Dynamic Incentives in Wait List Mechanisms

By Nikhil Agarwal, Itai Ashlagi, Paulo Somaini, and Daniel Waldinger

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Many scarce public resources are allocated through wait lists that use priorities for individual agents. A new priority system for allocating deceased donor kidneys was adopted in 2014. This redesign was guided by simulations that held decision-rules fixe...

Regulating Mismeasured Pollution: Implications of Firm Heterogeneity for Environmental Policy

By Eva Lyubich, Joseph Shapiro, and Reed Walker

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

This paper provides the first estimates of within-industry heterogeneity in energy and CO2 productivity for the entire US manufacturing sector. We measure energy and CO2 productivity as output per dollar energy input or per ton CO

Male Social Status and Women's Work

By Arielle Bernhardt, Erica Field, Rohini Pande, Natalia Rigol, Simone Schaner, and Charity Troyer-Moore

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Female labor force participation varies significantly even among countries with similar levels of economic development. Recent studies have shown that gender norms can help explain these differences in women's work, but the channels through which norms im...

The Geographic Spread of a Large Devaluation

By Javier Cravino and Andrei A. Levchenko

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Cravino and Levchenko (2017) establish that the 1994 Mexican peso devaluation raised the prices of consumption baskets of low-income households substantially more than the prices of the consumption baskets of high-income households. In this paper, we expl...

Natural Resources and Global Misallocation

By Alexander Monge-Naranjo, Juan M. Sánchez, and Raül Santaeulàlia-Llopis

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2019

Are production factors allocated efficiently across countries? To differentiate misallocation from factor intensity differences, we provide a new methodology to estimate output shares of natural resources based solely on current rent flows data. With this...

Using Online Prices for Measuring Real Consumption across Countries

By Alberto Cavallo, W. Erwin Diewert, Robert C. Feenstra, Robert Inklaar, and Marcel P. Timmer

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

We show that online prices can be used to construct quarterly purchasing power parities (PPPs) with a closely matched set of goods and identical methodologies in a variety of developed and developing countries. Our results are close to those reported by t...

Can Information Change Personal Retirement Savings? Evidence from Social Security Benefits Statement Mailings

By Susan Payne Carter and William Skimmyhorn

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Despite concern about the viability of public retirement programs and potential undersaving for retirement, we still know little about the impact of government provided information on individual behavior. We exploit plausibly exogenous variation in exposu...

From "Traditional" to Research-Based Instructional Strategies: An Assessment of Learning Gains

By Sarah B. Cosgrove and Neal H. Olitsky

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

The cognitive science literature provides several research based instructional strategies (RBIS) proven to be effective in student learning. Given the prevalence of lecture-based classes and instructor-led discussions, understanding the effects of switchi...

Reach for Yield and Fickle Capital Flows

By Ricardo J. Caballero and Alp Simsek

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

In Caballero and Simsek (2017), we develop a model of fickle capital flows and show that, when countries are similar, international flows create global liquidity and mitigate crises despite their fickleness. In this paper, we focus on the asymmetric situa...

Is Altruism Sensitive to Scope? The Role of Tangibility

By Alex Imas and George Loewenstein

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Prior work has shown that people appear insensitive to the scope of their altruistic acts and prosocial behavior. While they respond positively when their choices lead to increasing rewards for themselves, people do not change their behavior when the outc...

Welfarism's Envy Problem Extends to Popular Judgments

By Matthew Weinzierl

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Economists use a welfarist approach to policy evaluation, but doing so can lead to recommendations that violate seemingly wise non-welfarist principles. I explore one example: the proper tax policy response to envy. Using a novel survey, I find that a maj...

Foreign Safe Asset Demand for US Treasurys and the Dollar

By Zhengyang Jiang, Arvind Krishnamurthy, and Hanno Lustig

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

We present theory showing that the spot dollar exchange rate reflects the value of all future convenience yields that foreign investors assign to US Treasuries. The convenience yield also creates wedge, the Treasury-based dollar basis, between the yield o...

Low-Cost Randomized Controlled Trials in Education

By Nathan Wozny, Cary Balser, and Drew Ives

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are widely accepted as the gold standard in program evaluation but are uncommon in educational research. A likely explanation is that experiments designed with sufficient statistical precision to detect meaningful impac...

China's Rate-Based Approach to Reducing CO₂ Emissions: Attractions, Limitations, and Alternatives

By Lawrence H. Goulder and Richard D. Morgenstern

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

A distinguishing feature of China's recently launched emissions trading system (ETS) is its rate-based structure. This structure governs the way emissions allowances are allocated and the conditions for compliance, and it has important implications for sy...

China's New National Carbon Market

By William A. Pizer and Xiliang Zhang

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

On December 19, 2017, China announced the official start of its national emissions trading system (ETS) construction program. When fully implemented, this program will more than double the volume of worldwide carbon dioxide emissions covered by either tax...

Split Families and the Future of Children: Immigration Enforcement and Foster Care Placements

By Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes and Esther Arenas-Arroyo

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Tougher immigration enforcement has been responsible for approximately 1.8 million deportations between 2009 and 2013 alone. Children enter the foster care system when their parents are apprehended, deported, and unable to care for them. We find that the ...

Estimating Economic Characteristics with Phone Data

By Joshua E. Blumenstock

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Historically, economists have relied heavily on survey-based data collection to measure social and economic well-being. Here, we investigate the extent to which the "digital footprints" of an individual can be used to infer his or her socioeconomic charac...

In Debt and Approaching Retirement: Claim Social Security or Work Longer?

By Barbara A. Butrica and Nadia S. Karamcheva

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Over the past couple of decades, older Americans have become considerably more leveraged. This paper considers whether household debt affects the timing of retirement and Social Security benefit claiming. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study, w...

Racial and Ethnic Sentencing Differentials in the Federal Criminal Justice System

By Brendon McConnell and Imran Rasul

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

A large body of multidisciplinary research has documented how sentencing outcomes vary tremendously across racial and ethnic groups. The research challenge lies in establishing whether these sentencing differentials are driven by unobserved heterogeneity ...

The Effect of the Disability Insurance Application Decision on the Employment of Denied Applicants

By Mashfiqur R. Khan

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) affects the labor supply of applicants through its work discouragement and through human capital deterioration regardless of the ultimate acceptance or denial of the claim. In this paper, I provide an estimate o...