Codiffusion of Technologies in Social Networks

By Natalia Lazzati

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2020

This paper studies the diffusion process of two complementary technologies among people who are connected through a social network. It characterizes adoption rates over time for different initial allocations and network structures. In doing so, we provide...

The Value of Incumbency When Platforms Face Heterogeneous Customers

By Gary Biglaiser and Jacques Crémer

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2020

We study competition for the market in a dynamic model with network externalities, focusing on the efficiency of market outcomes. We propose a representation of the strategic advantages of incumbency and embed it in a dynamic framework with heterogeneous ...

Designing Dynamic Research Contests

By Jean-Michel Benkert and Igor Letina

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2020

This paper studies the optimal design of dynamic research contests. We introduce interim transfers, which are paid in every period while the contest is ongoing, to an otherwise standard setting. We show that a contest where (i) the principal can stop the ...

The Negative Income Tax and the Evolution of U.S. Welfare Policy

By Robert A. Moffitt

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2003

The negative income tax proposed by Milton Friedman represents one of the fundamental ideas of modern welfare policy. However, the academic literature has raised two difficulties with it, one challenging its purported work incentives and the other suggest...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, November 2020

Seasonal Liquidity, Rural Labor Markets, and Agricultural Production

By Günther Fink, B. Kelsey Jack, and Felix Masiye

American Economic Review, November 2020

Rural economies in many developing countries are characterized by a lean season in the months preceding harvest, when farmers have depleted their cash and grain savings from the previous year. To identify the impacts of liquidity during the lean season, w...

Arrival of Young Talent: The Send-Down Movement and Rural Education in China

By Yi Chen, Ziying Fan, Xiaomin Gu, and Li-An Zhou

American Economic Review, November 2020

This paper estimates the effects on rural education of the send-down movement during the Cultural Revolution, when about 16 million urban youth were mandated to resettle in the countryside. Using a county-level dataset compiled from local gazetteers and p...

Does Information Break the Political Resource Curse? Experimental Evidence from Mozambique

By Alex Armand, Alexander Coutts, Pedro C. Vicente, and Inês Vilela

American Economic Review, November 2020

Natural resources can have a negative impact on the economy through corruption and civil conflict. This paper tests whether information can counteract this political resource curse. We implement a large-scale field experiment following the dissemination o...

Devotion and Development: Religiosity, Education, and Economic Progress in Nineteenth-Century France

By Mara P. Squicciarini

American Economic Review, November 2020

This paper studies when religion can hamper diffusion of knowledge and economic development, and through which mechanism. I examine Catholicism in France during the Second Industrial Revolution (1870–1914). In this period, technology became skill-intens...

In Honor of Matthew Rabin: Winner of the John Bates Clark Medal

By Colin Camerer and Richard H. Thaler

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2003

Although there is some evidence that Matthew Rabin existed before 1990, we had the pleasure of discovering him for ourselves when, in the early 1990s, he sent each of us a copy of his manuscript "Incorporating Fairness into Game Theory and Economics" [2]....

Gambling over Public Opinion

By Deepal Basak and Joyee Deb

American Economic Review, November 2020

We consider bargaining environments in which public opinion provides leverage by making compromises costly. Two parties make initial demands, before knowing the public opinion. If deadlocked, they can bargain again after public opinion forms, but suffer r...

From Extreme to Mainstream: The Erosion of Social Norms

By Leonardo Bursztyn, Georgy Egorov, and Stefano Fiorin

American Economic Review, November 2020

Social norms, usually persistent, can change quickly when new public information arrives, such as a surprising election outcome. People may become more inclined to express views or take actions previously perceived as stigmatized and may judge others less...

Small and Large Firms over the Business Cycle

By Nicolas Crouzet and Neil R. Mehrotra

American Economic Review, November 2020

This paper uses new confidential Census data to revisit the relationship between firm size, cyclicality, and financial frictions. First, we find that large firms (the top 1 percent by size) are less cyclically sensitive than the rest. Second, high and ris...

Does When You Die Depend on Where You Live? Evidence from Hurricane Katrina

By Tatyana Deryugina and David Molitor

American Economic Review, November 2020

We follow Medicare cohorts to estimate Hurricane Katrina's long-run mortality effects on victims initially living in New Orleans. Including the initial shock, the hurricane improved eight-year survival by 2.07 percentage points. Migration to lower-mortali...

Methods Matter: p-Hacking and Publication Bias in Causal Analysis in Economics

By Abel Brodeur, Nikolai Cook, and Anthony Heyes

American Economic Review, November 2020

The credibility revolution in economics has promoted causal identification using randomized control trials (RCT), difference-in-differences (DID), instrumental variables (IV) and regression discontinuity design (RDD). Applying multiple approaches to over ...

How Well Targeted Are Soda Taxes?

By Pierre Dubois, Rachel Griffith, and Martin O'Connell

American Economic Review, November 2020

Soda taxes aim to reduce excessive sugar consumption. We assess who is most impacted by soda taxes. We estimate demand using micro longitudinal data covering on-the-go purchases, and exploit the panel dimension to estimate individual-specific preferences....

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2020

Retrospectives: Who Invented Instrumental Variable Regression?

By James H. Stock and Francesco Trebbi

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2003

This feature addresses the history of economic words and ideas. The hope is to deepen the workaday dialogue of economists, while perhaps also casting new light on ongoing questions.

Child Care Subsidies, Quality, and Optimal Income Taxation

By Spencer Bastani, Sören Blomquist, and Luca Micheletto

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2020

We study child care subsidies in a Mirrleesian optimal tax framework where parents choose both the quantity and quality of child care. Child care services not only enable parents to work, but also contribute to children's human capital. We examine the con...

How Taxing Is Tax Filing? Using Revealed Preferences to Estimate Compliance Costs

By Youssef Benzarti

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2020

This paper uses a quasi-experimental design to estimate the cost of filing taxes. Using US tax returns, I observe how taxpayers choose between itemizing deductions and claiming the standard deduction. Taxpayers forgo large tax savings to avoid compliance ...