History Dependence in the Housing Market

By Philippe Bracke and Silvana Tenreyro

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2021

Using data on the universe of housing transactions in England and Wales over a 20-year period, we document that sale prices and selling propensities are affected by house prices prevailing in the period in which properties were previously bought. Using ad...

Evaluating the Economic Cost of Coastal Flooding

By Klaus Desmet, Robert E. Kopp, Scott A. Kulp, Dávid Krisztián Nagy, Michael Oppenheimer, Esteban Rossi-Hansberg, and Benjamin H. Strauss

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2021

Sea level rise will cause spatial shifts in economic activity over the next 200 years. Using a spatially disaggregated, dynamic model of the world economy, this paper estimates the consequences of probabilistic projections of local sea level changes. Unde...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, April 2021

Behavioral Constraints on the Design of Subgame-Perfect Implementation Mechanisms

By Ernst Fehr, Michael Powell, and Tom Wilkening

American Economic Review, April 2021

We study subgame-perfect implementation (SPI) mechanisms that have been proposed as a solution to incomplete contracting problems. We show that these mechanisms, which are based on off-equilibrium arbitration clauses that impose large fines for lying and ...

The Macroeconomic Effects of Oil Supply News: Evidence from OPEC Announcements

By Diego R. Känzig

American Economic Review, April 2021

This paper studies how changes in oil supply expectations affect the oil price and the macroeconomy. Using a novel identification design, exploiting institutional features of OPEC and high-frequency data, I identify an oil supply news shock. These shocks ...

Reference Points for Retirement Behavior: Evidence from German Pension Discontinuities

By Arthur Seibold

American Economic Review, April 2021

This paper studies the large concentration of retirement behavior around statutory retirement ages, a puzzling stylized fact. To investigate this fact, I estimate bunching responses to 644 pension benefit discontinuities, using administrative data on the ...

Myopia and Anchoring

By George-Marios Angeletos and Zhen Huo

American Economic Review, April 2021

We develop an equivalence between the equilibrium effects of incomplete information and those of two behavioral distortions: myopia, or extra discounting of the future; and anchoring of current behavior to past behavior, as in models with habit persistenc...

Parental Resources and College Attendance: Evidence from Lottery Wins

By George Bulman, Robert Fairlie, Sarena Goodman, and Adam Isen

American Economic Review, April 2021

We examine US children whose parents won the lottery to trace out the effect of financial resources on college attendance. The analysis leverages federal tax and financial aid records and substantial variation in win size and timing. While per-dollar effe...

Impacts of Performance Pay for Hospitals: The Readmissions Reduction Program

By Atul Gupta

American Economic Review, April 2021

US policy increasingly ties payments for providers to performance on quality measures, though little empirical evidence guides the design of such incentives. I deploy administrative data to study a large federal program that penalizes hospitals with high ...

Making a Name: Women's Surnames at Marriage and Beyond

By Claudia Goldin and Maria Shim

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2004

This paper tracks the fraction of college graduate women who kept their surnames upon marriage and after childbirth and explores some of the correlates of surname retention. Data from the New York Times, Harvard College alumni books, and Massachusetts bir...

The Legacy of Colonial Medicine in Central Africa

By Sara Lowes and Eduardo Montero

American Economic Review, April 2021

Between 1921 and 1956, French colonial governments organized medical campaigns to treat and prevent sleeping sickness. Villagers were forcibly examined and injected with medications with severe, sometimes fatal, side effects. We digitized 30 years of arch...

Risk-Based Selection in Unemployment Insurance: Evidence and Implications

By Camille Landais, Arash Nekoei, Peter Nilsson, David Seim, and Johannes Spinnewijn

American Economic Review, April 2021

This paper studies whether adverse selection can rationalize a universal mandate for unemployment insurance (UI). Building on a unique feature of the unemployment policy in Sweden, where workers can opt for supplemental UI coverage above a minimum manda...

When Does Regulation Distort Costs? Lessons from Fuel Procurement in US Electricity Generation: Comment

By Jin Soo Han, Jean-François Houde, Arthur A. van Benthem, and Jose Miguel Abito

American Economic Review, April 2021

We revisit one of the results in Cicala (2015) and show that the previously estimated large and significant effects of US electricity restructuring on fuel procurement are not robust to the presence of outliers. Using methodologies from the robust statist...

When Does Regulation Distort Costs? Lessons from Fuel Procurement in US Electricity Generation: Reply

By Steve Cicala

American Economic Review, April 2021

The average effect of deregulatory policies on fuel prices at coal-fired power plants is strongly influenced by plants that were initially paying the highest prices for fuel. Primary sources document that these plants were locked into long-term, high-cost...

Manager-Investor Conflicts in Mutual Funds

By Paul G. Mahoney

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2004

Half of all of U.S. households own shares in one or more mutual funds, either directly or through personal or employer-sponsored retirement accounts. This article describes the structure and regulation of mutual funds and the resulting incentives facing t...

Asbestos and the Future of Mass Torts

By Michelle J. White

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2004

State Budget Deficit Dynamics and the California Debacle

By Steven M. Sheffrin

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2004

This paper analyzes the recent experience with state budget deficits in the United States, with an in-depth analysis of the California experience. Compared to prior recessions, states were slower to make adjustments in taxes and spending this time. The pa...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2021

Fees, Reputation, and Information Production in the Credit Rating Industry

By Jacopo Bizzotto and Adrien Vigier

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2021

We compare a credit rating agency's incentives to acquire costly information when it is only paid for giving favorable ratings to the corresponding incentives when the agency is paid up-front, i.e., irrespective of the ratings assigned. We show that, in t...

Estimating Platform Market Power in Two-Sided Markets with an Application to Magazine Advertising

By Minjae Song

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2021

In two-sided markets, two groups of agents interact through platforms. Because agents' decision to join a platform is affected by the presence of agents on the other side, their interactions create indirect network externalities and make platforms' strate...