Background Risk and Small-Stakes Risk Aversion

By Xiaosheng Mu, Luciano Pomatto, Philipp Strack, and Omer Tamuz

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2024

Building on Pomatto, Strack, and Tamuz (2020), we identify a tight condition for when background risk can induce first-order stochastic dominance. Using this condition, we show that under plausible levels of background risk, no theory of choice under risk...

Disentangling Rent Index Differences: Data, Methods, and Scope

By Brian Adams, Lara Loewenstein, Hugh Montag, and Randal Verbrugge

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2024

Rent measurement determines 32 percent of the CPI. Accurate rent measurement is therefore essential for accurate inflation measurement, but the CPI rent index often differs from alternative rent inflation measures. Using repeat-rent inflation measures cre...

Debt Moratoria: Evidence from Student Loan Forbearance

By Michael Dinerstein, Constantine Yannelis, and Ching-Tse Chen

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2024

We evaluate the effects of the 2020 student debt moratorium. Using administrative credit panel data, we compare borrowers whose loans were frozen to borrowers whose loans were not frozen based on whether the government owned the loans. We estimate that bo...

Moderate Utility

By Junnan He and Paulo Natenzon

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2024

Hotelling's and Salop's spatial competition models, as well as nested logit, covariance probit, elimination-by-aspects, and several other well-known discrete choice models, belong to the class of moderate utility models, where binary choices are a functio...

The US-China Trade War and Global Reallocations

By Pablo Fajgelbaum, Pinelopi Goldberg, Patrick Kennedy, Amit Khandelwal, and Daria Taglioni

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2024

The US-China trade war created net export opportunities rather than simply shifting trade across destinations. Many "bystander" countries grew their exports of taxed products into the rest of the world (excluding the United States and China). Country-spec...

The Fading Treatment Effects of a Multifaceted Asset-Transfer Program in Ethiopia

By Nathan Barker, Dean Karlan, Christopher Udry, and Kelsey Wright

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2024

We study the long-run effects of a big-push "graduation" program in Ethiopia in which very poor households received a one-time transfer of productive assets (mainly livestock), technical training, and access to savings accounts. After seven years, treatme...

Inflation Expectations and Misallocation of Resources: Evidence from Italy

By Tiziano Ropele, Yuriy Gorodnichenko, and Olivier Coibion

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2024

Using Italian data that include both inflation forecasts of firms and external information on their balance sheets, we study the causal effect of changes in the dispersion of beliefs about future inflation on the misallocation of resources. We find that a...

Universalism and Political Representation: Evidence from the Field

By Benjamin Enke, Raymond Fisman, Luis Mota Freitas, and Steven Sun

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2024

This paper provides field evidence on the link between morals and political behavior. We create a district-level variable that reflects to what degree charitable giving decreases as a function of (geographic and social) distance, which we interpret as a r...

Trade and Trees

By Bård Harstad

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2024

International trade and natural resource exploitation interact in multiple ways. This paper first presents a dynamic game in which the South (S) exploits (e.g., deforests) in order to export (e.g., lumber and agricultural products). Because of negative ex...

Front Matter

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2024

CTREE Conference 2024

[Page]

May 29–31, 2024 | Lowes Atlanta Hotel, Atlanta, GA

Migrants at Sea: Unintended Consequences of Search and Rescue Operations

By Claudio Deiana, Vikram Maheshri, and Giovanni Mastrobuoni

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2024

Many countries are facing and resisting strong migratory pressure, fueling irregular migration. In response to mounting deaths in the Central Mediterranean, European nations intensified rescue operations in 2013. We develop a model of irregular migration ...

Moral hazard and migration

[Research Highlight]

June 04, 2024

Vikram Maheshri discusses unintended consequences of search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean Sea.

Contingent Valuation: A Practical Alternative When Prices Aren't Available

[Symposium: Contingent Valuation]

By Richard T. Carson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2012

A person may be willing to make an economic tradeoff to assure that a wilderness area or scenic resource is protected even if neither that person nor (perhaps) anyone else will actually visit this area. This tradeoff is commonly labeled "passive use valu...

Understanding China's Growth: Past, Present, and Future

[Symposium: China's Economy]

By Xiaodong Zhu

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2012

The pace and scale of China's economic transformation have no historical precedent. In 1978, China was one of the poorest countries in the world. The real per capita GDP in China was only one-fortieth of the U.S. level and one-tenth the Brazilian level. ...

How Did China Take Off?

[Symposium: China's Economy]

By Yasheng Huang

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2012

There are two prevailing perspectives on how China took off. One emphasizes the role of globalization—foreign trade and investments and special economic zones; the other emphasizes the role of internal reforms, especially rural reforms. Detailed docume...

The Economic Impacts of Climate Change: Evidence from Agricultural Output and Random Fluctuations in Weather: Reply

By Olivier Deschênes and Michael Greenstone

American Economic Review, December 2012

Fisher et al. (2012) (henceforth, FHRS) have uncovered coding and data errors in our paper, Deschênes and Greenstone (2007), henceforth, DG. We acknowledge and are embarrassed by these mistakes. We are grateful to FHRS for uncovering them. We hope t...

On the Real Effects of Bank Bailouts: Micro Evidence from Japan

By Mariassunta Giannetti and Andrei Simonov

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2013

Exploiting the Japanese banking crisis of the 1990s as a laboratory, we investigate the effects of bank bailouts on the supply of credit and the performance of banks' clients. Our findings indicate that the size of capital injections relative to the in...

Labor Market Outcomes and Reforms in China

[Symposium: China's Economy]

By Xin Meng

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2012

Over the past few decades of economic reform, China's labor markets have been transformed to an increasingly market-driven system. China has two segregated economies: the rural and urban. Understanding the shifting nature of this divide is probably the k...

Cross-Country Differences in Productivity: The Role of Allocation and Selection

By Eric Bartelsman, John Haltiwanger, and Stefano Scarpetta

American Economic Review, February 2013

This paper investigates the effect of idiosyncratic (firm-level) policy distortions on aggregate outcomes. Exploiting harmonized firm-level data for a number of countries, we show that there is substantial and systematic cross-country variation in the ...