Wholesale collusion?

[Research Highlight]

December 10, 2020

Reforms to African agriculture markets didn’t help farmers or consumers as intended. The reason seems to be with how intermediary traders set prices.

Testing the welfare magnet hypothesis

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Do generous public benefits attract more immigrants?

Information for ASSA 2021 Participants

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International conference on gender economics: "Rethinking gender: Economic and social costs of gender inequality”

[News]

December 04, 2020

The deadline for submissions is January 5, 2021.

The promise of conditional cash transfers

[Research Highlight]

December 22, 2020

Rema Hanna discusses how giving families money affects child development in the long run.

Cumulative Impacts of Conditional Cash Transfer Programs: Experimental Evidence from Indonesia

By Nur Cahyadi, Rema Hanna, Benjamin A. Olken, Rizal Adi Prima, Elan Satriawan, and Ekki Syamsulhakim

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2020

Conditional cash transfers provide income and promote human capital investments. Yet evaluating their longitudinal impacts is hard, as most experimental evaluations treat control locations after a few years. We examine such impacts in Indonesia after six ...

ASSA 2021 Live-Streamed Sessions

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Selected sessions from the annual meeting will be live-streamed on Youtube.

Front Matter

American Economic Review, January 2021

Equilibrium Technology Diffusion, Trade, and Growth

By Jesse Perla, Christopher Tonetti, and Michael E. Waugh

American Economic Review, January 2021

We study how opening to trade affects economic growth in a model where heterogeneous firms can adopt new technologies already in use by other firms in their home country. We characterize the growth rate using a summary statistic of the profit distribution...

Lumpy Investment, Business Cycles, and Stimulus Policy

By Thomas Winberry

American Economic Review, January 2021

I study the aggregate implications of micro-level lumpy investment in a model consistent with the empirical dynamics of the real interest rate. The elasticity of aggregate investment with respect to shocks is procyclical because more firms are likely to m...

Lack of Selection and Limits to Delegation: Firm Dynamics in Developing Countries

By Ufuk Akcigit, Harun Alp, and Michael Peters

American Economic Review, January 2021

Delegating managerial tasks is essential for firm growth. Most firms in developing countries, however, do not hire outside managers but instead rely on family members. In this paper, we ask if this lack of managerial delegation can explain why firms in po...

Asymmetric Consumption Smoothing

By Brian Baugh, Itzhak Ben-David, Hoonsuk Park, and Jonathan A. Parker

American Economic Review, January 2021

Analyzing account-level data from an account aggregator, we find that households increase consumption when they receive expected tax refunds, as if they face liquidity constraints. However, these same households smooth consumption when making payments in ...

Politically Feasible Reforms of Nonlinear Tax Systems

By Felix J. Bierbrauer, Pierre C. Boyer, and Andreas Peichl

American Economic Review, January 2021

We study reforms of nonlinear income tax systems from a political economy perspective. We present a median voter theorem for monotonic tax reforms, reforms so that the change in the tax burden is a monotonic function of income. We also provide an empirica...

Job Seekers' Perceptions and Employment Prospects: Heterogeneity, Duration Dependence, and Bias

By Andreas I. Mueller, Johannes Spinnewijn, and Giorgio Topa

American Economic Review, January 2021

This paper uses job seekers' elicited beliefs about job finding to disentangle the sources of the decline in job-finding rates by duration of unemployment. We document that beliefs have strong predictive power for job finding, but are not revised downward...

Going Negative at the Zero Lower Bound: The Effects of Negative Nominal Interest Rates

By Mauricio Ulate

American Economic Review, January 2021

After the Great Recession several central banks started setting negative nominal interest rates in an expansionary attempt, but the effectiveness of this measure remains unclear. Negative rates can stimulate the economy by lowering the rates that commerci...

Using Models to Persuade

By Joshua Schwartzstein and Adi Sunderam

American Economic Review, January 2021

We present a framework where "model persuaders" influence receivers' beliefs by proposing models that organize past data to make predictions. Receivers are assumed to find models more compelling when they better explain the data, fixing receivers' prior b...

2020 in Research Highlights

[Research Highlight]

December 17, 2020

Economists tackled racial discrimination, border walls, collusion, and more.

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2021

Gambling, Saving, and Lumpy Liquidity Needs

By Sylvan Herskowitz

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2021

I present evidence that unmet liquidity needs for indivisible, "lumpy," expenditures increase demand for betting as a second-best method of liquidity generation in the presence of financial constraints. With a sample of 1,708 sports bettors in Kampala, Ug...