Sources of Inaction in Household Finance: Evidence from the Danish Mortgage Market

By Steffen Andersen, John Y. Campbell, Kasper Meisner Nielsen, and Tarun Ramadorai

American Economic Review, October 2020

We build an empirical model to attribute delays in mortgage refinancing to psychological costs inhibiting refinancing until incentives are sufficiently strong; and behavior, potentially attributable to information-gathering costs, lowering the probability...

Sources of Displaced Workers' Long-Term Earnings Losses

By Marta Lachowska, Alexandre Mas, and Stephen A. Woodbury

American Economic Review, October 2020

We estimate the magnitudes of reduced earnings, work hours, and wage rates of workers displaced during the Great Recession using linked employer-employee panel data from Washington state. Displaced workers' earnings losses occurred mainly because hourly w...

Notes

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2003

Artificial Intelligence, Algorithmic Pricing, and Collusion

By Emilio Calvano, Giacomo Calzolari, Vincenzo Denicolò, and Sergio Pastorello

American Economic Review, October 2020

Increasingly, algorithms are supplanting human decision-makers in pricing goods and services. To analyze the possible consequences, we study experimentally the behavior of algorithms powered by Artificial Intelligence (Q-learning) in a workhorse oligopoly...

Voter Turnout with Peer Punishment

By David K. Levine and Andrea Mattozzi

American Economic Review, October 2020

We introduce a model where social norms of voting participation are strategically chosen by competing political parties and determine voters' turnout. Social norms must be enforced through costly peer monitoring and punishment. When the cost of enforcemen...

Upping the Ante: The Equilibrium Effects of Unconditional Grants to Private Schools

By Tahir Andrabi, Jishnu Das, Asim I. Khwaja, Selcuk Ozyurt, and Niharika Singh

American Economic Review, October 2020

We assess whether financing can help private schools, which now account for one-third of primary school enrollment in low- and middle-income countries. Our experiment allocated unconditional cash grants to either one (L) or all (H) private schools in a vi...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2020

War of the Waves: Radio and Resistance during World War II

By Stefano Gagliarducci, Massimiliano Gaetano Onorato, Francesco Sobbrio, and Guido Tabellini

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2020

We analyze the role of the media in coordinating and mobilizing insurgency against an authoritarian regime, in the context of the Nazi-fascist occupation of Italy during WWII. We study the effect of BBC radio on the intensity of internal resistance. By ex...

E-governance, Accountability, and Leakage in Public Programs: Experimental Evidence from a Financial Management Reform in India

By Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, Clément Imbert, Santhosh Mathew, and Rohini Pande

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2020

Can e-governance reforms improve government policy? By making information available on a real-time basis, information technologies may reduce the theft of public funds. We analyze a large field experiment and the nationwide scale-up of a reform to India's...

The Economics and Law of Sexual Harassment in the Workplace

By Kaushik Basu

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2003

Suppose a firm has a widespread reputation for sexually harassing its employees. When a person signs up to work for such a firm, it would appear that both the firm and the worker are better off by virtue of the "exchange". Is there a case then for governm...

The Not-So-Hot Melting Pot: The Persistence of Outcomes for Descendants of the Age of Mass Migration

By Zachary Ward

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2020

How persistent are economic gaps across ethnicities? The convergence of ethnic gaps through the third generation of immigrants is difficult to measure because few datasets include grandparental birthplace. I overcome this limitation with a new three-gener...

The Elasticity of Science

By Kyle Myers

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2020

This paper identifies the degree to which scientists are willing to change the direction of their work in exchange for resources. Data from the National Institutes of Health are used to estimate how scientists respond to targeted funding opportunities. In...

Increasing Access to Selective High Schools through Place-Based Affirmative Action: Unintended Consequences

By Lisa Barrow, Lauren Sartain, and Marisa de la Torre

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2020

We investigate whether elite Chicago public high schools differentially benefit high-achieving students from more and less affluent neighborhoods. Chicago's place-based affirmative action policy allocates seats based on achievement and neighborhood socioe...

Rules for Recovery: Impact of Indexed Disaster Funds on Shock Coping in Mexico

By Alejandro del Valle, Alain de Janvry, and Elisabeth Sadoulet

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2020

Government provision of disaster transfers is typically hampered by liquidity constraints and by weak rules and administrative capacity to disburse reconstruction resources. We show that by easing these hurdles, Mexico's indexed disaster fund (Fonden) con...

Healthcare Demand under Simple Prices: Evidence from Tiered Hospital Networks

By Elena Prager

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2020

This paper shows that consumers respond to prices for complex healthcare when they can easily assess out-of-pocket prices. Healthcare cost containment efforts increasingly incentivize price shopping despite a dearth of evidence that this steers consumers ...

Partisan Shocks and Financial Markets: Evidence from Close National Elections

By Daniele Girardi

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2020

This paper estimates the effect of partisan electoral victories on stock and bond markets. We employ a regression-discontinuity-based event study in a sample of 758 worldwide post-1945 national elections, using existing data on parliamentary elections and...

Job Displacement, Family Dynamics, and Spousal Labor Supply

By Martin Halla, Julia Schmieder, and Andrea Weber

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2020

We study the effectiveness of intrahousehold insurance among married couples when the husband loses his job due to a mass layoff or plant closure. Empirical results based on Austrian administrative data show that husbands suffer persistent employment and ...

The Impact of Insurance Expansions on the Already Insured: The Affordable Care Act and Medicare

By Colleen M. Carey, Sarah Miller, and Laura R. Wherry

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2020

Some states have not adopted the Affordable Care Act (ACA) Medicaid expansions due to concerns that the expansions may impair access to care and utilization for those who are already insured. We investigate such negative spillovers using a large panel of ...

Halving Global Poverty

[Symposium: Global Poverty Reduction]

By Timothy Besley and Robin Burgess

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2003

The Millennium Development Goals--global targets that the world's leaders set at the Millennium Summit in September 2000--are an ambitious agenda for reducing poverty. As a central plank, these goals include halving the proportion of people living below a...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2020