The Linear Algebra of Economic Geography Models

By Benny Kleinman, Ernest Liu, and Stephen J. Redding

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

We provide sufficient statistics for nominal and real wage exposure to productivity shocks in a constant elasticity economic geography model. These exposure measures summarize the first-order general equilibrium elasticity of nominal and real wages in eac...

The Traveling Trucker Problem

By Treb Allen, David Atkin, Santiago Cantillo Cleves, and Carlos Eduardo Hernandez

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

This paper documents three new stylized facts showing that truckers in Colombia frequently choose to make complex chains of shipments in a single trip before returning home. It then provides a new model of optimal trucker trip-chaining with a general geog...

Affordability of Owner-Occupied Housing across US Cities

By Rebecca Diamond and William Diamond

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

This paper compares the affordability of owner-occupied housing across US cities. We apply a new method for imputing the rental value of owner-occupied housing developed in Diamond and Diamond (2024) that accounts for unobserved house quality. On average,...

Event Studies with a Continuous Treatment

By Brantly Callaway, Andrew Goodman-Bacon, and Pedro H. C. Sant'Anna

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

This paper builds on the identification results and estimation tools for continuous difference-in-difference designs in Callaway, Goodman-Bacon, and Sant'Anna (2024) to discuss aggregation strategies for event studies with continuous treatments. Estimates...

Difference-in-Difference Estimators with Continuous Treatments and No Stayers

By Clément de Chaisemartin, Xavier D'Haultfœuille, and Gonzalo Vazquez-Bare

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

Many treatments, such as prices, taxes, or temperatures, are continuous in nature. Empirical researchers usually rely on two-way fixed effect regressions to estimate treatment effects in such cases. However, such estimators are not robust to heterogeneous...

Temporal Aggregation for the Synthetic Control Method

By Liyang Sun, Eli Ben-Michael, and Avi Feller

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

The synthetic control method (SCM) is a popular approach for estimating the impact of a treatment on a single unit with panel data. Two challenges arise with higher-frequency data (e.g., monthly versus yearly): (i) achieving excellent pretreatment fit is ...

Origins of US Inflation

By Christopher A. Sims

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

Measuring fiscal pressure on inflation by the ratio of the primary deficit to the outstanding federal debt, this paper traces its growth through the 1970s, along with the shifts in the politics of deficits. There are thought-provoking parallels to the pan...

The NY Fed DSGE Model: A Post-COVID Assessment

By Marco Del Negro, Keshav Dogra, Aidan Gleich, Pranay Gundam, Donggyu Lee, Ramya Nallamotu, and Brian Pacula

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

We document the real-time forecasting performance for output and inflation of the New York Fed dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model since 2011. We find the DSGE's accuracy to be comparable to that of private forecasters before COVID but som...

What Do Long Data Tell Us about the Permanent Component of Inflation?

By Stephanie Schmitt-Grohé and Martín Uribe

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

Is postwar data enough to estimate the permanent component of inflation? We find that it is not for episodes of sudden and large inflation spikes like the one observed after the COVID-19 pandemic because such episodes are rare in the prewar sample (the in...

Will Wealth Weaken Weather Wars?

By Marshall Burke, Joel Ferguson, Solomon Hsiang, and Edward Miguel

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

This study estimates the moderating impact of economic development on climate-conflict linkages during 1989–2019 in Africa, the world region that in recent decades has experienced the most armed conflict. We build a spatially disaggregated dataset that ...

Social Media as an Identity Barometer: Evidence From the Russia-Ukraine War

By Serhii Abramenko, Vasily Korovkin, and Alexey Makarin

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

This study investigates how social media data can be used to study shifts in identity, focusing on Ukraine during the Russia-Ukraine war. We analyze VK users' reported language proficiency and the language of tweets and note a significant shift from Russi...

Refugees Are Hosted in Highly Vulnerable Communities

By C. Austin Davis, Paula López-Peña, Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak, and Jaya Y. Wen

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

Low- and middle-income nations host 76 percent of the world's refugees. This study uses original data to explore within-country spatial variability in refugee-hosting responsibilities. We find that hosting responsibilities for the displaced Rohingya peopl...

The Intensifying Effects of Prolonged Climate Change on Conflict, 1400–1900 CE

By Murat Iyigun, Joris Mueller, and Nancy Qian

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

This study uses historical conflict and weather data for the period 1400–1900 CE to investigate the long-run effects of climate change on political instability in a context that suffered extensive cooling. The results show that temperature changes have ...

Maternal Mental Health Responses to COVID-19 Shocks and Uncertainty in Rural Pakistan

By Michelle Escobar Carias, Victoria Baranov, Joanna Maselko, Pietro Biroli, and Sonia Bhalotra

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

In this paper, we investigate the association between a battery of mental health measures and experienced morbidity and mortality due to COVID-19, worry about disease risk, experienced economic shocks, and economic uncertainty about the future. We find th...

Depression, Poverty, and Economic Shocks: Evidence from India

By Manuela Angelucci and Daniel Bennett

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

This paper examines the correlations between socioeconomic status, economic shocks, and depression, and how these vary by gender, in a sample of adults from India. Poverty and the exposure to negative shocks are both associated with depression. However, t...

The Economic Burden of Dementia in India

By Marco Angrisani, Maria Casanova, Jinkook Lee, and Erik Meijer

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

This paper provides the first estimate of the economic cost borne by Indian individuals living with dementia and their families based on nationally and state-wise representative data from the Longitudinal Aging Study in India (LASI). We found that the ann...

Air Pollution and Mental Health: Evidence from China

By Shuai Chen, Paulina Oliva, and Peng Zhang

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

We estimate the short-run effect of air pollution on mental illness. Using the China Family Panel Studies covering 12,615 urban residents during 2014–2015, we find a significantly positive effect of air pollution—instrumented by thermal inversions—o...

Auditability in School Choice

By Aram Grigoryan and Markus Möller

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

In centralized public school admissions, participants may not fully observe other participants' preference rankings and priorities. In this paper, we evaluate prominent assignment rules in terms of their auditability properties. We show that Serial Dictat...

Diversity Balance in Centralized Public School Admissions

By Atila Abdulkadiroğlu and Aram Grigoryan

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

Parental choice over public schools has become a major educational reform throughout the United States and the world. Most district policies are implemented via admission priorities. Diversity in admissions is a common policy goal. However, it necessitate...

Exorbitant Privilege and the Sustainability of US Public Debt

By Jason Choi, Duong Dang, Rishabh Kirpalani, and Diego J. Perez

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

We study the extent to which the perceived cost of losing the exorbitant privilege the United States holds in global safe asset markets sustains its public debt safety. Our findings indicate that losing this special status in the event of a default signif...