Borrowing from China and Sovereign Credit Risk

By Illenin Kondo, Astghik Mkhitaryan, and César Sosa-Padilla

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

China's lending to developing nations has surged since the mid–2000s, making it these nations' largest official creditor. Contracts frequently feature unique terms, indicating China's substantial privileges as a lender. However, other lenders are also i...

Global Spillovers from Fed Hikes and a Strong Dollar: The Risk Channel

By José Cristi, Şebnem Kalemli-Özcan, Mariana Sans, and Filiz Unsal

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

We study the international transmission of US monetary policy shocks and a strong US dollar. We show that monetary tightening is linked to a higher risk premium, only in emerging markets, measured by deviations from uncovered interest parity. An appreciat...

Comparative Advantage of Humans versus AI in the Long Tail

By Nikhil Agarwal, Ray Huang, Alex Moehring, Pranav Rajpurkar, Tobias Salz, and Feiyang Yu

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

Machine learning algorithms now exceed human performance on several predictive tasks, generating concerns about widespread job displacement. However, supervised learning approaches rely on large amounts of high-quality labeled data and are designed for sp...

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Algorithms

By Jens Ludwig, Sendhil Mullainathan, and Ashesh Rambachan

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

We calculate the social return on algorithmic interventions (specifically, their marginal value of public funds (MVPF)) across multiple domains of interest to economists—regulation, criminal justice, medicine, and education. Though these algorithms are ...

Algorithmic Fairness and Social Welfare

By Annie Liang and Jay Lu

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

What constitutes a fair algorithm? In the literature on algorithmic fairness, a common approach is to formulate fairness concerns as statistical constraints and to select the most accurate algorithm satisfying this constraint. This approach is facially di...

Algorithmic Recommendations When the Stakes Are High: Evidence from Judicial Elections

By Victoria Angelova, Will Dobbie, and Crystal S. Yang

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

We ask whether increased public scrutiny leads to the more effective use of predictive algorithms. We focus on the context of bail, where judges face heightened public scrutiny during competitive partisan elections. We find that judges up for reelection a...

Creating the "American Way" of Business: Evidence from WWII in the United States

By Michela Giorcelli

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

World War II was arguably one of history's largest shocks to the US economic and production system. In this paper, I argue that "managerial technology" played a key role in shaping US WWII production and its capacity to defeat some of the most advanced ec...

Global Managers, Local Workers: Wage Setting inside a Multinational Firm

By Virginia Minni

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

How are wages set within a multinational firm? Combining cross-country data on wages and labor regulations with personnel records of a large multinational firm, I find that wage setting depends on the rank of the employee in the firm hierarchy. For manage...

Regional Differences in Public-Sector Productivity and Managerial Talent

By Alessandra Fenizia

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

This paper studies whether regional differences in the productivity of Italian Social Security Agency offices can be explained by variation in manager characteristics. Consistent with other settings, offices in the North are more productive on average tha...

Synergistic Impacts of Expansions in Pre-K Access and School Funding on Student Achievement: Evidence from California's Transitional Kindergarten Rollout

By Rucker C. Johnson

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

This paper investigates the extent to which expansions in public pre-K and increases in K12 funding improve student learning trajectories and narrow achievement gaps. I link school- and student-level information on public preschool participation with long...

In Search of Dynamic Complementarities between Early and Later Education: Evidence from North Carolina's Pre-K and K–12 School Funding Reforms

By Jade M. Jenkins, Tyler W. Watts, and Kenneth A. Dodge

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

We extend Johnson and Jackson's (2019) seminal paper on dynamic complementarities between early and late educational opportunities using modern-day programs in North Carolina. We exploit exogenous variation in the allocations made to counties for state pr...

The Effect of Early Childhood Programs on Third-Grade Test Scores: Evidence from Transitional Kindergarten in Michigan

By Jordan Berne, Brian Jacob, Tareena Musaddiq, Anna Shapiro, and Christina Weiland

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

Transitional kindergarten (TK) is a relatively recent entrant into the US early education landscape, combining features of public pre-K and regular kindergarten. We provide the first estimates of the impact of Michigan's TK program on third-grade test sco...

Measuring the Market for Legal Firearms

By Luis Armona and Adam M. Rosenberg

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

The Massachusetts Firearms Records Bureau recently published administrative data covering the universe of legal firearm transactions in the state. We use these data to validate state-level background checks as a proxy for firearm transactions and show tha...

Employment and Earnings of Men at High Risk of Gun Violence

By Max Kapustin, Monica P. Bhatt, Sara B. Heller, Marianne Bertrand, and Christopher Blattman

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

Since Becker (1968), economists have modeled crime as resulting from higher returns to criminal activity than legal work. Yet contemporary employment data for people engaged in crime is scarce. We surveyed men at extreme risk of gun violence in Chicago ab...

The Lasting Impacts of School Shootings on Youth Psychotropic Drug Use

By Max Pienkny, Maya Rossin-Slater, Molly Schnell, and Hannes Schwandt

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

This paper estimates the effects of fatal school shootings on youth psychotropic drug use over the subsequent five and a half years. Using an event study approach that compares trends in drugs prescribed by providers practicing close to a school shooting ...

Early Home Visiting Delivery Model and Maternal and Child Mental Health at Primary School Age

By Gabriella Conti, Sören Kliem, and Malte Sandner

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

We study the impacts of a prenatal and infancy home visiting program targeting disadvantaged families on mental health outcomes, assessed through diagnostic interviews. The program significantly reduced the prevalence of mental health conditions for both ...

Go Vegan? Prejudice, (Blind) Experimentation, and Food Choices

By Michèle Belot and Adelson Teh

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

We examine the role of prejudice and experimentation in the evaluation of a nonmainstream product. We conduct a randomized controlled experiment where participants evaluate a plant-based product. We vary (i) whether they can taste the product, (ii) whethe...

Sleep Norms

By Osea Giuntella, Andrea Kiss, and Stephanie W. Wang

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

This study documents sleep norms and studies the effect of norm information on anticipated behavioral change. Participants were shown either a small or large gap between others' ideal sleep duration (injunctive norm) and actual sleep patterns (descriptive...

The Effects of Unemployment Insurance Caseworkers on Job Search Effort

By Amelie Schiprowski, Julia Schmidtke, Johannes Schmieder, and Simon Trenkle

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

We combine a high-frequency survey on job search effort with administrative data on caseworker interactions from the German unemployment insurance system to estimate how the dynamics of search effort respond to caseworker meetings and vacancy referrals. M...

Risk Scores for Long-Term Unemployment and the Assignment to Job Search Counseling

By Sebastian Ernst, Andreas I. Mueller, and Johannes Spinnewijn

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

This paper analyses how risk profiling is used to assign unemployed job seekers to job search counseling in Flanders, Belgium. We compare algorithmic selection to self-selection and selection by job search counselors. We discuss practical challenges for t...