Local Violence, Academic Performance, and School Accountability

By Marcus Casey, Jeffrey C. Schiman, and Maciej Wachala

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Standardized test scores and value-added measures largely determine "grades" assigned to teachers and schools. Poor evaluations have severe implications: in some cases, entire schools may be closed or replaced by a charter. Although evaluation depends on ...

The Potential of Digital Credit to Bank the Poor

By Daniel Björkegren and Darrell Grissen

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Many households in developing countries lack access to credit: physically providing small loans to poor and remote populations is costly. However, the digitization of developing countries enables a new model: digital credit delivered directly via mobile p...

Trade Invoicing, Bank Funding, and Central Bank Reserve Holdings

By Gita Gopinath and Jeremy C. Stein

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

We develop a model that shows how the currency denomination of a country's imports influences the funding structure of its banking system, and in turn, the currency composition of its central bank's reserve holdings. The link between the dollar's role in ...

Cousin Marriage Is Not Choice: Muslim Marriage and Underdevelopment

By Lena Edlund

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

According to classical Muslim marriage law, a woman needs her guardian's (viz. father's) consent to marry. However, the resulting marriage payment, the mahr, is hers. This split bill may lie behind the high rates of consanguineous marriage in the Muslim w...

Review of Global Tax Fairness, Thomas Pogge and Krishen Mehta, Editors

By Matthew Weinzierl

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2018

This timely volume (Global Tax Fairness, edited by Thomas Pogge and Krishen Mehta) on the proper taxation of multinational enterprises argues that several feasible, near-term reforms could substantially narrow the scope for tax avoidance by closi...

Intangibles, Investment, and Efficiency

By Nicolas Crouzet and Janice Eberly

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Recent work on macroeconomic trends has emphasized slowing capital investment, but strong business profits and valuations. The retail sector is a microcosm of these trends, and accounts for a large share of the increase in aggregate business concentration...

Police Use of Force as an Extension of Arrests: Examining Disparities across Civilian and Officer Race

By Emily K. Weisburst

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

The United States is embroiled in an important debate about police use of force tactics. I find that black civilians are disproportionately likely to be involved in a use of force incident during an arrest, examining data from Dallas, Texas. However, this...

Intergenerational Human Capital Spillovers: Indonesia's School Construction and Its Effects on the Next Generation

By Bhashkar Mazumder, Maria Rosales-Rueda, and Margaret Triyana

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We analyze the effects of increased access to education in one generation on human capital outcomes in the next generation. Using longitudinal data, we exploit the geographical and cohort variations in exposure to a massive primary school construction pro...

A Practical Method to Reduce Privacy Loss When Disclosing Statistics Based on Small Samples

By Raj Chetty and John N. Friedman

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Building on insights from the differential privacy literature, we develop a simple noise-infusion method to reduce privacy loss when disclosing statistics such as OLS regression estimates based on small samples. Although our method does not offer a formal...

Time and Money: Social Security Benefits and Intergenerational Transfers

By Anita Mukherjee

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

I examine the relationship between Social Security benefits, a major component of income in older age, and intergenerational transfers of financial help and caregiving. I find that the net pass-through rate of Social Security benefits from parents to chil...

Dollar Invoicing and the Heterogeneity of Exchange Rate Pass-Through

By Emine Boz, Gita Gopinath, and Mikkel Plagborg-Møller

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We show empirically that the variation across country pairs in exchange rate pass-through and trade elasticity is meaningfully explained by the dollar's dominance as invoicing currency. We use a hierarchical Bayesian approach to directly and flexibly mode...

Just Starting Out: Learning and Equilibrium in a New Market

By Ulrich Doraszelski, Gregory Lewis, and Ariel Pakes

American Economic Review, March 2018

We document the evolution of the new market for frequency response within the UK electricity system over a six-year period. Firms competed in price while facing considerable initial uncertainty about demand and rival behavior. We show that prices stabiliz...

Exchange Rates and the Working Capital Channel of Trade Fluctuations

By Valentina Bruno, Se-Jik Kim, and Hyun Shin

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Exchange rates affect the economy not only through the competitiveness of exports but also through a financial channel. The financial channel goes in the opposite direction to the competitiveness channel in that a stronger currency goes hand-in-hand with ...

Does Maternal Education Decrease Female Genital Cutting?

By Elisabetta De Cao and Giulia La Mattina

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Female genital cutting (FGC) affects more than 200 million women globally. Education is often depicted as an effective instrument for abandoning the practice, but causal evidence is scant. This paper uses the introduction of the Universal Primary Educatio...

Wealth Redistribution after Exchange Rate Devaluations

By Andres Drenik, Gustavo Pereira, and Diego J. Perez

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

We document that the likelihood of having assets in foreign currency is increasing in households' income within many emerging economies. This pattern leads to heterogeneous exposures of wealth to exchange rate movements. We analyze the redistribution of l...

The Effect of Parental Education on Children's Drug and Alcohol Use

By Aaron Chalfin and Monica Deza

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

This research is the first to uncover evidence of an intergenerational effect of education on substance use in the United States. Using data from the NLSY79 and variation in education induced by changes in compulsory schooling laws, we study the effect of...

Ensemble Methods for Causal Effects in Panel Data Settings

By Susan Athey, Mohsen Bayati, Guido Imbens, and Zhaonan Qu

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

In many prediction problems researchers have found that combinations of prediction methods ("ensembles") perform better than individual methods. In this paper we apply these ideas to synthetic control type problems in panel data. Here a number of conceptu...

Unequal Rewards to Firms: Stock Market Responses to the Trump Election and the 2017 Corporate Tax Reform

By Alexander F. Wagner, Richard J. Zeckhauser, and Alexandre Ziegler

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Massive dollars shuttled back and forth among firms on the twisted path to and passage of the 2017 tax reform. Prices of individual stocks responded to the difference between initial and revised expectations. From the bill's initiation in the House to fin...

Escaping Malthus: Economic Growth and Fertility Change in the Developing World

By Shoumitro Chatterjee and Tom Vogl

American Economic Review, June 2018

Following mid-twentieth century predictions of Malthusian catastrophe, fertility in the developing world more than halved, while living standards more than doubled. We analyze how fertility change related to economic growth during this episode, using data...

Differentiated Durable Goods Monopoly: A Robust Coase Conjecture

By Francesco Nava and Pasquale Schiraldi

American Economic Review, May 2019

The paper analyzes a durable goods monopoly problem in which multiple varieties can be sold. A robust Coase conjecture establishes that the market eventually clears, with profits exceeding static optimal market-clearing profits and converging to this lowe...