US Criminal Deportations and Human Capital in Central America

By Maria Micaela Sviatschi

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

In this paper I ask whether peer effects generate changes in education investments in the areas where deported criminals are located in Central America using administrative data in El Salvador. I exploit the increase in criminal deportations from the Unit...

The Gender Socialization of Children Growing Up in Nontraditional Families

By Marianne Bertrand

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We study how childhood exposure to a nontraditional family (a working married mother, a married mother that is the primary breadwinner, or a non-married mother) affects gender role attitudes in young adulthood. Boys and girls develop more liberal gender a...

Predation, Protection, and Productivity: A Firm-Level Perspective

By Timothy Besley and Hannes Mueller

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2018

This paper studies the consequences of predation when firms deploy guard labor as a means of protecting themselves. We build a simple model and combine it with data for 144 countries from the World Bank enterprise surveys, which ask about firm-level exper...

The Burgeoning Health Care Needs of Aging Prisoners

By Hessam Bavafa and Anita Mukherjee

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We estimate the increasing health care needs of American inmates by combining data on inmate demographics and national health trends. Decades of harsh punishment combined with demographic shifts have led to a "greying" prison population that is a source o...

Older Workers and the Gig Economy

By Cody Cook, Rebecca Diamond, and Paul Oyer

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

As the workforce ages, how will the work lives of older people evolve? One way to ease into retirement is to move to the gig economy where workers choose hours and intensity of work that fit their needs and capabilities. However, older workers are often r...

A Review Essay on Social Neuroscience: Can Research on the Social Brain and Economics Inform Each Other?

By Carlos Alós-Ferrer

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2018

Social neuroscience studies the "social brain," conceived as the set of brain structures and functions supporting the perception and evaluation of the social environment. This article provides an overview of the field, using the book Social Neuroscienc...

Work of the Past, Work of the Future

By David H. Autor

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

US cities today are vastly more educated and skill-intensive than they were five decades ago. Yet, urban non-college workers perform substantially less skilled jobs than decades earlier. This deskilling reflects the joint effects of automation and, seco...

Race to the Bottom? Local Tax Break Competition and Business Location

By Evan Mast

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2020

I analyze how competition between localities affects tax breaks and business location decisions. I first use a geographic instrument to show that spatial competition substantially increases firm-specific property tax breaks. I then use this pattern to est...

Older Americans Would Work Longer If Jobs Were Flexible

By John Ameriks, Joseph Briggs, Andrew Caplin, Minjoon Lee, Matthew D. Shapiro, and Christopher Tonetti

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2020

Older Americans, even those who are long retired, have strong willingness to work, especially in jobs with flexible schedules. For many, labor force participation near or after normal retirement age is limited more by a lack of acceptable job opportunitie...

Consumer Spending during Unemployment: Positive and Normative Implications

By Peter Ganong and Pascal Noel

American Economic Review, July 2019

Using de-identified bank account data, we show that spending drops sharply at the large and predictable decrease in income arising from the exhaustion of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits. We use the high-frequency response to a predictable income decl...

The Out-of-State Tuition Distortion

By Brian Knight and Nathan Schiff

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2019

Public universities typically charge much higher tuition to nonresidents. We first investigate the welfare implications of this tuition gap in a simple model. While the social planner does not distinguish between residents and nonresidents, state governme...

The Logic of Insurgent Electoral Violence

By Luke N. Condra, James D. Long, Andrew C. Shaver, and Austin L. Wright

American Economic Review, November 2018

Competitive elections are essential to establishing the political legitimacy of democratizing regimes. We argue that insurgents undermine the state's mandate through electoral violence. We study insurgent violence during elections using newly declassified...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2018

Front Matter

American Economic Review, April 2018

Make and Buy: Outsourcing, Vertical Integration, and Cost Reduction

By Simon Loertscher and Michael H. Riordan

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2019

Globalization reshaped supply chains and the boundaries of firms in favor of outsourcing. Now, even vertically integrated firms procure substantially from external suppliers. To study procurement and the structure of firms in this reshaped economy, we ana...

From Final Goods to Inputs: The Protectionist Effect of Rules of Origin

By Paola Conconi, Manuel García-Santana, Laura Puccio, and Roberto Venturini

American Economic Review, August 2018

Recent decades have witnessed a surge of trade in intermediate goods and a proliferation of free trade agreements (FTAs). FTAs use rules of origin (RoO) to distinguish goods originating from member countries from those originating from third countries. We...

Learning from Others' Outcomes

By Alexander Wolitzky

American Economic Review, October 2018

I develop a simple model of social learning in which players observe others' outcomes but not their actions. A continuum of players arrives continuously over time, and each player chooses once-and-for-all between a safe action (which succeeds with known p...

Near-Feasible Stable Matchings with Couples

By Thành Nguyen and Rakesh Vohra

American Economic Review, November 2018

The National Resident Matching program seeks a stable matching of medical students to teaching hospitals. With couples, stable matchings need not exist. Nevertheless, for any student preferences, we show that each instance of a matching problem has a "nea...

Mind the Gap: A Review of The Health Gap: The Challenge of an Unequal World by Sir Michael Marmot

By Adriana Lleras-Muney

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2018

The Health Gap documents the large and persistent health gaps that exist across and within relatively rich countries today. Marmot argues that in developed countries, poor health does not cause low incomes; rather, low socioeconomic status leads ...

Beyond Truth-Telling: Preference Estimation with Centralized School Choice and College Admissions

By Gabrielle Fack, Julien Grenet, and Yinghua He

American Economic Review, April 2019

We propose novel approaches to estimating student preferences with data from matching mechanisms, especially the Gale-Shapley deferred acceptance. Even if the mechanism is strategy-proof, assuming that students truthfully rank schools in applications may ...