Report by the AEA Data Editor

By Lars Vilhuber

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

AEA Data and Code Availability Policy

By Lars Vilhuber

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

How to Subvert Democracy: Montesinos in Peru

By John Mcmillan and Pablo Zoido

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2004

Which of the democratic checks and balances--opposition parties, the judiciary, a free press--is the most forceful? Peru has the full set of democratic institutions. In the 1990s, the secret-police chief Montesinos systematically undermined them all with ...

Best Practices for Economists: Building a More Diverse, Inclusive, and Productive Profession

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

The Muddles over Outsourcing

By Jagdish Bhagwati, Arvind Panagariya, and T.N. Srinivasan

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2004

Critics have muddled the public debate over offshore outsourcing by using the term interchangeably to refer to altogether different phenomena such as on-line purchase of services, direct foreign investment and, sometimes, all imports. We argue that clarit...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, June 2021

Closing the Gap: The Effect of Reducing Complexity and Uncertainty in College Pricing on the Choices of Low-Income Students

By Susan Dynarski, CJ Libassi, Katherine Michelmore, and Stephanie Owen

American Economic Review, June 2021

High-achieving, low-income students attend selective colleges at far lower rates than upper-income students with similar achievement. Behavioral biases, intensified by complexity and uncertainty in the admissions and aid process, may explain this gap. In ...

The Selection of Talent: Experimental and Structural Evidence from Ethiopia

By Girum Abebe, A. Stefano Caria, and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina

American Economic Review, June 2021

We study how search frictions in the labor market affect firms' ability to recruit talented workers. In a field experiment in Ethiopia, we show that an employer can attract more talented applicants by offering a small monetary incentive for making a job a...

Types of Contact: A Field Experiment on Collaborative and Adversarial Caste Integration

By Matt Lowe

American Economic Review, June 2021

I estimate the effects of collaborative and adversarial intergroup contact. I randomly assigned Indian men from different castes to participate in cricket leagues or to serve as a control group. League players faced variation in collaborative contact, thr...

Feedbacks: Financial Markets and Economic Activity

By Markus Brunnermeier, Darius Palia, Karthik A. Sastry, and Christopher A. Sims

American Economic Review, June 2021

Is credit expansion a sign of desirable financial deepening or the prelude to an inevitable bust? We study this question in modern US data using a structural VAR model of 10 monthly frequency variables, identified by heteroskedasticity. Negative reduced-f...

Can Policy Change Culture? Government Pension Plans and Traditional Kinship Practices

By Natalie Bau

American Economic Review, June 2021

Policies may change the incentives that allow cultural practices to persist. To test this, I study matrilocality and patrilocality, kinship traditions that determine daughters' and sons' post-marriage residences, and thus, which gender lives with and supp...

Can Network Theory-Based Targeting Increase Technology Adoption?

By Lori Beaman, Ariel BenYishay, Jeremy Magruder, and Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak

American Economic Review, June 2021

Can targeting information to network-central farmers induce more adoption of a new agricultural technology? By combining social network data and a field experiment in 200 villages in Malawi, we find that targeting central farmers is important to spur the ...

Digitization and Pre-purchase Information: The Causal and Welfare Impacts of Reviews and Crowd Ratings

By Imke Reimers and Joel Waldfogel

American Economic Review, June 2021

Digitization has led to many new creative products, straining the capacity of professional critics and consumers. Yet, the digitization of retailing has also delivered new crowd-based sources of pre-purchase information. We compare the relative impacts of...

Discrete Choice under Risk with Limited Consideration

By Levon Barseghyan, Francesca Molinari, and Matthew Thirkettle

American Economic Review, June 2021

This paper is concerned with learning decision-makers' preferences using data on observed choices from a finite set of risky alternatives. We propose a discrete choice model with unobserved heterogeneity in consideration sets and in standard risk aversion...

Oil and the Macroeconomy Since the 1970s

By Robert B. Barsky and Lutz Kilian

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2004

Increases in oil prices have been held responsible for recessions, periods of excessive inflation, reduced productivity and lower economic growth. In this paper, we review the arguments supporting such views. First, we highlight some of the conceptual dif...

Digital Dystopia

By Jean Tirole

American Economic Review, June 2021

Autocratic regimes, democratic majorities, private platforms, and religious or professional organizations can achieve social control by managing the flow of information about individuals' behavior. Bundling the agents' political, organizational, or religi...

Report of Independent Auditor

American Economic Review, June 2021

Front Matter

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2021

Enforcing Wealth Taxes in the Developing World: Quasi-experimental Evidence from Colombia

By Juliana Londoño-Vélez and Javier Ávila-Mahecha

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2021

This paper investigates the feasibility of wealth taxation in developing countries. It uses rich administrative data from Colombia and leverages a government-designed program for voluntary disclosures of hidden wealth as well as the threat of detection tr...

News Uncertainty in Brexit United Kingdom

By Renato Faccini and Edoardo Palombo

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2021

After the Brexit referendum, the behavior of the UK economy defied widespread expectations, as it did not exhibit a V-shaped recession but a slow decline in production. We show that this pattern of propagation arises when uncertainty is about future, rath...