Are Risk Preferences Stable?

[Symposium: Risk in Economics and Psychology]

By Hannah Schildberg-Hörisch

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2018

It is ultimately an empirical question whether risk preferences are stable over time. The evidence comes from diverse strands of literature, covering the stability of risk preferences in panel data over shorter periods of time, life-cycle dynamics in ri...

Temporary Protection and Technology Adoption: Evidence from the Napoleonic Blockade

By Réka Juhász

American Economic Review, November 2018

This paper uses a natural experiment to estimate the causal effect of temporary trade protection on long-term economic development. I find that regions in the French Empire which became better protected from trade with the British for exogenous reasons du...

The Effect of Export Promotion on Firm-Level Performance

By Jakob Munch and Georg Schaur

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2018

Most countries promote exports. This paper answers two questions: Does export promotion improve firm performance, and do any benefits outweigh costs? We solve self-selection problems by accounting for an extensive set of firm characteristics. In addition,...

Representations of Men and Women in Introductory Economics Textbooks

By Betsey Stevenson and Hanna Zlotnik

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

This paper examines the frequency and ways in which men and women appear in principles of economics textbooks. Men account for more than 90 percent of business leaders, policymakers, and economists mentioned in textbooks. In addition, women are a minority...

Cartels Uncovered

By Ari Hyytinen, Frode Steen, and Otto Toivanen

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2018

How many cartels are there, and how long do they live? The answers to these questions are important in assessing the need for competition policy. We present a Hidden Markov Model that takes into account that often it is not known whether a cartel exists o...

Does Cheap Talk Affect Market Outcomes? Evidence from eBay

By Daniel W. Elfenbein, Raymond Fisman, and Brian McManus

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2019

We study cheap talk by firms and responses by their consumers, focusing on unverifiable promises of charitable donations on eBay during 2005–2006. Cheap talk listings have lower sales probabilities but sell at higher prices when successful. The negative...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2018

Are Low Interest Rates Deflationary? A Paradox of Perfect-Foresight Analysis

By Mariana García-Schmidt and Michael Woodford

American Economic Review, January 2019

We argue that an influential "neo-Fisherian" analysis of the effects of low interest rates depends on using perfect foresight equilibrium analysis under circumstances where it is not plausible for people to hold expectations of that kind. We propose an ex...

Emotional Judges and Unlucky Juveniles

By Ozkan Eren and Naci Mocan

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2018

Employing the universe of juvenile court decisions in a U.S. state between 1996 and 2012, we analyze the effects of emotional shocks associated with unexpected outcomes of football games played by a prominent college team in the state. We find that unexpe...

Early Childhood Education by Television: Lessons from Sesame Street

By Melissa S. Kearney and Phillip B. Levine

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2019

We investigate whether preschool-age children exposed to Sesame Street when it aired in 1969 experienced improved educational and labor market outcomes. We exploit geographic variation in broadcast reception derived from technological factors, namely UHF ...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, August 2018

The Evolution of the Online Platform Economy: Evidence from Five Years of Banking Data

By Diana Farrell, Fiona Greig, and Amar Hamoudi

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Measuring the gig economy has been challenging. Drawing on anonymized administrative banking data, we measure supply-side participation in the online platform economy between 2013 and 2018. We find 2.3 million account holders who received payments from 12...

Unemployment Cycles

By Jan Eeckhout and Ilse Lindenlaub

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2019

The labor market by itself can create cyclical outcomes, even in the absence of exogenous shocks. We propose a theory in which the search behavior of the employed has profound aggregate implications for the unemployed. There is a strategic complementarity...

Income Volatility and the PSID: Past Research and New Results

By Robert Moffitt and Sisi Zhang

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

The PSID has major advantages for studying income volatility and, because of this, research using it has been responsible for major improvements in the methodology of studying income volatility. Its research on calendar trends finds a reasonably consisten...

Cognitive Abilities and Inflation Expectations

By Francesco D'Acunto, Daniel Hoang, Maritta Paloviita, and Michael Weber

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Cognitive abilities help explain the large cross-sectional variation in inflation expectations at the household level. But which type of cognitive abilities are important? We find that not only quantitative abilities but also logical and verbal abilities ...

Matching with Stochastic Arrival

By Neil Thakral

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

This paper examines efficiency and fairness properties in a dynamic allocation problem. The model applies to situations in which objects of different types arrive stochastically over time and must be assigned to agents in a queue, such as the allocation o...

The Price of Labor: Evaluating the Impact of Eliminating User Fees on Maternal and Infant Health Outcomes

By Anne Fitzpatrick

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Since 2001, several sub-Saharan African countries have eliminated user fees for childbirth. Although intended to improve maternal and infant health outcomes, service quality also fell as facilities became overburdened. In this paper I combine DHS surveys ...

Product versus Process: Innovation Strategies of Multiproduct Firms

By Lisandra Flach and Michael Irlacher

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2018

We investigate the effects of better access to foreign markets on innovation strategies of multiproduct firms in industries with different scope for product differentiation. Industry-specific demand and cost linkages induce a distinction between the retur...

The Language of Discrimination: Using Experimental versus Observational Data

By Aislinn Bohren, Alex Imas, and Michael Rosenberg

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

We use experimental and observational data to examine whether people respond differently to questions posed by females versus males. We document significant differences in the language of responses, both in terms of the distribution of language utilized, ...

How Trade Sensitive Are Energy-Intensive Sectors?

By Carolyn Fischer and Alan K. Fox

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

For most governments looking to implement climate policy—and for interest groups looking to influence it—the effect of unilateral greenhouse gas regulation on employment, production, and emissions represents an overarching concern. Critical to improvi...