Testing Efficient Risk Sharing with Heterogeneous Risk Preferences

By Maurizio Mazzocco and Shiv Saini

American Economic Review, February 2012

We propose a method that enables one to test efficient risk sharing even when households have different risk preferences. The method is composed of three tests. The first one determines whether in the data households have homogeneous risk preferences. The...

Testing Efficient Risk Sharing with Heterogeneous Risk Preferences: Comment

By Aditya Shrinivas and Marcel Fafchamps

American Economic Review, October 2018

Mazzocco and Saini (2012) propose and implement a test of efficient risk sharing that allows for preference heterogeneity. They motivate their approach as yielding different results from those of standard efficiency test with homogeneous preferences. We s...

Testing Efficient Risk Sharing with Heterogeneous Risk Preferences: Reply

By Maurizio Mazzocco and Shiv Saini

American Economic Review, October 2018

Temperature and Decisions: Evidence from 207,000 Court Cases

By Anthony Heyes and Soodeh Saberian

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2019

We analyze the impact of outdoor temperature on high-stakes decisions (immigration adjudications) made by professional decision-makers (US immigration judges). In our preferred specification, which includes spatial, temporal, and judge fixed effects, and ...

Comment on "Temperature and Decisions: Evidence from 207,000 Court Cases"

By Holger Spamann

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2022

Heyes and Saberian (2019) estimate from 2000–2004 data that outdoor temperature reduces US immigration judges' propensity to grant asylum. This estimate is the result of coding and data errors and of sample selection. Correcting the errors reduces the p...

Correction to "Temperature and Decisions: Evidence from 207,000 Court Cases" and Reply to Spamann

By Anthony Heyes and Soodeh Saberian

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2022

This paper evidenced the sensitivity of US immigration judge decisions to temperature in the city of arbitration on the date of a case's completion. This note serves to correct errors noted since publication. The results from both the main linear specific...

Dominated Pension Investments: The Role of Search Frictions and Unawareness

By Karin Kinnerud and Louise Lorentzon

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics

We conduct a large-scale field experiment in the Swedish pension system to examine to what extent information and search frictions explain dominated high-fee index fund choices. Three findings stand out: (i) Letters that increase awareness of a dominat...

Order Effects and Teacher Labor Supply: A Nation-Wide RCT in Ecuador

By Nicolás Ajzenman, Gregory Elacqua, Luana Marotta, and Anne Sofie Olsen

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics

We evaluate a nationwide zero-cost intervention to reduce teacher sorting, where lower-income students are more likely to attend understaffed schools with less qualified teachers. Our approach was grounded in an insight from behavioral economics known as ...

Call for Papers: Los Angeles Annual Business Research Conference 2026

[News]

September 09, 2025

The submission deadline is December 20, 2025.

Reviewing residential segregation

[Research Highlight]

September 10, 2025

Trevon Logan and John Parman discuss the meaning of segregation and how it has shaped US history.

Racial Residential Segregation in the United States

By Trevon D. Logan and John M. Parman

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2025

Residential segregation is a central factor in explaining socioeconomic gaps across race and ethnicity in the United States. Place of residence directly impacts access to schools, jobs, and health care. There is an ever-evolving literature across the soci...

An Evolutionary Perspective on Updating Risk and Ambiguity Preferences

By Philipp Sadowski and Todd Sarver

American Economic Review: Insights

Using an evolutionary approach, we address the prominent tension in the literature that updating of ambiguity and non-expected-utility preferences cannot, in general, be both dynamically consistent and consequentialist. Perhaps not surprisingly, evoluti...

Report on the Second AEA Member Survey on the Professional Climate in Economics

[News]

September 15, 2025

View the AEA Member Announcement from September 15th, 2025.

Federal Statistical System

[Page]

The 13 principal U.S. statistical agencies and their coordination

Under the cover of disaster

[Page]

In the immediate aftermath of natural disasters, members of Congress become more likely to adopt the positions of special interest donors.

Reexamining the Contribution of Public Health Efforts to the Decline in Urban Mortality

By D. Mark Anderson, Kerwin Kofi Charles, and Daniel I. Rees

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2022

Using data on 25 major American cities for the period 1900⁠–⁠1940, we explore the effects of municipal-level public health efforts that were viewed as critical in the fight against foodborne and waterborne diseases. In addition to studying intervent...

Reexamining the Contribution of Public Health Efforts to the Decline in Urban Mortality: Comment

By David M. Cutler and Grant Miller

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2022

We address points raised by Anderson, Charles, and Rees (2022), which comments on our prior work. After correcting unambiguous data mistakes, our revised estimates suggest that municipal water disinfection (filtration) explains 38 percent of the total mor...

Reexamining the Contribution of Public Health Efforts to the Decline in Urban Mortality: Reply

By D. Mark Anderson, Kerwin Kofi Charles, and Daniel I. Rees

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2022

This rejoinder is written in response to the comment by Cutler and Miller (hereafter CM) on our paper, "Reexamining the Contribution of Public Health Efforts to the Decline in Urban Mortality" (Anderson, Charles, and Rees 2022). In their comment, CM ackno...