Vulnerability and Clientelism

By Gustavo J. Bobonis, Paul J. Gertler, Marco Gonzalez-Navarro, and Simeon Nichter

American Economic Review, November 2022

This study argues that economic vulnerability causes citizens to participate in clientelism, a phenomenon with various pernicious consequences. To examine how reduced vulnerability affects citizens' participation in clientelism, we employ two exogenous sh...

Job Search and Hiring with Limited Information about Workseekers' Skills

By Eliana Carranza, Robert Garlick, Kate Orkin, and Neil Rankin

American Economic Review, November 2022

We assess South African workseekers' skills and disseminate the assessment results to explore how limited information affects firm and workseeker behavior. Giving workseekers assessment results that they can credibly share with firms increases workseekers...

Human Capital Depreciation and Returns to Experience

By Michael Dinerstein, Rigissa Megalokonomou, and Constantine Yannelis

American Economic Review, November 2022

Human capital can depreciate if skills are unused. But estimating human capital depreciation is challenging, as worker skills are difficult to measure and less productive workers are more likely to spend time in nonemployment. We overcome these challenges...

The End of Economic Growth? Unintended Consequences of a Declining Population

By Charles I. Jones

American Economic Review, November 2022

In many models, economic growth is driven by people discovering new ideas. These models typically assume either a constant or growing population. However, in high income countries today, fertility is already below its replacement rate: women are having fe...

Persistent Polarizing Effects of Persuasion: Experimental Evidence from Turkey

By Ceren Baysan

American Economic Review, November 2022

I evaluate randomly varied neighborhood exposure to information campaigns regarding either executive performance, or increases in executive power, prior to a Turkish referendum on weakening checks and balances on the executive. The campaigns increased vot...

Evaluating Deliberative Competence: A Simple Method with an Application to Financial Choice

By Sandro Ambuehl, B. Douglas Bernheim, and Annamaria Lusardi

American Economic Review, November 2022

We examine methods for evaluating interventions designed to improve decision-making quality when people misunderstand the consequences of their choices. In an experiment involving financial education, conventional outcome metrics (financial literacy and d...

Immigration and Spatial Equilibrium: The Role of Expenditures in the Country of Origin

By Christoph Albert and Joan Monras

American Economic Review, November 2022

We document that international migrants concentrate more in expensive cities—the more so, the lower the prices in their origin countries are—and consume less locally than comparable natives. We rationalize this empirical evidence by introducing a quan...

The Psychosocial Value of Employment: Evidence from a Refugee Camp

By Reshmaan Hussam, Erin M. Kelley, Gregory Lane, and Fatima Zahra

American Economic Review, November 2022

Employment may be important to well-being for reasons beyond its role as an income source. This paper presents a causal estimate of the psychosocial value of employment in refugee camps in Bangladesh. We involve 745 individuals in a field experiment with ...

Predistribution vs redistribution

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Why is income inequality higher in the United States than in Europe?

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2022

A Theory of One-Size-Fits-All Recommendations

By Doron Levit and Anton Tsoy

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2022

One-size-fits-all recommendations are common in many contexts, including those with a widespread heterogeneity. We propose a model that rationalizes this phenomenon. An expert recommends publicly to two agents whether to adopt a policy. The expert is priv...

Voting Agendas and Preferences on Trees: Theory and Practice

By Andreas Kleiner and Benny Moldovanu

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2022

We study how parliaments and committees select one out of several alternatives when options cannot be ordered along a "left-right" axis. Which voting agendas are used in practice, and how should they be designed? We assume that preferences are single peak...

Robust Minimal Instability of the Top Trading Cycles Mechanism

By Battal Doğan and Lars Ehlers

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2022

In the context of priority-based allocation of objects, we formulate methods to compare assignments in terms of their stability. We introduce three basic properties that a reasonable stability comparison should satisfy. We show that for any stability comp...

On the Foundations of Ex Post Incentive-Compatible Mechanisms

By Takuro Yamashita and Shuguang Zhu

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2022

This paper considers an interdependent-value robust mechanism design problem, where the principal has little knowledge about the agent's belief. Although ex post incentive-compatible (EPIC) mechanisms can implement allocations without any knowledge about ...

Accountability and Grand Corruption

By Cesar Martinelli

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2022

We propose a model of political careers and electoral accountability in an environment in which politicians may take bribes at different stages of their careers and in which politicians' actions are only imperfectly observed by voters. We show that the ex...

Too Much Data: Prices and Inefficiencies in Data Markets

By Daron Acemoglu, Ali Makhdoumi, Azarakhsh Malekian, and Asu Ozdaglar

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2022

When a user shares her data with online platforms, she reveals information about others. In such a setting, externalities depress the price of data because once a user's information is leaked by others, she has less reason to protect her data and privacy....

Deposit Requirements in Auctions

By Xiaogang Che, Tong Li, Jingfeng Lu, and Xiaoyong Zheng

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2022

We examine optimal auction design when buyers may receive future outside offers. The winning bidder may choose to default upon observing her outside offer. Under the optimal mechanism, the bidder with the highest value wins if and only if her value is abo...

What Should a Firm Know? Protecting Consumers' Privacy Rents

By Daniel Bird and Zvika Neeman

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2022

A monopolistic firm observes a signal about the state of the world and then makes a take-it-or-leave-it offer to an uninformed consumer who has recourse to some outside option. We provide a geometric characterization of the firm's information structure th...

Auction Mechanisms and Treasury Revenue: Evidence from the Chinese Experiment

By Klenio Barbosa, Dakshina G. De Silva, Liyu Yang, and Hisayuki Yoshimoto

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2022

This paper exploits a large-scale auction experiment conducted by two Chinese government treasury security issuers—the Chinese Development Bank and the Export-Import Bank—to investigate whether treasury securities should be sold through uniform price ...

Reporting Sexual Misconduct in the #MeToo Era

By Ing-Haw Cheng and Alice Hsiaw

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2022

We model the reporting of sexual misconduct. Individuals underreport misconduct due to strategic uncertainty over whether others will report and corroborate a pattern of behavior. Underreporting occurs if and only if misconduct is widespread. Making sanct...