Monetary Policy Strategies for a Low-Rate Environment

By Ben S. Bernanke, Michael T. Kiley, and John M. Roberts

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

In low-rate environments, policy strategies that involve holding rates "lower for longer" (L4L) may mitigate the effects of the effective lower bound (ELB). However, these strategies work in part by managing the public's expectations, which is not always ...

Pass-Through as a Test for Market Power: An Application to Solar Subsidies

By Jacquelyn Pless and Arthur A. van Benthem

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2019

We formalize pass-through over-shifting as a simple yet underutilized test for market power. We apply this test in the market for solar energy. Specifically, we estimate the pass-through of solar subsidies to solar system prices using rich micro-level tra...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2014

Does Helping John Help Sue? Evidence of Spillovers in Education

By Isaac M. Opper

American Economic Review, March 2019

Does the impact of teachers extend beyond the students in their classroom? Using the natural transitions of students from multiple elementary schools into a single middle school, this paper provides a new method for isolating and quantifying peer spillove...

New Perspectives on the Decline of US Manufacturing Employment

[Symposium: Does the US Really Gain From Trade?]

By Teresa C. Fort, Justin R. Pierce, and Peter K. Schott

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2018

We use relatively unexplored dimensions of US microdata to examine how US manufacturing employment has evolved across industries, firms, establishments, and regions. These data provide support for both trade- and technology-based explanations of the overa...

Cadet-Branch Matching in a Kelso-Crawford Economy

By Ravi Jagadeesan

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2019

Sonmez (2013) and Sonmez and Switzer (2013) used matching theory with unilaterally substitutable priorities to propose mechanisms to match cadets to military branches. This paper shows that, alternatively, the Sonmez and Sonmez-Switzer mechanisms can be c...

Leverage and Deepening Business-Cycle Skewness

By Henrik Jensen, Ivan Petrella, Søren Hove Ravn, and Emiliano Santoro

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2020

We document that the United States and other G7 economies have been characterized by an increasingly negative business-cycle asymmetry over the last three decades. This finding can be explained by the concurrent increase in the financial leverage of house...

Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2018

Targeting with In-Kind Transfers: Evidence from Medicaid Home Care

By Ethan M. J. Lieber and Lee M. Lockwood

American Economic Review, April 2019

Making a transfer in kind reduces its value to recipients but can improve targeting. We develop an approach to quantifying this trade-off and apply it to home care. Using randomized experiments by Medicaid, we find that in-kind provision significantly red...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2012

Copyright and Generic Entry in Book Publishing

By Imke Reimers

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2019

Taking works off copyright promotes their availability, but it also allows generic entry to dissipate producer surplus. This paper examines the effect of a copyright on the availability and price of books when incentives to create new works are not affect...

Subsidies and Time Discounting in New Technology Adoption: Evidence from Solar Photovoltaic Systems

By Olivier De Groote and Frank Verboven

American Economic Review, June 2019

We study a generous program to promote the adoption of solar photovoltaic (PV) systems through subsidies on future electricity production, rather than through upfront investment subsidies. We develop a tractable dynamic model of new technology adoption, a...

Relative Price Dispersion: Evidence and Theory

By Greg Kaplan, Guido Menzio, Leena Rudanko, and Nicholas Trachter

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2019

Relative price dispersion refers to persistent differences in the price that different retailers set for one particular good relative to the price they set for other goods. Relative price dispersion accounts for 30 percent of the overall variance of price...

Now You See Me, Now You Don't: The Geography of Police Stops

By Jesse J. Kalinowski, Matthew B. Ross, and Stephen L. Ross

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

This paper uses state police stop data in Texas to assess patrol activity. We find that both the types of stops and allocation of resources over space change in darkness relative to daylight, and that the changes in stop type and manpower allocation are c...

Inventory Management, Product Quality, and Cross-Country Income Differences

By Bernardo S. Blum, Sebastian Claro, Kunal Dasgupta, and Ignatius J. Horstmann

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2019

Previous research has documented that export shipments are "lumpy"—exporters make infrequent and relatively large shipments to any given export destination. This fact has been interpreted as implying that fixed, per shipment cost and inventory man...

Test Design and Minimum Standards

By Peter M. DeMarzo, Ilan Kremer, and Andrzej Skrzypacz

American Economic Review, June 2019

We analyze test design and certification standards when an uninformed seller has the option to generate and disclose costly information regarding asset quality. We characterize equilibria by a minimum principle: the test and disclosure policy are chosen t...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2018

Screening in Contract Design: Evidence from the ACA Health Insurance Exchanges

By Michael Geruso, Timothy Layton, and Daniel Prinz

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2019

We study insurers' use of prescription drug formularies to screen consumers in the ACA Health Insurance exchanges. We begin by showing that exchange risk adjustment and reinsurance succeed in neutralizing selection incentives for most, but not all, consum...

Some Causal Effects of an Industrial Policy

By Chiara Criscuolo, Ralf Martin, Henry G. Overman, and John Van Reenen

American Economic Review, January 2019

We exploit changes in the area-specific eligibility criteria for a program to support jobs through investment subsidies. European rules determine whether an area is eligible for subsidies, and we construct instrumental variables for area eligibility based...

Soft Commitments, Reminders, and Academic Performance

By Oliver Himmler, Robert Jäckle, and Philipp Weinschenk

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2019

We provide first evidence that a soft commitment device enhances progress in education and, more generally, improves the completion of complex tasks—such as passing exams. In our field experiment, students can sign a nonbinding agreement and commit to s...