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.

Relocating Development Economics: The First Generation of Modern Indian Economists by Maria Bach

By Alex M. Thomas

Journal of Economic Literature

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...

Prediction Errors, Incarceration, & Violent Crime: Evidence from Linking Prosecutor Surveys to Court Records

By Emma Harrington, William Murdock III, and Hannah Shaffer

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

Incarceration is often justified by a defendant’s risk of future crime. To what extent do biased beliefs about predictors of crime distort incarceration decisions? We survey prosecutors about how violent re-arrest rates vary by defendant age and crim...

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.

Concentration in Product Markets

By C. Lanier Benkard, Ali Yurukoglu, and Anthony Lee Zhang

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

This paper measures concentration in narrowly defined product markets for a broad range of consumer goods and services in the U.S. from 1994 to 2019. We document two main empirical facts. First, concentration levels are high. 44.4% of the markets in ou...

Voter Information and Distributive Politics

By Benjamin Blumenthal

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

Does more information benefit voters? I examine this question in a novel setting of distributive politics and electoral accountability. Homogeneously-informed electorates can benefit from less information through improvements in the control or screenin...

Sharing Model Uncertainty

By Chiaki Hara, Sujoy Mukerji, Frank Riedel, and Jean-Marc Tallon

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

This paper examines efficient allocations in economies where consumers exhibit heterogeneous smooth ambiguity preferences and face model uncertainty with a common set of identifiable models. Aggregate endowment is ambiguous. We characterize economies ...

Medical Technology and Life Expectancy: Evidence from the Antitoxin Treatment of Diphtheria

By Philipp Ager, Casper W. Hansen, and Peter Z. Lin

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

We examine the impact of the free supply of diphtheria antitoxin, the first effective medical treatment for an infectious disease, on the historical health transition in Massachusetts. Using newly collected municipality-level data on the distribution of...