What Motivates Paternalism? An Experimental Study

By Sandro Ambuehl, B. Douglas Bernheim, and Axel Ockenfels

American Economic Review, March 2021

We study experimentally when, why, and how people intervene in others' choices. Choice Architects (CAs) construct opportunity sets containing bundles of time-indexed payments for Choosers. CAs frequently prevent impatient choices despite opportunities to ...

The Financial Transmission of Housing Booms: Evidence from Spain

By Alberto Martín, Enrique Moral-Benito, and Tom Schmitz

American Economic Review, March 2021

How does a housing boom affect credit to non-housing firms? Using bank, firm, and loan-level microdata, we show that the Spanish housing boom reduced non-housing credit growth during its first years, but stimulated it later on. These patterns can be ratio...

Rank Uncertainty in Organizations

By Marina Halac, Elliot Lipnowski, and Daniel Rappoport

American Economic Review, March 2021

A principal incentivizes a team of agents to work by privately offering them bonuses contingent on team success. We study the principal's optimal incentive scheme that implements work as a unique equilibrium. This scheme leverages rank uncertainty to addr...

ASSA 2019 Annual Meeting

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ASSA 2018 Annual Meeting

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ASSA 2016 Annual Meeting

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Disappearing gazelles

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Fewer high-growth startups could be making the US economy much less dynamic.

Tariff Pass-Through at the Border and at the Store: Evidence from US Trade Policy

By Alberto Cavallo, Gita Gopinath, Brent Neiman, and Jenny Tang

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2021

We use microdata collected at the border and the store to characterize the price impact of recent US trade policy on importers, exporters, and consumers. At the border, import tariff pass-through is much higher than exchange rate pass-through. Chinese exp...

The Cyclical Behavior of Job Quality and Real Wage Growth

By Andriana Bellou and Bariş Kaymak

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2021

We study the empirical relevance of implicit insurance contracts for wage setting while accounting for cyclical fluctuations in average job quality. Using proxy measures, we find the latter to be acyclical, if not countercyclical, due to the cleansing eff...

Information Design and Strategic Communication

By Daniel Krähmer

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2021

I study sender-receiver games where the receiver can disclose information to the sender by designing an information structure. I show that by secretly randomizing over information structures, the receiver can virtually attain her complete information payo...

Internal Deadlines, Drug Approvals, and Safety Problems

By Lauren Cohen, Umit G. Gurun, and Danielle Li

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2021

Absent explicit quotas, incentives, reporting, or fiscal year-end motives, drug approvals around the world surge in December, at month-ends, and before respective major national holidays. Drugs approved before these informal deadlines are associated with ...

Trade Shocks and Labor Market Adjustment

By Ryan Kim and Jonathan Vogel

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2021

We develop a framework to analyze the impact of trade shocks on a range of labor market adjustment margins in economies with a large number of sectors and labor groups. We provide analytic results characterizing equilibria. We show that labor groups earni...

Front Matter

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2021

Job Loss, Credit, and Crime in Colombia

By Gaurav Khanna, Carlos Medina, Anant Nyshadham, Christian Posso, and Jorge Tamayo

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2021

We investigate the effects of job displacement, as a result of mass layoffs, on criminal arrests using a matched employer-employee crime dataset from Medellín, Colombia. Job displacement leads to immediate and persistent earnings losses and higher probab...

The unemployment insurance tax hangover

[Research Highlight]

February 25, 2021

A tax spike on companies after layoffs is discouraging them from rehiring when business turns around.

Unemployment Insurance Taxes and Labor Demand: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Administrative Data

By Andrew C. Johnston

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2021

To finance unemployment insurance, states raise payroll tax rates on employers who engage in layoffs. Tax rates are, therefore, highest for firms after downturns, potentially hampering labor-market recovery. Using full-population, administrative records f...

The globalization of American universities

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Foreign students are a growing presence on college campuses. Whether they stay in the United States after graduation largely depends on job opportunities back home.

Call for Papers on Inequality for the Statistics, Politics and Policy journal

[News]

March 02, 2021

The deadline for submission is August 1, 2021.

Supreme polarization

[Research Highlight]

February 26, 2021

University of Chicago law professor Daniel Hemel discusses whether the nation’s highest court is facing a legitimacy crisis and, if so, what to do about it.

Recorded sessions from the 2021 ASSA Annual Meeting are now available, compliments of the AEA.

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View research on a wide variety of economics topics presented by speakers from all areas of the discipline.