A token of trust

[Research Highlight]

May 10, 2019

How important are monetary systems in getting people to cooperate in large-scale interactions?

Front Matter

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2019

Robot Arithmetic: New Technology and Wages

By Francesco Caselli and Alan Manning

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2019

Existing economic models show how new technology can cause large changes in relative wages and inequality. But there are also claims, based largely on verbal expositions, that new technology can harm workers on average or even all workers. This paper show...

Introducing AER: Insights

[Research Highlight]

May 21, 2019

The AEA interviews editor Amy Finkelstein about the launch of the organization's newest journal.

2019 PCAOB Conference on Auditing and Capital Markets Call for Papers

[News]

May 08, 2019

The conference is organized by the PCAOB in conjunction with the Journal of Accounting Research (JAR).

Welfare reform and recidivism

[Page]

A new study finds that banning felons from receiving food stamps led to more crime.

The Speed of Learning in Noisy Games: Partial Reinforcement and the Sustainability of Cooperation

By Yoella Bereby-Meyer and Alvin E. Roth

American Economic Review, September 2006

In an experiment, players' ability to learn to cooperate in the repeated prisoner's dilemma was substantially diminished when the payoffs were noisy, even though players could monitor one another’s past actions perfectly. In contrast, in one-time play...

Cream skimming on online platforms

[Research Highlight]

May 29, 2019

When sellers know too much about buyers, both can suffer.

China's embrace of robots

[Page]

The world's second largest economy has become a global leader in its adoption of robotic technology.

Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2019

Digging deeper into debt

[Research Highlight]

May 20, 2019

Why would anybody want to keep taking on expensive high-interest loans?

Spurring work, not wages

[Page]

A tax cut for young Swedish workers turned out very differently than traditional economic theory would predict.

Martin Feldstein (1939-2019)

[News]

June 12, 2019

One of the most influential economists of his generation and president of the AEA in 2004.

Call for Papers for the International Conference on Gender Economics

[News]

June 18, 2019

The conference will be held on November 15-16, 2019 in Tbilisi, Georgia.

Gender inequality across disciplines

[Page]

UK economics departments are also struggling to boost the number of women in their ranks.

Debts and degrees

[Research Highlight]

June 18, 2019

In a randomized controlled trial, telling students about loans led to more borrowing, but also better grades.

Stealth consolidation under weakened antitrust laws

[Page]

Smaller mergers could be playing a big role in concentrating local markets across the US.

Informing physicians

[Research Highlight]

March 08, 2018

Would doctors prescribe different medications if they knew how much people had to pay for them?

Disability Benefits, Consumption Insurance, and Household Labor Supply

By David Autor, Andreas Kostøl, Magne Mogstad, and Bradley Setzler

American Economic Review, July 2019

There is no evaluation of the consequences of Disability Insurance (DI) receipt that captures the effects on households' net income and consumption expenditure, family labor supply, or benefits from other programs. Combining detailed register data from ...

Betting on beach tourism

[Research Highlight]

May 31, 2019

How do investments in the service sector affect economic growth in developing countries?