Front Matter

American Economic Review, October 2020

Sources of Displaced Workers' Long-Term Earnings Losses

By Marta Lachowska, Alexandre Mas, and Stephen A. Woodbury

American Economic Review, October 2020

We estimate the magnitudes of reduced earnings, work hours, and wage rates of workers displaced during the Great Recession using linked employer-employee panel data from Washington state. Displaced workers' earnings losses occurred mainly because hourly w...

Sources of Inaction in Household Finance: Evidence from the Danish Mortgage Market

By Steffen Andersen, John Y. Campbell, Kasper Meisner Nielsen, and Tarun Ramadorai

American Economic Review, October 2020

We build an empirical model to attribute delays in mortgage refinancing to psychological costs inhibiting refinancing until incentives are sufficiently strong; and behavior, potentially attributable to information-gathering costs, lowering the probability...

Upping the Ante: The Equilibrium Effects of Unconditional Grants to Private Schools

By Tahir Andrabi, Jishnu Das, Asim I. Khwaja, Selcuk Ozyurt, and Niharika Singh

American Economic Review, October 2020

We assess whether financing can help private schools, which now account for one-third of primary school enrollment in low- and middle-income countries. Our experiment allocated unconditional cash grants to either one (L) or all (H) private schools in a vi...

Misperceived Social Norms: Women Working Outside the Home in Saudi Arabia

By Leonardo Bursztyn, Alessandra L. González, and David Yanagizawa-Drott

American Economic Review, October 2020

We show that the vast majority of young married men in Saudi Arabia privately support women working outside the home (WWOH) and substantially underestimate support by other similar men. Correcting these beliefs increases men's (costly) willingness to help...

Business-Cycle Anatomy

By George-Marios Angeletos, Fabrice Collard, and Harris Dellas

American Economic Review, October 2020

We propose a new strategy for dissecting the macroeconomic time series, provide a template for the business-cycle propagation mechanism that best describes the data, and use its properties to appraise models of both the parsimonious and the medium-scale v...

Liquidity versus Wealth in Household Debt Obligations: Evidence from Housing Policy in the Great Recession

By Peter Ganong and Pascal Noel

American Economic Review, October 2020

We exploit variation in mortgage modifications to disentangle the impact of reducing long-term obligations with no change in short-term payments ("wealth"), and reducing short-term payments with no change in long-term obligations ("liquidity"). Using regr...

Patronage and Selection in Public Sector Organizations

By Emanuele Colonnelli, Mounu Prem, and Edoardo Teso

American Economic Review, October 2020

In all modern bureaucracies, politicians retain some discretion in public employment decisions, which may lead to frictions in the selection process if political connections substitute for individual competence. Relying on detailed matched employer-employ...

Artificial Intelligence, Algorithmic Pricing, and Collusion

By Emilio Calvano, Giacomo Calzolari, Vincenzo Denicolò, and Sergio Pastorello

American Economic Review, October 2020

Increasingly, algorithms are supplanting human decision-makers in pricing goods and services. To analyze the possible consequences, we study experimentally the behavior of algorithms powered by Artificial Intelligence (Q-learning) in a workhorse oligopoly...

Medical cost sharing for kids

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How much do price hikes decrease healthcare expenditures on children?

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2020

E-governance, Accountability, and Leakage in Public Programs: Experimental Evidence from a Financial Management Reform in India

By Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, Clément Imbert, Santhosh Mathew, and Rohini Pande

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2020

Can e-governance reforms improve government policy? By making information available on a real-time basis, information technologies may reduce the theft of public funds. We analyze a large field experiment and the nationwide scale-up of a reform to India's...

Healthcare Demand under Simple Prices: Evidence from Tiered Hospital Networks

By Elena Prager

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2020

This paper shows that consumers respond to prices for complex healthcare when they can easily assess out-of-pocket prices. Healthcare cost containment efforts increasingly incentivize price shopping despite a dearth of evidence that this steers consumers ...

The Elasticity of Science

By Kyle Myers

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2020

This paper identifies the degree to which scientists are willing to change the direction of their work in exchange for resources. Data from the National Institutes of Health are used to estimate how scientists respond to targeted funding opportunities. In...

Job Displacement, Family Dynamics, and Spousal Labor Supply

By Martin Halla, Julia Schmieder, and Andrea Weber

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2020

We study the effectiveness of intrahousehold insurance among married couples when the husband loses his job due to a mass layoff or plant closure. Empirical results based on Austrian administrative data show that husbands suffer persistent employment and ...

Rules for Recovery: Impact of Indexed Disaster Funds on Shock Coping in Mexico

By Alejandro del Valle, Alain de Janvry, and Elisabeth Sadoulet

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2020

Government provision of disaster transfers is typically hampered by liquidity constraints and by weak rules and administrative capacity to disburse reconstruction resources. We show that by easing these hurdles, Mexico's indexed disaster fund (Fonden) con...

The Impact of Insurance Expansions on the Already Insured: The Affordable Care Act and Medicare

By Colleen M. Carey, Sarah Miller, and Laura R. Wherry

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2020

Some states have not adopted the Affordable Care Act (ACA) Medicaid expansions due to concerns that the expansions may impair access to care and utilization for those who are already insured. We investigate such negative spillovers using a large panel of ...

Partisan Shocks and Financial Markets: Evidence from Close National Elections

By Daniele Girardi

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2020

This paper estimates the effect of partisan electoral victories on stock and bond markets. We employ a regression-discontinuity-based event study in a sample of 758 worldwide post-1945 national elections, using existing data on parliamentary elections and...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2020