A Pareto-Improving Way to Teach Principles of Economics: Evidence from the University of Toronto

By Dwayne Benjamin, Avi J. Cohen, and Gillian Hamilton

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

University of Toronto undergraduates can choose between conventional and literacy-targeted (LT) principles of economics courses. We compare demographics and performance in subsequent courses for 13,000 students over 11 years and find that LT courses attra...

How Often Does Active Learning Actually Occur? Perception versus Reality

By Brandon J. Sheridan and Ben Smith

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

Substantial evidence suggests active learning pedagogies are superior to lecturing, but little evidence exists on the prevalence of such methods. Watts and Schaur (2011) find, based on self-reported data, the median instructor lectures 83 percent of the t...

The Theory of the Firm as Governance Structure: From Choice to Contract

By Oliver E. Williamson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2002

The propositions that organization matters and that it is susceptible to analysis were long greeted by skepticism by economists. One reason why this message took a long time to register is that it is much easier to say that organization matters than it is...

Linguistic Traits and Human Capital Formation

By Oded Galor, Ömer Özak, and Assaf Sarid

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

This research establishes the influence of linguistic traits on human behavior. Exploiting variations in the languages spoken by children of migrants with identical ancestral countries of origin, the analysis indicates that the presence of periphrastic fu...

The Cost of Being Too Patient

By Paola Giuliano and Paola Sapienza

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

We study the cost of being too patient on happiness. We find that the relationship between patience and various measures of subjective well-being is hump-shaped: there exists an optimal amount of patience that maximizes happiness. Beyond this optimal leve...

Ancient Origins of the Global Variation in Economic Preferences

By Anke Becker, Benjamin Enke, and Armin Falk

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

This paper shows that contemporary population-level heterogeneity in risk aversion, time preference, altruism, positive reciprocity, negative reciprocity, and trust partly traces back to the structure of the migration patterns of our very early ancestors....

The Polarization of Reality

By Alberto Alesina, Armando Miano, and Stefanie Stantcheva

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

Americans are polarized not only in their views on policy issues and attitudes toward government and society but also in their perceptions of the same factual reality. We conceptualize how to think about the "polarization of reality" and review recent pap...

Diversity, Immigration, and Redistribution

By Alberto Alesina and Stefanie Stantcheva

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

This paper provides a simple conceptual framework that captures how different perceptions, attitudes, and biases about immigrants or minorities can shape preferences for redistribution and reviews the empirical evidence on the effects of increasing racial...

Rationing as a Determinant of Immigrant Composition and Outcomes

By Edward P. Lazear

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

Willingness to migrate is a necessary but not sufficient condition for migration from an origin to destination country. For the United States and other countries with an excess supply of immigrants, the slot-rationing rule is a key determinant of immigran...

Discrimination and the Returns to Cultural Assimilation in the Age of Mass Migration

By Ran Abramitzky, Leah Boustan, Katherine Eriksson, and Stephanie Hao

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

We document that, in the early twentieth century, children of immigrants who were given more-foreign first names completed fewer years of schooling, earned less, and married less assimilated spouses. However, we find few differences in the adult outcomes ...

Extending the Race between Education and Technology

By David Autor, Claudia Goldin, and Lawrence F. Katz

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

The race between education and technology provides a canonical framework that does a remarkable job of explaining US wage structure changes across the twentieth century. The framework involves secular increases in the demand for more-educated workers from...

College Attainment, Income Inequality, and Economic Security: A Simulation Exercise

By Brad Hershbein, Melissa S. Kearney, and Luke W. Pardue

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

We conduct an empirical simulation exercise that gauges the plausible impact of increased rates of college attainment on a variety of measures of income inequality and economic insecurity. Using two different methodological approaches⁠—a distributiona...

Unpacking Skill Bias: Automation and New Tasks

By Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

We extend the canonical model of skill-biased technical change by modeling the allocation of tasks to factors and allowing for automation and the creation of new tasks. In our model, factor prices depend on the set of tasks they perform. Automation can re...

Retrospectives: The Origins of Neoclassical Microeconomics

By Robert B. Ekelund Jr and Robert F. Hébert

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2002

Until recently, the standard story line in history of thought textbooks was that a triumvirate of British and Continental writers established demarcation between classical economics and neoclassical economics in the early 1870s. The authors raise two obje...

Structural Increases in Demand for Skill after the Great Recession

By Peter Q. Blair and David J. Deming

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

In this paper, we use detailed job vacancy data to estimate changes in skill demand in the years since the Great Recession. The share of job vacancies requiring a bachelor's degree increased by more than 60 percent between 2007 and 2019, with faster growt...

Economics after Neoliberalism: Introducing the EfIP Project

By Suresh Naidu, Dani Rodrik, and Gabriel Zucman

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

The tools of contemporary economics are critical to developing a policy framework for "inclusive prosperity," which requires that we consider the whole distribution of outcomes and human prosperity broadly, including health, climate change, political righ...

Shrinking Capitalism

By Samuel Bowles and Wendy Carlin

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

A defining feature of capitalism is that work using privately owned capital goods under the control of an owner or manager in return for wages produces goods to be sold for profit. The domain in which this system of production works tolerably well is shri...

The Political Limits of Economics

By Luigi Zingales

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

We economists do not apply economic tools to analyze our own discipline. If we were to do so, we would discover that we have self-motivated explanations for why political systems fail, explanations that entitle us to impose our views on elected representa...

Competing with Robots: Firm-Level Evidence from France

By Daron Acemoglu, Claire Lelarge, and Pascual Restrepo

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

We study the firm-level implications of robot adoption in France. Of 55,390 firms in our sample, 598 adopted robots between 2010 and 2015, but these firms accounted for 20 percent of manufacturing employment. Adopters experienced significant declines in l...

Firm-Level Automation: Evidence from the Netherlands

By James Bessen, Maarten Goos, Anna Salomons, and Wiljan van den Berge

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

Studying firm-level adjustments is important for understanding the economic effects of workplace automation. So far, emerging firm-level evidence is focused on robotics and the manufacturing sector. In this paper, we document that the adoption of automati...