Reimagining public safety research

[Research Highlight]

November 19, 2021

Yale sociologist Monica Bell talks about why economists must change the way they study police.

Work and childcare during the pandemic

[Research Highlight]

August 27, 2021

Stefania Albanesi discusses the effects of the COVID-19 recession on the US labor market.

A big push out of poverty

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A program in India shows that helping the ultra poor can have long-lasting effects.

Teenage Driving, Mortality, and Risky Behaviors

By Jason Huh and Julian Reif

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2021

We investigate the effect of teenage driving on mortality and risky behaviors in the United States using a regression discontinuity design. We estimate that total mortality rises by 5.84 deaths per 100,000 (15 percent) at the minimum legal driving age cut...

Horizontal growth

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How do innovative companies diversify their product portfolios?

Information for ASSA 2022 Participants

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The long-run benefits of public preschool

[Research Highlight]

December 15, 2021

Martha Bailey discusses the impact of Head Start on educational attainment and economic self-sufficiency in adulthood.

Prep School for Poor Kids: The Long-Run Impacts of Head Start on Human Capital and Economic Self-Sufficiency

By Martha J. Bailey, Shuqiao Sun, and Brenden Timpe

American Economic Review, December 2021

This paper evaluates the long-run effects of Head Start using large-scale, restricted administrative data. Using the county roll-out of Head Start between 1965 and 1980 and age-eligibility cutoffs for school entry, we find that Head Start generated large ...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, January 2022

College Tuition and Income Inequality

By Zhifeng Cai and Jonathan Heathcote

American Economic Review, January 2022

This paper evaluates the role of rising income inequality in explaining observed growth in college tuition. We develop a competitive model of the college market, in which college quality depends on instructional expenditure and the average ability of admi...

Measuring the Welfare Effects of Shame and Pride

By Luigi Butera, Robert Metcalfe, William Morrison, and Dmitry Taubinsky

American Economic Review, January 2022

Public recognition is frequently used to motivate desirable behavior, yet its welfare effects—such as costs of shame or gains from pride—are rarely measured. We develop a portable empirical methodology for measuring and monetizing social image utility...

Imperfect Competition, Compensating Differentials, and Rent Sharing in the US Labor Market

By Thibaut Lamadon, Magne Mogstad, and Bradley Setzler

American Economic Review, January 2022

We quantify the importance of imperfect competition in the US labor market by estimating the size of labor market rents earned by American firms and workers. We construct a matched employer-employee panel dataset by combining the universe of US business a...

Consumption Response to Credit Expansions: Evidence from Experimental Assignment of 45,307 Credit Lines

By Deniz Aydin

American Economic Review, January 2022

In a field experiment that constructs a randomized credit limit shock, participants borrow to spend 11 cents on the dollar in the first quarter and 28 cents by the third year. Effects extend to those far from the limit, those who had the new limits as ava...

Employment Structure and the Rise of the Modern Tax System

By Anders Jensen

American Economic Review, January 2022

This paper builds a new microdatabase that covers 100 countries at all income levels and long-run time series in the United States (1870–2010) and Mexico (1960–2010) to document how the modern tax system arises over development. I establish a new set ...

The Relative Efficiency of Skilled Labor across Countries: Measurement and Interpretation

By Federico Rossi

American Economic Review, January 2022

I study how the relative efficiency of high- and low-skill labor varies across countries. Using microdata for countries at different stages of development, I document that differences in relative quantities and wages are consistent with high-skill workers...

A/B Contracts

By George Georgiadis and Michael Powell

American Economic Review, January 2022

This paper aims to improve the practical applicability of the classic theory of incentive contracts under moral hazard. We establish conditions under which the information provided by an A/B test of incentive contracts is sufficient for answering the ques...

When Should There Be Vertical Choice in Health Insurance Markets?

By Victoria R. Marone and Adrienne Sabety

American Economic Review, January 2022

We study the welfare effects of offering choice over coverage levels—"vertical choice"—in regulated health insurance markets. We emphasize that heterogeneity in efficient coverage level is not sufficient to motivate choice. When premiums cannot reflec...

Counterfactuals with Latent Information

By Dirk Bergemann, Benjamin Brooks, and Stephen Morris

American Economic Review, January 2022

We describe a methodology for making counterfactual predictions in settings where the information held by strategic agents and the distribution of payoff-relevant states of the world are unknown. The analyst observes behavior assumed to be rationalized by...