Does Exposure to Other Ethnic Regions Promote National Integration? Evidence from Nigeria

By Oyebola Okunogbe

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2024

This paper examines how temporary exposure to a different ethnic region affects national integration, using original survey data from participants in Africa's largest national youth service program. Seven years later, participants randomly assigned to ser...

Employer Concentration and Wages for Specialized Workers

By Anna Thoresson

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2024

This paper studies how wages respond to a sudden change in employer concentration by using the deregulation of the Swedish pharmacy industry. The reform involved a substantial and policy-driven increase in the number of employers that varied by local labo...

Informed Enforcement: Lessons from Pollution Monitoring in China

By Sebastian Axbard and Zichen Deng

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2024

Government regulations are often imperfectly enforced by public officials. In this study, we exploit the introduction of air pollution monitors in China to investigate whether real-time monitoring of policy outcomes affects the enforcement of existing reg...

Reversing the Resource Curse: Foreign Corruption Regulation and the Local Economic Benefits of Resource Extraction

By Hans B. Christensen, Mark Maffett, and Thomas Rauter

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2024

We examine how foreign corruption regulation affects the economic benefits communities receive from extraction activities in the resource-rich areas of Africa. After a mid-2000s increase in enforcement of the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), night...

Gender Attitudes in the Judiciary: Evidence from US Circuit Courts

By Elliott Ash, Daniel L. Chen, and Arianna Ornaghi

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2024

Do gender attitudes influence interactions with female judges in US circuit courts? In this paper, we propose a judge-specific measure of gender attitudes based on use of gender-stereotyped language in the judge's authored opinions. Exploiting quasi-rando...

Is It Who You Are or What You Get? Comparing the Impacts of Loans and Grants for Microenterprise Development

By Bruno Crépon, Mohamed El Komi, and Adam Osman

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2024

Is the type of financial support provided to businesses more important than which businesses receive it? Loans and grants can lead to differences in optimal investments and in scope for moral hazard. We randomize 3,293 business loan applicants into receiv...

Affirmative Action and Precollege Human Capital

By Mitra Akhtari, Natalie Bau, and Jean-William Laliberté

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2024

Though racial affirmative action (AA) policies are widespread in college admissions, evidence on their effects before college is limited. We study a US Supreme Court ruling that reinstated AA in three states. Using nationwide SAT data, we separately ident...

The Virus of Fear: The Political Impact of Ebola in the United States

By Filipe Campante, Emilio Depetris-Chauvin, and Ruben Durante

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2024

We study how public anxiety over the threat of a disease outbreak can affect voter behavior by looking at the Ebola scare that hit the United States in 2014. Exploiting timing and locations of the four cases diagnosed in the country, we show that heighten...

The Marginal Returns to Distance Education: Evidence from Mexico's Telesecundarias

By Emilio Borghesan and Gabrielle Vasey

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2024

This paper analyzes a large-scale and long-running distance education program in Mexico. We estimate marginal treatment effects (MTEs) for learning in math and Spanish in telesecundarias relative to traditional Mexican secondary schools using an empirical...

The Value of Leisure Synchronization

By Simon Georges-Kot, Dominique Goux, and Eric Maurin

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2024

This paper explores the extent to which workers are willing to trade hours worked for leisure time shared with their spouse. We use the fact that the number and timing of paid vacation days to which French employees are entitled vary in a quasi-random way...

What Impacts Can We Expect from School Spending Policy? Evidence from Evaluations in the United States

By C. Kirabo Jackson and Claire L. Mackevicius

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2024

We conduct meta-analysis on a comprehensive set of studies of the impacts of US K-12 public school spending on student outcomes—estimating average marginal impacts and heterogeneity across contexts. On average, a policy increasing spending by $1,000 per...

2023 in Featured Charts

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Economists addressed issues related to immigration, social identity, infrastructure costs, and more.

Estimating the Distaste for Price Gouging with Incentivized Consumer Reports

By Justin Holz, Rafael Jiménez-Durán, and Eduardo Laguna-Müggenburg

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2024

Thirty-four states prohibit price increases during emergencies, and individuals take costly actions to report violators. We measure experimentally the willingness to pay to report sellers who increase prices of personal protective equipment. Over 75 perce...

AEASTAT: 2024 Annual Meeting

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Sessions for AEA Committee on Economic Statistics, 2024 ASSA meetings

Front Matter

American Economic Review, January 2024

Market Power and Innovation in the Intangible Economy

By Maarten De Ridder

American Economic Review, January 2024

This paper offers a unified explanation for the slowdown of productivity growth, the decline in business dynamism, and the rise of market power. Using a quantitative framework, I show that the rise of intangible inputs, such as software, can explain these...

The Economic Impact of Depression Treatment in India: Evidence from Community-Based Provision of Pharmacotherapy

By Manuela Angelucci and Daniel Bennett

American Economic Review, January 2024

This study evaluates the impact of depression treatment on economic behavior in Karnataka, India. We cross-randomize pharmacotherapy and livelihoods assistance among 1,000 depressed adults and evaluate impacts on depression severity, socioeconomic outcome...

Disentangling Moral Hazard and Adverse Selection

By Henrique Castro-Pires, Hector Chade, and Jeroen Swinkels

American Economic Review, January 2024

While many real-world principal-agent problems have both moral hazard and adverse selection, existing tools largely analyze only one at a time. Do the insights from the separate analyses survive when the frictions are combined? We develop a simple methodâ...

Propagation and Insurance in Village Networks

By Cynthia Kinnan, Krislert Samphantharak, Robert Townsend, and Diego Vera-Cossio

American Economic Review, January 2024

Firms in developing countries are embedded in supply chains and labor networks. These linkages may propagate or attenuate shocks. Using panel data from Thai villages, we document three facts: as households facing idiosyncratic shocks adjust their producti...

Universal Basic Income: A Dynamic Assessment

By Diego Daruich and Raquel Fernández

American Economic Review, January 2024

Universal basic income (UBI) is an increasingly popular policy proposal, but there is no evidence regarding its longer-term consequences. We find that UBI generates large welfare losses in a general equilibrium model with imperfect capital markets, labor ...