Trends in US Spatial Inequality: Concentrating Affluence and a Democratization of Poverty

By Cecile Gaubert, Patrick Kline, Damián Vergara, and Danny Yagan

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We use Bureau of Economic Analysis, census, and Current Population Survey data to study trends in income inequality across US states and counties from 1960–2019. Both states and counties have diverged in terms of per capita pretax incomes since the late...

Local Industrial Policy and Sectoral Hubs

By Esteban Rossi-Hansberg, Pierre-Daniel Sarte, and Felipe Schwartzman

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We study the desirability of industrial policies that generate sectoral hubs using a quantitative spatial model with cognitive nonroutine and other occupations. The productivity of each occupation in an industry depends on sector-specific production exter...

Could Gentrification Stop the Poor from Benefiting from Urban Improvements?

By Clare Balboni, Gharad Bryan, Melanie Morten, and Bilal Siddiqi

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

When policymakers invest in urban infrastructure, there are concerns that poor residents living near the infrastructure will be displaced. This paper investigates mechanisms that may lead to such infrastructure-induced gentrification using a general equil...

On the Inequity of Predicting A While Hoping for B

By Sendhil Mullainathan and Ziad Obermeyer

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Algorithms trained to predict mismeasured proxy variables can reproduce and scale up racial bias. This mechanism of algorithmic bias is distinct from others in the literature and harder to detect. We show this using examples from health care, but the forc...

Adaptive Correspondence Experiments

By Hadar Avivi, Patrick Kline, Evan Rose, and Christopher Walters

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Correspondence experiments probe for discrimination by manipulating employer perceptions of applicant characteristics. We consider the gains from dynamically adapting the number and quality of fictitious applications each employer receives to their prior ...

Measuring Racial Discrimination in Algorithms

By David Arnold, Will Dobbie, and Peter Hull

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Algorithmic decision-making can lead to discrimination against legally protected groups, but measuring such discrimination is often hampered by a fundamental selection challenge. We develop new quasi-experimental tools to overcome this challenge and measu...

Product Proliferation under Rational Inattention: Application to Health Insurance

By Zach Y. Brown and Jihye Jeon

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

In markets with complicated products such as insurance, why do firms offer many products even when consumers appear to receive little benefit? We show that when consumers face information acquisition costs, firms may have an incentive to introduce many un...

Can Automatic Retention Improve Health Insurance Market Outcomes?

By Adrianna McIntyre, Mark Shepard, and Myles Wagner

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

There is growing interest in market design using default rules and other "choice architecture" principles to steer consumers toward desirable outcomes. Using data from Massachusetts's health insurance exchange, we study an "automatic retention" policy int...

Diversity in Economics Seminars: Who Gives Invited Talks?

By Jennifer L. Doleac, Erin Hengel, and Elizabeth Pancotti

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Invited seminar talks are a primary way that economists get feedback on their work, disseminate their research, and build their professional networks. In this paper, we present descriptive evidence on who gave invited seminar talks in economics. We use a ...

Gendered Citations at Top Economic Journals

By Marlène Koffi

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

This paper investigates how women's works are perceived among their peers. I construct a dataset using bibliographic data from articles published in top journals in economics and granular information on the articles that cite them. I find that female-auth...

Confidence Men? Evidence on Confidence and Gender among Top Economists

By Heather Sarsons and Guo Xu

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Using data from economists working in top US universities, we find that women are less confident than men along three margins. When asked about their level of agreement on survey questions about the economy, women are less likely to provide a judgment tha...

Using Longitudinal Data to Explore the Gender Gap for Academic Economists

By Kelly Bedard, Maxine Lee, and Heather Royer

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

There are widespread gender inequities within the economics discipline. In this paper, we collect and analyze new longitudinal salary and personnel data from top economics departments at public institutions. A panel spanning 2005 to 2018 allows us to foll...

Low Energy: Estimating Electric Vehicle Electricity Use

By Fiona Burlig, James Bushnell, David Rapson, and Catherine Wolfram

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We provide the first at-scale estimate of electric vehicle (EV) home charging. Previous estimates are based on conflicting surveys or are extrapolated from a small, unrepresentative sample of households with dedicated EV meters. We combine billions of hou...

Making Clean Firms Cleaner: Targeting Environmental Regulation to Maximize Returns

By Paige Weber

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Many environmental regulations are designed to clean up the dirtiest firms. However, if pollution intensity is negatively correlated with market share, this approach may not be the most cost-effective way to reduce pollution. This paper illustrates the th...

Machine Learning about Treatment Effect Heterogeneity: The Case of Household Energy Use

By Christopher R. Knittel and Samuel Stolper

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We use causal forests to evaluate the heterogeneous treatment effects (TEs) of repeated behavioral nudges toward household energy conservation. The average response to treatment is a monthly electricity reduction of 9 kilowatt-hours (kWh), but the full di...

Long-Term Employment Effects from Job Losses during the COVID-19 Crisis? A Comparison to the Great Recession and Its Slow Recovery

By Till von Wachter

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

This paper compares predictions for the long-term reductions in the employment-to-population (EPOP) ratio based on estimates of the overall job-loss rate and the long-term effects of job loss with the actual evolution of the EPOP ratio. It took about ten ...

Disability Insurance in the Great Recession: Ease of Access, Program Enrollment, and Local Hysteresis

By Melissa S. Kearney, Brendan M. Price, and Riley Wilson

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We examine the interaction between Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) access and economic shocks during the Great Recession by exploiting exogenous variation in SSDI appeals processing time—a measure of hassle or access—between neighboring zi...

Wage Insurance and Labor Market Trajectories

By Benjamin G. Hyman, Brian K. Kovak, Adam Leive, and Theodore Naff

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Wage insurance provides income support to displaced workers who find reemployment at a lower wage. We study the effects of the wage insurance provisions of the US Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program using administrative data from the state of Virgin...

Working for Your Bread: The Labor Supply Effects of SNAP

By Marianne Bitler, Jason Cook, and Jonathan Rothbaum

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the only universal US means-tested safety net program, has a low benefit-reduction rate. Thus, many SNAP recipients are working. We apply recent methods to study whether there is evidence of moral haza...

Jackson, the Bank War, and the Legacy of the Second Bank of the United States

By Peter L. Rousseau

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

President Jackson vetoed the bill to recharter the Second Bank of the United States on July 10, 1832. I describe events leading to the veto and through the bank's dissolution in 1836 using private correspondence and official government documents. These ...