Capital Cities, Conflict, and Misgovernance

By Filipe R. Campante, Quoc-Anh Do, and Bernardo Guimaraes

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2019

We investigate the links between capital cities, conflict, and the quality of governance, starting from the assumption that incumbent elites are constrained by the threat of insurrection, and that the latter is rendered less effective by distance from the...

Climate Change: The Ultimate Challenge for Economics

By William Nordhaus

American Economic Review, June 2019

The Culture of Overconfidence

By V. Bhaskar and Caroline Thomas

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2019

Perceptions of overconfidence can exacerbate the tendency of reputationally concerned leaders to continue bad projects. Reputation concerns alone induce a bias toward inefficient continuation in a leader receiving information privately. When she is overco...

Can We Control Carbon Dioxide? (From 1975)

By William Nordhaus

American Economic Review, June 2019

Asymmetric Information and Imperfect Competition in Lending Markets

By Gregory S. Crawford, Nicola Pavanini, and Fabiano Schivardi

American Economic Review, July 2018

We study the effects of asymmetric information and imperfect competition in the market for small business lines of credit. We estimate a structural model of credit demand, loan use, pricing, and firm default using matched firm-bank data from Italy. We fin...

Do Immigrants Assimilate More Slowly Today Than in the Past?

By Ran Abramitzky, Leah Boustan, and Katherine Eriksson

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2020

Using millions of historical census records and modern birth certificates, we document that immigrants assimilated into US society at similar rates in the past and present. We measure cultural assimilation as immigrants giving their children less foreign ...

Unity in Diversity? How Intergroup Contact Can Foster Nation Building

By Samuel Bazzi, Arya Gaduh, Alexander D. Rothenberg, and Maisy Wong

American Economic Review, November 2019

We use a population resettlement program in Indonesia to identify long-run effects of intergroup contact on national integration. In the 1980s, the government relocated two million ethnically diverse migrants into hundreds of new communities. We find grea...

Occupations and Import Competition: Evidence from Denmark

By Sharon Traiberman

American Economic Review, December 2019

I argue that the winners and losers from trade are decided primarily by occupation. In addition to fixed adjustment costs, workers build up specific human capital over time that is destroyed when they must change occupations. I show that ignoring human ca...

Sovereign Debt and Structural Reforms

By Andreas Müller, Kjetil Storesletten, and Fabrizio Zilibotti

American Economic Review, December 2019

We construct a dynamic theory of sovereign debt and structural reforms with limited enforcement and moral hazard. A sovereign country in recession wishes to smooth consumption. It can also undertake costly reforms to speed up recovery. The sovereign can r...

An Event Long-Short Index: Theory and Applications

By Raymond Fisman and Eric Zitzewitz

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2019

We propose a stock market-based measure to capture initial beliefs about an event's effect on firm profits, which may be used to measure whether initial expectations are subsequently realized. Our "Event Long-Short Index" is the difference in market-capit...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2019

Should We Treat Data as Labor? Moving beyond "Free"

By Imanol Arrieta-Ibarra, Leonard Goff, Diego Jiménez-Hernández, Jaron Lanier, and E. Glen Weyl

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

In the digital economy, user data is typically treated as capital created by corporations observing willing individuals. This neglects users' roles in creating data, reducing incentives for users, distributing the gains from the data economy unequally, an...

Does Strategic Ability Affect Efficiency? Evidence from Electricity Markets

By Ali Hortaçsu, Fernando Luco, Steven L. Puller, and Dongni Zhu

American Economic Review, December 2019

Oligopoly models of price competition predict that strategic firms exercise market power and generate inefficiencies. However, heterogeneity in firms' strategic ability also generates inefficiencies. We study the Texas electricity market where firms exhib...

Government Old-Age Support and Labor Supply: Evidence from the Old Age Assistance Program

By Daniel K. Fetter and Lee M. Lockwood

American Economic Review, August 2018

Many government programs transfer resources to older people and implicitly or explicitly tax their labor. We shed new light on the labor supply and welfare effects of such programs by investigating the Old Age Assistance Program (OAA). Exploiting the larg...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, October 2019

A Single-Judge Solution to Beauty Contests

By Zhen Huo and Marcelo Pedroni

American Economic Review, February 2020

We show that the equilibrium policy rule in beauty contest models is equivalent to that of a single agent's forecast of the economic fundamental. This forecast is conditional on a modified information process, which simply discounts the precision of idios...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2018

Monopsony in Online Labor Markets

By Arindrajit Dube, Jeff Jacobs, Suresh Naidu, and Siddharth Suri

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2020

Despite the seemingly low switching and search costs of on-demand labor markets like Amazon Mechanical Turk, we find substantial monopsony power, as measured by the elasticity of labor supply facing the requester (employer). We isolate plausibly exogenous...

The Race to the Base

By Dan Bernhardt, Peter Buisseret, and Sinem Hidir

American Economic Review, March 2020

We study multi-district legislative elections between two office-seeking parties when one party has an initial valence advantage that may shift and even reverse during the campaign; and, each party cares not only about winning a majority, but also about i...

What Matters for the Productivity of Kidney Exchange?

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

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Kidney exchange platforms serve patients who need a kidney transplant and who have a willing, but incompatible, donor. These platforms match patients and donors to produce transplants. This paper documents operational details of the three largest platform...