Does Elite Capture Matter? Local Elites and Targeted Welfare Programs in Indonesia

By Vivi Alatas, Abhijit Banerjee, Rema Hanna, Benjamin A. Olken, Ririn Purnamasari, and Matthew Wai-Poi

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

This paper investigates how elite capture affects the welfare gains from targeted government transfer programs in Indonesia, using both a high-stakes field experiment that varied the extent of elite influence and nonexperimental data on a variety of exist...

Cream Skimming and Information Design in Matching Markets

By Gleb Romanyuk and Alex Smolin

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2019

Short-lived buyers arrive to a platform over time and randomly match with sellers. The sellers stay at the platform and decide whether to accept incoming requests. The platform designs what buyer information the sellers observe before deciding to form a m...

Beyond the Flipped Class: The Impact of Research-Based Teaching Methods in a Macroeconomics Principles Class

By Austin Boyle and William L. Goffe

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Cognitive scientists have identified fundamental principles influencing learning: deliberate practice, interleaving, retrieval practice, spacing, metacognition, desirable difficulties, limited working memory, curse of knowledge, schema generation, and con...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2018

Price Theory

By E. Glen Weyl

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2019

I argue that there exists a coherent and relevant tradition in economic thought that I label "price theory." I define it as neoclassical microeconomic analysis that reduces rich and often incompletely specified models into "prices" (approximately) suffi...

A Precinct Too Far: Turnout and Voting Costs

By Enrico Cantoni

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2020

I study the effects of voting costs—specifically, distance to polling location—using geographic discontinuities. Opposite sides of boundaries between voting precincts are observationally identical, except for their assigned polling locations. This dis...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2019

Tax Evasion and Inequality

By Annette Alstadsæter, Niels Johannesen, and Gabriel Zucman

American Economic Review, June 2019

Drawing on a unique dataset of leaked customer lists from offshore financial institutions matched to administrative wealth records in Scandinavia, we show that offshore tax evasion is highly concentrated among the rich. The skewed distribution of offshore...

Job Search Periods for Welfare Applicants: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment

By Jonneke Bolhaar, Nadine Ketel, and Bas van der Klaauw

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2019

We combine a randomized experiment with administrative data to study the effects of mandatory job search periods in the Dutch welfare system. Job search periods postpone the first welfare benefits payment and encourage applicants to start searching for jo...

Corrigendum: Particulate Pollution and the Productivity of Pear Packers

By Tom Chang, Joshua S. Graff Zivin, Tal Gross, and Matthew J. Neidell

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2019

Top 1 Percent Income Shares: Comparing Estimates Using Tax Data

By Gerald Auten and David Splinter

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Many studies have used tax data to measure the U.S. income distribution, but their results vary widely. For example, in 2014 the top 1 percent share of income is 21.5 percent in Piketty and Saez (2003 and updates), 16.7 percent in the Congressional Budget...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2019

Identifying Industry Margins with Price Constraints: Structural Estimation on Pharmaceuticals

By Pierre Dubois and Laura Lasio

American Economic Review, December 2018

We develop a structural model to investigate the effects of pharmaceutical price regulation on demand and on manufacturers' price-setting behavior in France. We estimate price-cost margins in a regulated market with price constraints and infer whether the...

Liquidity Sentiments

By Vladimir Asriyan, William Fuchs, and Brett Green

American Economic Review, November 2019

We develop a rational theory of liquidity sentiments in which the market outcome in any given period depends on agents' expectations about market conditions in future periods. Our theory is based on the interaction between adverse selection and resale c...

Collective Choice in Dynamic Public Good Provision

By T. Renee Bowen, George Georgiadis, and Nicolas S. Lambert

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2019

Two heterogeneous agents contribute over time to a joint project and collectively decide its scale. A larger scale requires greater cumulative effort and delivers higher benefits upon completion. We show that the efficient agent prefers a smaller scale,...

Bayesian Identification: A Theory for State-Dependent Utilities

By Jay Lu

American Economic Review, September 2019

We provide a revealed preference methodology for identifying beliefs and utilities that can vary across states. A notion of comparative informativeness is introduced that is weaker than the standard Blackwell ranking. We show that beliefs and state-depend...

Estimating Adjustment Frictions Using Nonlinear Budget Sets: Method and Evidence from the Earnings Test

By Alexander M. Gelber, Damon Jones, and Daniel W. Sacks

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2020

We introduce a method for estimating the cost of adjusting earnings, as well as the earnings elasticity with respect to the net-of-tax share. Our method uses information on bunching in the earnings distribution at convex budget set kinks before and after ...

Fiscal Foundations of Inflation: Imperfect Knowledge

By Stefano Eusepi and Bruce Preston

American Economic Review, September 2018

This paper proposes a theory of the fiscal foundations of inflation based on imperfect knowledge and learning. Because imperfect knowledge breaks Ricardian equivalence, the scale and composition of the public debt matter for inflation. High and moderate d...

Market Failure in Kidney Exchange

By Nikhil Agarwal, Itai Ashlagi, Eduardo Azevedo, Clayton R. Featherstone, and Ömer Karaduman

American Economic Review, November 2019

We show that kidney exchange markets suffer from market failures whose remedy could increase transplants by 30 to 63 percent. First, we document that the market is fragmented and inefficient; most transplants are arranged by hospitals instead of national ...

The Dollar, Bank Leverage, and Deviations from Covered Interest Parity

By Stefan Avdjiev, Wenxin Du, Cathérine Koch, and Hyun Song Shin

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2019

We document a triangular relationship in that a stronger dollar goes hand in hand with larger deviations from covered interest parity (CIP) and contractions of cross-border bank lending in dollars. We argue that underpinning the triangle is the role of th...