The case for paying college athletes

[Research Highlight]

September 11, 2019

The AEA interviews Allen Sanderson and John Siegfried about why they believe the NCAA's current model is broken.

Front Matter

American Economic Review, August 2021

Lapse-Based Insurance

By Daniel Gottlieb and Kent Smetters

American Economic Review, August 2021

Most individual life insurance policies lapse, with lapsers cross-subsidizing non-lapsers. We show that policies and lapse patterns predicted by standard rational expectations models are the opposite of those observed empirically. We propose two behaviora...

Daily Labor Supply and Adaptive Reference Points

By Neil Thakral and Linh T. Tô

American Economic Review, August 2021

This paper provides field evidence on how reference points adjust, a degree of freedom in reference-dependence models. Examining this in the context of cabdrivers' daily labor-supply behavior, we ask how the within-day timing of earnings affects decisions...

The Long-Run Effects of Childhood Insurance Coverage: Medicaid Implementation, Adult Health, and Labor Market Outcomes

By Andrew Goodman-Bacon

American Economic Review, August 2021

This paper estimates the long-run effects of childhood Medicaid eligibility on adult health and economic outcomes using the program's original introduction (1966–1970) and its mandated coverage of welfare recipients. The design compares cohorts born in ...

What to Expect from the Lower Bound on Interest Rates: Evidence from Derivatives Prices

By Thomas M. Mertens and John C. Williams

American Economic Review, August 2021

This paper analyzes the effects of the lower bound for interest rates on the distributions of inflation and interest rates. In a New Keynesian model with a lower bound, two equilibria emerge: policy is mostly unconstrained in the "target equilibrium," whe...

Entry-Proofness and Discriminatory Pricing under Adverse Selection

By Andrea Attar, Thomas Mariotti, and François Salanié

American Economic Review, August 2021

This paper studies competitive allocations under adverse selection. We first provide a general necessary and sufficient condition for entry on an inactive market to be unprofitable. We then use this result to characterize, for an active market, a unique b...

Targeting In-Kind Transfers through Market Design: A Revealed Preference Analysis of Public Housing Allocation

By Daniel Waldinger

American Economic Review, August 2021

Public housing benefits are rationed through wait lists. Theoretical work on public housing allocation has debated how much choice applicants should have over units, identifying a possible trade-off between efficiency and redistribution. This paper empiri...

Place-Based Drivers of Mortality: Evidence from Migration

By Amy Finkelstein, Matthew Gentzkow, and Heidi Williams

American Economic Review, August 2021

We estimate the effect of current location on elderly mortality by analyzing outcomes of movers in the Medicare population. We control for movers' origin locations as well as a rich vector of pre-move health measures. We also develop a novel strategy to a...

Identifying Present Bias from the Timing of Choices

By Paul Heidhues and Philipp Strack

American Economic Review, August 2021

A (partially naive) quasi-hyperbolic discounter repeatedly chooses whether to complete a task. Her net benefits of task completion are drawn independently between periods from a time-invariant distribution. We show that the probability of completing the t...

Mediation in Reputational Bargaining

By Jack Fanning

American Economic Review, August 2021

Can an uninformed mediator improve outcomes in a dynamic reputational bargaining model? I show that a simple communication protocol used by professional mediators, of announcing an agreement only if both parties privately accept its terms, can increase th...

The Impacts of a Multifaceted Prenatal Intervention on Human Capital Accumulation in Early Life

By Pedro Carneiro, Lucy Kraftman, Giacomo Mason, Lucie Moore, Imran Rasul, and Molly Scott

American Economic Review, August 2021

We evaluate an intervention targeting early life nutrition and well-being for households in extreme poverty in Northern Nigeria. The intervention leads to large and sustained improvements in children's anthropometric and health outcomes, including an 8 pe...

Minority visibility and political outcomes

[Page]

Does the salience of minorities increase political polarization?

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2021

Washington Consensus in Latin America: From Raw Model to Straw Man

[Symposium: Washington Consensus Revisited]

By Ilan Goldfajn, Lorenza Martínez, and Rodrigo O. Valdés

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2021

We take stock of three decades of a love-hate relationship between Latin American policies and the Washington Consensus, reviewing its implementation, national debate, and outcomes. Using regional data and case studies of Brazil, Chile, and Mexico, we dis...

Washington Consensus Reforms and Lessons for Economic Performance in Sub-Saharan Africa

[Symposium: Washington Consensus Revisited]

By Belinda Archibong, Brahima Coulibaly, and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2021

Over three decades after market-oriented structural reforms termed "Washington Consensus" policies were first implemented, we revisit the evidence on policy adoption and the effects of these policies on socio-economic performance in sub-Saharan African ...

Of Forking Paths and Tied Hands: Selective Publication of Findings, and What Economists Should Do about It

[Symposium: Statistical Significance]

By Maximilian Kasy

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2021

A key challenge for interpreting published empirical research is the fact that published findings might be selected by researchers or by journals. Selection might be based on criteria such as significance, consistency with theory, or the surprisingness ...

Evidence on Research Transparency in Economics

[Symposium: Statistical Significance]

By Edward Miguel

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2021

A decade ago, the term "research transparency" was not on economists' radar screen, but in a few short years a scholarly movement has emerged to bring new open science practices, tools and norms into the mainstream of our discipline. The goal of this ar...

Retrospectives: James Buchanan: Clubs and Alternative Welfare Economics

By Alain Marciano

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2021

James Buchanan wrote "An Economic Theory of Clubs" and invented clubs to support a form of welfare economics in which there is no social welfare function (SWF) and individual utility functions cannot be "read" by external observers. Clubs were a means to ...

The Great Unequalizer: Initial Health Effects of COVID-19 in the United States

[Symposium: COVID-19]

By Marcella Alsan, Amitabh Chandra, and Kosali Simon

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2021

We measure inequities from the COVID-19 pandemic on mortality and hospitalizations in the United States during the early months of the outbreak. We discuss challenges in measuring health outcomes and health inequality, some of which are specific to COVID-...