Danger lurks below

[Research Highlight]

January 11, 2021

How much do leaky underground petroleum tanks harm our health and what should policymakers do about it?

Going Beneath the Surface: Petroleum Pollution, Regulation, and Health

By Michelle Marcus

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2021

This paper quantifies the health impacts of petroleum leaks from underground storage tanks, the effectiveness of tank regulation, and the role of information as a policy tool in the same setting. Exposure to a leaking underground storage tank during gesta...

Rereading "The Road to Serfdom"

[Research Highlight]

January 18, 2021

Bruce Caldwell discusses Friedrich Hayek and the history of economic ideas.

Competition or creation?

[Page]

Do immigrants hurt the job prospects of native-born workers?

Call for Papers: The Journal of Government and Economics (JGE)

[News]

January 27, 2021

Call for Papers: Second Conference on the Interconnectedness of Financial Systems

[News]

January 27, 2021

Front Matter

American Economic Review, February 2021

Speculative Fever: Investor Contagion in the Housing Bubble

By Patrick Bayer, Kyle Mangum, and James W. Roberts

American Economic Review, February 2021

Historical anecdotes abound of new investors being drawn into a booming asset market, only to suffer when the market turns. While the role of investor contagion in asset bubbles has been explored extensively in the theoretical literature, causal empirical...

Intertemporal Labor Supply Substitution? Evidence from the Swiss Income Tax Holidays

By Isabel Z. Martínez, Emmanuel Saez, and Michael Siegenthaler

American Economic Review, February 2021

This paper estimates intertemporal labor supply responses to two-year long income tax holidays staggered across Swiss cantons. Cantons shifted from an income tax system based on the previous two years' income to a standard annual pay as you earn system, l...

Exchange Rates and Prices: Evidence from the 2015 Swiss Franc Appreciation

By Raphael Auer, Ariel Burstein, and Sarah M. Lein

American Economic Review, February 2021

We dissect the impact of a large and sudden exchange rate appreciation on Swiss border import prices, retail prices, and consumer expenditures on domestic and imported nondurable goods, following the removal of the EUR/CHF floor in January 2015. Cross-sec...

Aggregate Nominal Wage Adjustments: New Evidence from Administrative Payroll Data

By John Grigsby, Erik Hurst, and Ahu Yildirmaz

American Economic Review, February 2021

Using administrative payroll data from the largest US payroll processing company, we measure the extent of nominal wage rigidity in the United States. The data allow us to define a worker's per-period base contract wage separately from other forms of comp...

A Theory of Chosen Preferences

By B. Douglas Bernheim, Luca Braghieri, Alejandro Martínez-Marquina, and David Zuckerman

American Economic Review, February 2021

We propose and develop a dynamic theory of endogenous preference formation in which people adopt worldviews that shape their judgments about their experiences. The framework highlights the role of mindset flexibility, a trait that determines the relative ...

Employer Consolidation and Wages: Evidence from Hospitals

By Elena Prager and Matt Schmitt

American Economic Review, February 2021

We test whether wage growth slows following employer consolidation by examining hospital mergers. We find evidence of reduced wage growth in cases where both (i) the increase in concentration induced by the merger is large and (ii) workers' skills are ind...

The Nature of Firm Growth

By Vincent Sterk ⓡ Petr Sedláček ⓡ Benjamin Pugsley

American Economic Review, February 2021

About one-half of all startups fail within five years, and those that survive grow at vastly different speeds. Using Census microdata, we estimate that most of these differences are determined by ex ante heterogeneity rather than persistent ex post shocks...

Intergenerational Mobility of Immigrants in the United States over Two Centuries

By Ran Abramitzky, Leah Boustan, Elisa Jacome, and Santiago Perez

American Economic Review, February 2021

Using millions of father-son pairs spanning more than 100 years of US history, we find that children of immigrants from nearly every sending country have higher rates of upward mobility than children of the US-born. Immigrants' advantage is similar histor...

Mobilizing the Masses for Genocide

By Thorsten Rogall

American Economic Review, January 2021

Do political elites use armed groups to foster civilian participation in genocidal violence? Are armed groups employed strategically? How do they mobilize civilians? I investigate these questions using data from the Rwandan Genocide. To establish causalit...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2021

A Generalized Model of Advertised Sales

By Sandro Shelegia and Chris M. Wilson

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2021

To better understand temporary price reductions or "sales," this paper presents a generalized "clearinghouse" framework of advertised sales and explores some applications. By viewing the firms as competing in utility and amending the conventional tiebreak...

Strategic Experimentation with Congestion

By Caroline D. Thomas

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2021

This paper considers a two-player game of strategic experimentation with competition. Each agent faces a two-armed bandit problem where she continually chooses between her private, risky arm and a common, safe arm. Each agent has exclusive access to her p...

Sequential Preference Revelation in Incomplete Information Settings

By James Schummer and Rodrigo A. Velez

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2021

Strategy-proof allocation rules incentivize truthfulness in simultaneous move games, but real world mechanisms sometimes elicit preferences sequentially. Surprisingly, even when the underlying rule is strategy-proof and nonbossy, sequential elicitation ca...