carolyn M. Moehling and Melissa A. Thomasson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2020

The ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 officially granted voting rights to women across the United States. However, many states extended full or partial suffrage to women before the federal amendment. In this paper, we discuss the history ...

A Century of the American Woman Voter: Sex Gaps in Political Participation, Preferences, and Partisanship since Women's Enfranchisement

[Symposium: One Hundred Years of Women's Suffrage]

By Elizabeth U. Cascio and Na'ama Shenhav

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2020

This year marks the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment, which provided American women a constitutional guarantee to the franchise. We assemble data from a variety of sources to document and explore trends in women's political participation, issue pr...

The Separation and Reunification of Germany: Rethinking a Natural Experiment Interpretation of the Enduring Effects of Communism

[Symposium: The Departure of Communism]

By Sascha O. Becker, Lukas Mergele, and Ludger Woessmann

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2020

German separation in 1949 into a communist East and a capitalist West and their reunification in 1990 are commonly described as a natural experiment to study the enduring effects of communism. We show in three steps that the populations in East and West G...

The Long-Term Effects of Communism in Eastern Europe

[Symposium: The Departure of Communism]

By Nicola Fuchs-Schündeln and Matthias Schündeln

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2020

We analyze the long-term effects of communism on both policies and preferences in Eastern Europe in four areas in which the communist and capitalist doctrines fundamentally differ: government intervention in markets, political freedom, and inequality in i...

Is India's Economic Growth Leaving the Poor Behind?

[Symposium: India]

By Gaurav Datt and Martin Ravallion

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2002

Has poverty continued to fall with growth in India in the 1990s, or has the nature of the growth process changed, such that the poor have been left behind? This paper tries to answer those questions. We do not attempt to assess the impact of India's macro...

The Polarization of Reality

By Alberto Alesina, Armando Miano, and Stefanie Stantcheva

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

Americans are polarized not only in their views on policy issues and attitudes toward government and society but also in their perceptions of the same factual reality. We conceptualize how to think about the "polarization of reality" and review recent pap...

The Political Limits of Economics

By Luigi Zingales

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

We economists do not apply economic tools to analyze our own discipline. If we were to do so, we would discover that we have self-motivated explanations for why political systems fail, explanations that entitle us to impose our views on elected representa...

A Look Ahead at the 2020 US Elections: The Role of Candidate Diversity in Political Participation

By Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes and Jose R. Bucheli

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

An increasingly diverse population in the United States has given rise to a growing body of literature that analyzes the causes and consequences of descriptive representation. Using individual-level representative data on registration and voting for the e...

Brexit Uncertainty: Trade Externalities beyond Europe

By Alejandro G. Graziano, Kyle Handley, and Nuno Limão

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

We examine if Brexit uncertainty has trade externalities beyond Europe. Using detailed data on export values and participation, tariffs, and Brexit probabilities prior to the referendum, we estimate ongoing negative trade-uncertainty elasticities between ...

Expert-Captured Democracies

By Archishman Chakraborty, Parikshit Ghosh, and Jaideep Roy

American Economic Review, June 2020

Does public cheap talk by a biased expert benefit voters? The answer depends on the nature of democratic institutions and the extent of communication possibilities. Expert endorsements induce office-seeking parties to serve the expert's interests, hurting...

Social Ties and the Selection of China's Political Elite

By Raymond Fisman, Jing Shi, Yongxiang Wang, and Weixing Wu

American Economic Review, June 2020

We study how sharing a hometown or college connection with an incumbent member of China's Politburo affects a candidate's likelihood of selection as a new member. In specifications that include fixed effects to absorb quality differences across cities and...