Disability Insurance in the Great Recession: Ease of Access, Program Enrollment, and Local Hysteresis

By Melissa S. Kearney, Brendan M. Price, and Riley Wilson

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We examine the interaction between Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) access and economic shocks during the Great Recession by exploiting exogenous variation in SSDI appeals processing time—a measure of hassle or access—between neighboring zi...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Bernard Saffran

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2004

Wage Insurance and Labor Market Trajectories

By Benjamin G. Hyman, Brian K. Kovak, Adam Leive, and Theodore Naff

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Wage insurance provides income support to displaced workers who find reemployment at a lower wage. We study the effects of the wage insurance provisions of the US Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program using administrative data from the state of Virgin...

Working for Your Bread: The Labor Supply Effects of SNAP

By Marianne Bitler, Jason Cook, and Jonathan Rothbaum

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the only universal US means-tested safety net program, has a low benefit-reduction rate. Thus, many SNAP recipients are working. We apply recent methods to study whether there is evidence of moral haza...

Jackson, the Bank War, and the Legacy of the Second Bank of the United States

By Peter L. Rousseau

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

President Jackson vetoed the bill to recharter the Second Bank of the United States on July 10, 1832. I describe events leading to the veto and through the bank's dissolution in 1836 using private correspondence and official government documents. These ...

Off the Rails: The Real Effects of Railroad Bond Defaults following the Panic of 1873

By Christopher Cotter

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Although corporate default crises are often quite severe, previous work has found little impact on real macroeconomic variables. This article investigates the relationship between railroad defaults and the balance sheets of local banks following the Panic...

How Contagious Was the Panic of 1907? New Evidence from Trust Company Stocks

By Caroline Fohlin and Zhikun Lu

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Using a new dataset of all NYC trust company stocks, we study the impact of the Panic of 1907 and the ensuing cash infusion by JP Morgan and the Treasury. Using synthetic controls, we find that three "troubled" trusts performed far worse than the other tr...

Trends in US Spatial Inequality: Concentrating Affluence and a Democratization of Poverty

By Cecile Gaubert, Patrick Kline, Damián Vergara, and Danny Yagan

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We use Bureau of Economic Analysis, census, and Current Population Survey data to study trends in income inequality across US states and counties from 1960–2019. Both states and counties have diverged in terms of per capita pretax incomes since the late...

Local Industrial Policy and Sectoral Hubs

By Esteban Rossi-Hansberg, Pierre-Daniel Sarte, and Felipe Schwartzman

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We study the desirability of industrial policies that generate sectoral hubs using a quantitative spatial model with cognitive nonroutine and other occupations. The productivity of each occupation in an industry depends on sector-specific production exter...

Could Gentrification Stop the Poor from Benefiting from Urban Improvements?

By Clare Balboni, Gharad Bryan, Melanie Morten, and Bilal Siddiqi

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

When policymakers invest in urban infrastructure, there are concerns that poor residents living near the infrastructure will be displaced. This paper investigates mechanisms that may lead to such infrastructure-induced gentrification using a general equil...

Arrow Meets Hotelling: Modeling Spatial Innovation

By Steven Callander, Nicolas Lambert, and Niko Matouschek

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We combine a spatial model of innovation with Hotelling's model of competition. Innovations are vertically and also horizontally differentiated. Potential innovators choose not only whether to innovate but also how to innovate. The bolder they are with a ...

Learning and Corruption on Monitoring Chains

By Bruno Strulovici

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

"But who will guard the guardians?" I revisit this age-old question under the following assumptions: (i) guardians are devoid of ethical motives and have quasilinear preferences, (ii) guardians monitor one another through a monitoring chain, and (iii) any...

Comments

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2004

Constrained Retrospective Search

By Can Urgun and Leeat Yariv

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

The search for good outcomes—be it government policies, technological breakthroughs, or lasting purchases—takes time and effort. At times, the decision process is unconstrained: an individual seeking a well-priced product determines her search scope a...

Product Proliferation under Rational Inattention: Application to Health Insurance

By Zach Y. Brown and Jihye Jeon

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

In markets with complicated products such as insurance, why do firms offer many products even when consumers appear to receive little benefit? We show that when consumers face information acquisition costs, firms may have an incentive to introduce many un...

Can Automatic Retention Improve Health Insurance Market Outcomes?

By Adrianna McIntyre, Mark Shepard, and Myles Wagner

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

There is growing interest in market design using default rules and other "choice architecture" principles to steer consumers toward desirable outcomes. Using data from Massachusetts's health insurance exchange, we study an "automatic retention" policy int...

Friend-Based Ranking in Practice

By Francis Bloch and Matthew Olckers

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

A planner aims to target individuals who exceed a threshold in a characteristic, such as wealth or ability. The individuals can rank their friends according to the characteristic. We study a strategy-proof mechanism for the planner to use the rankings for...

Urban Networks and Targeting: Evidence from Liberia

By Lori Beaman, Niall Keleher, Jeremy Magruder, and Carly Trachtman

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

To solicit information from a social network in urban Monrovia, Liberia, we ask community members to assess their neighbors' poverty and assist in targeting a cash transfer. We find little evidence that local leaders, randomly selected neighbors, or neigh...

The Effects of Prize Structures on Innovative Performance

By Joshua Graff Zivin and Elizabeth Lyons

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Successful innovation is essential for the survival and growth of organizations, but how best to incentivize innovation is poorly understood. We compare how two common incentive schemes affect innovative performance in a field experiment run in partnershi...

Common Ownership and Entrepreneurship

By Ofer Eldar and Jillian Grennan

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We complement the literature on common ownership by presenting two new observations from entrepreneurial start-ups. First, given the increase in common ownership of start-ups by venture capital investors, inclusion of high-value start-ups in standard comm...