Mediation in Reputational Bargaining

By Jack Fanning

American Economic Review, August 2021

Can an uninformed mediator improve outcomes in a dynamic reputational bargaining model? I show that a simple communication protocol used by professional mediators, of announcing an agreement only if both parties privately accept its terms, can increase th...

What to Expect from the Lower Bound on Interest Rates: Evidence from Derivatives Prices

By Thomas M. Mertens and John C. Williams

American Economic Review, August 2021

This paper analyzes the effects of the lower bound for interest rates on the distributions of inflation and interest rates. In a New Keynesian model with a lower bound, two equilibria emerge: policy is mostly unconstrained in the "target equilibrium," whe...

The Impacts of a Multifaceted Prenatal Intervention on Human Capital Accumulation in Early Life

By Pedro Carneiro, Lucy Kraftman, Giacomo Mason, Lucie Moore, Imran Rasul, and Molly Scott

American Economic Review, August 2021

We evaluate an intervention targeting early life nutrition and well-being for households in extreme poverty in Northern Nigeria. The intervention leads to large and sustained improvements in children's anthropometric and health outcomes, including an 8 pe...

The Long-Run Effects of Childhood Insurance Coverage: Medicaid Implementation, Adult Health, and Labor Market Outcomes

By Andrew Goodman-Bacon

American Economic Review, August 2021

This paper estimates the long-run effects of childhood Medicaid eligibility on adult health and economic outcomes using the program's original introduction (1966–1970) and its mandated coverage of welfare recipients. The design compares cohorts born in ...

Identifying Present Bias from the Timing of Choices

By Paul Heidhues and Philipp Strack

American Economic Review, August 2021

A (partially naive) quasi-hyperbolic discounter repeatedly chooses whether to complete a task. Her net benefits of task completion are drawn independently between periods from a time-invariant distribution. We show that the probability of completing the t...

Entry-Proofness and Discriminatory Pricing under Adverse Selection

By Andrea Attar, Thomas Mariotti, and François Salanié

American Economic Review, August 2021

This paper studies competitive allocations under adverse selection. We first provide a general necessary and sufficient condition for entry on an inactive market to be unprofitable. We then use this result to characterize, for an active market, a unique b...

Targeting In-Kind Transfers through Market Design: A Revealed Preference Analysis of Public Housing Allocation

By Daniel Waldinger

American Economic Review, August 2021

Public housing benefits are rationed through wait lists. Theoretical work on public housing allocation has debated how much choice applicants should have over units, identifying a possible trade-off between efficiency and redistribution. This paper empiri...

Place-Based Drivers of Mortality: Evidence from Migration

By Amy Finkelstein, Matthew Gentzkow, and Heidi Williams

American Economic Review, August 2021

We estimate the effect of current location on elderly mortality by analyzing outcomes of movers in the Medicare population. We control for movers' origin locations as well as a rich vector of pre-move health measures. We also develop a novel strategy to a...

The Role of Oligarchs in Russian Capitalism

[Symposium: The Economy of Russia]

By Sergei Guriev and Andrei Rachinsky

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2005

Using a unique dataset, we describe the degree of ownership concentration in Russian economy and its role in shaping economic and political institutions in Russia. In particular, we find that Russian "oligarchs" do control a substantial part of the econom...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2021

Deterring Illegal Entry: Migrant Sanctions and Recidivism in Border Apprehensions

By Samuel Bazzi, Gordon Hanson, Sarah John, Bryan Roberts, and John Whitley

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2021

During the 2008 to 2012 period, the US Border Patrol enacted new sanctions on migrants apprehended while attempting to enter the United States illegally. Using administrative records on apprehensions of Mexican nationals that include fingerprint-based I...

Using Labor Supply Elasticities to Learn about Income Inequality: The Role of Productivities versus Preferences

By Katy Bergstrom and William Dodds

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2021

Using a general labor supply model in which individuals choose how much to work conditional on productivities and preferences for consumption relative to leisure, we show that the mapping from earnings and hours worked to productivities and preferences ca...

The Labor Market for Teachers under Different Pay Schemes

By Barbara Biasi

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2021

Compensation of most US public school teachers is rigid and solely based on seniority. This paper studies the effects of a reform that gave school districts in Wisconsin full autonomy to redesign teacher pay schemes. Following the reform some districts sw...

A Normal Country: Russia After Communism

[Symposium: The Economy of Russia]

By Andrei Shleifer and Daniel Treisman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2005

During the 1990s, Russia underwent an extraordinary transformation from a communist dictatorship to a multi-party democracy, from a centrally planned economy to a market economy, and from a belligerent adversary of the West to a cooperative partner. Yet a...

Unit Sales and Price Effects of Preannounced Consumption Tax Reforms: Micro-level Evidence from European VAT

By Thiess Buettner and Boryana Madzharova

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2021

We study the effects of consumption tax changes on prices and unit sales of durables utilizing micro-level product data. The results show that tax rate changes are fully shifted into prices. An anticipated tax rate change causes a temporary shift in unit ...

Political Alignment, Attitudes toward Government, and Tax Evasion

By Julie Berry Cullen, Nicholas Turner, and Ebonya Washington

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2021

We ask whether attitudes toward government play a causal role in the evasion of US personal income taxes. As turnover elections move voters in partisan counties into and out of alignment with the party of the president, we find with alignment (i) taxpayer...

Informal Labor and the Efficiency Cost of Social Programs: Evidence from Unemployment Insurance in Brazil

By François Gerard and Gustavo Gonzaga

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2021

It is widely believed that the presence of a large informal sector increases the efficiency cost of social programs in developing countries. We evaluate such claims for the case of unemployment insurance (UI) by combining an optimal UI framework with co...

Consumer Myopia in Vehicle Purchases: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

By Kenneth T. Gillingham, Sébastien Houde, and Arthur A. van Benthem

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2021

A central question in the analysis of fuel economy policy is whether consumers are myopic with regards to future fuel costs. We provide the first evidence on the consumer valuation of fuel economy from a natural experiment that provides exogenous variatio...

Horizontal Differentiation and the Policy Effect of Charter Schools

By Michael Gilraine, Uros Petronijevic, and John D. Singleton

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2021

While school choice may enhance competition, incentives for public schools to raise productivity may be muted if public education is imperfectly substitutable with alternatives. This paper estimates the aggregate effect of charter school expansion on educ...

The Effect of SNAP on the Composition of Purchased Foods: Evidence and Implications

By Justine Hastings, Ryan Kessler, and Jesse M. Shapiro

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2021

We use detailed data from a large retail panel to study the effect of participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) on the composition and nutrient content of foods purchased for at-home consumption. We find that the effect of SNAP...