The Role of Unemployment in the Rise in Alternative Work Arrangements

By Lawrence F. Katz and Alan B. Krueger

American Economic Review, May 2017

The share of U.S. workers in alternative work arrangements has increased substantially in recent decades. Micro longitudinal analyses show that unemployed workers are much more likely to transition into alternative work arrangements than other workers. Ma...

Firm-Related Risk and Precautionary Saving Response

By Andreas Fagereng, Luigi Guiso, and Luigi Pistaferri

American Economic Review, May 2017

We propose a new approach to identify the strength of the precautionary motive and the extent of self-insurance in response to earnings risk based on Euler equation estimates. To address endogeneity problems, we use Norwegian administrative data and instr...

Worker Betas: Five Facts about Systematic Earnings Risk

By Fatih Guvenen, Sam Schulhofer-Wohl, Jae Song, and Motohiro Yogo

American Economic Review, May 2017

The magnitude of and heterogeneity in systematic earnings risk has important implications for various theories in macro, labor, and financial economics. Using administrative data, we document how the aggregate risk exposure of individual earnings to GDP a...

Global Inequality Dynamics: New Findings from WID.world

By Facundo Alvaredo, Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman

American Economic Review, May 2017

This paper presents new findings on global inequality dynamics from the World Wealth and Income Database (WID.world), with particular emphasis on the contrast between the trends observed in the United States, China, France, and the United Kingdom. We obse...

Segregation and Homeownership in the Early Twentieth Century

By Trevon D. Logan and John M. Parman

American Economic Review, May 2017

We use new county-level segregation estimates for the period of 1880 to 1940 to document a general rise in residential segregation in both urban and rural counties occurring alongside rising homeownership rates. However, we find a negative correlation bet...

Who Will Fight? The All-Volunteer Army after 9/11

By Susan Payne Carter, Alexander A. Smith, and Carl Wojtaszek

American Economic Review, May 2017

Who fought the War on Terror? We find that as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan progressed, there was an increase in the fraction of active-duty Army enlistees who were white or from high-income neighborhoods and that these two groups selected combat occup...

Taxman's Dilemma: Coercion or Persuasion? Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment in Ethiopia

By Abebe Shimeles, Daniel Zerfu Gurara, and Firew Woldeyes

American Economic Review, May 2017

We analyze data from a randomized controlled trial of two innovative anti-tax evasion schemes in Ethiopia that signal threats of audit and complimentary messages that encourage tax morale. Our results indicate that the threat of audit reduces tax evasion ...

Inequality in the Labor Market for Native American Women and the Great Recession

By Jeffrey D. Burnette

American Economic Review, May 2017

This research paper builds on previous literature and documents general changes in the labor market for Native American women that occurred during the Great Recession using extracts of data from the Current Population Survey Annual Earnings file, known as...

Consumption Smoothing and Frequency of Benefit Payments of Cash Transfer Programs

By Emma Aguila, Arie Kapteyn, and Francisco Perez-Arce

American Economic Review, May 2017

We analyze two noncontributory Mexican pension programs for the elderly. Both paid similar amounts, but one paid monthly while the other paid every two months. The Life Cycle Hypothesis suggests frequency of benefits payments should not affect consumption...

Asylum Applications and Migration Flows

By Anouch Missirian and Wolfram Schlenker

American Economic Review, May 2017

We discuss an underutilized dataset to examine the causes of migration. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees publishes annual binational asylum applications and the resulting decisions. Asylum is granted to protect individuals from persecutio...

Validating Migration Responses to Flooding Using Satellite and Vital Registration Data

By Joyce J. Chen, Valerie Mueller, Yuanyuan Jia, and Steven Kuo-Hsin Tseng

American Economic Review, May 2017

Rainfall measures may be imperfect proxies for floods, given factors such as upstream water balance, proximity to rivers, and topography. We check the robustness of flooding-migration relationships by combining nationally-representative survey data with m...

Heat Exposure and Youth Migration in Central America and the Caribbean

By Javier Baez, German Caruso, Valerie Mueller, and Chiyu Niu

American Economic Review, May 2017

We employ a triple difference-in-difference approach, using censuses and georeferenced temperature data, to quantify heat effects on internal migration in Central America and the Caribbean. A 1-standard deviation increase in heat would affect the lives of...

Improving Climate-Change Modeling of US Migration

By Mark D. Partridge, Bo Feng, and Mark Rembert

American Economic Review, May 2017

Manmade climate change (CC) has catastrophic consequences. The United States has already experienced wholesale population realignment due to climate as households have relocated to the Sunbelt and West. The irony is that people are moving toward the heat ...

Retirement Contribution Rate Nudges and Plan Participation: Evidence from a Field Experiment

By Jacob Goldin, Tatiana Homonoff, and Will Tucker-Ray

American Economic Review, May 2017

Simple interventions like changing the default or sending a short message can induce individuals to save more for retirement. However, messages that emphasize high savings rates may increase the amount that savings plan participants save while reducing th...

Challenges to Replication and Iteration in Field Experiments: Evidence from Two Direct Mail Shots

By Jake Bowers, Nathaniel Higgins, Dean Karlan, Sarah Tulman, and Jonathan Zinman

American Economic Review, May 2017

We conducted an experiment marketing microloans to farmers in the USA during Spring 2015 and found a simple direct mail letter increased borrowing from a government program. The subsequent spring, we built on this finding and enriched the design to test f...

Government-Academic Partnerships in Randomized Evaluations: The Case of Inappropriate Prescribing

By Adam Sacarny, David Yokum, and Shantanu Agrawal

American Economic Review, May 2017

There is growing evidence that inappropriate prescribing is harming patients and raising costs in the US health care system. Through a partnership between the federal government and academics, we seek to develop evidence on reducing this prescribing. We c...

Reminders and Recidivism: Using Administrative Data to Characterize Nonfilers and Conduct EITC Outreach

By John Guyton, Pat Langetieg, Day Manoli, Mark Payne, Brenda Schafer, and Michael Sebastiani

American Economic Review, May 2017

This project uses third-party information reporting and population-level administrative tax data to identify the population of nonfilers. This population consists of individuals who do not file a tax return despite having income reported by third parties ...

Does Machine Learning Automate Moral Hazard and Error?

By Sendhil Mullainathan and Ziad Obermeyer

American Economic Review, May 2017

Machine learning tools are beginning to be deployed en masse in health care. While the statistical underpinnings of these techniques have been questioned with regard to causality and stability, we highlight a different concern here, relating to measuremen...

Wearable Technologies and Health Behaviors: New Data and New Methods to Understand Population Health

By Benjamin Handel and Jonathan Kolstad

American Economic Review, May 2017

We study a randomized control trial in a large employer population of access to "wearable" technologies and the associated planning and monitoring tools on improved health behaviors (sleep and exercise). Both ITT and IV estimates based on actual plan enro...

Is American Health Care Uniquely Inefficient? Evidence from Prescription Drugs

By Margaret Kyle and Heidi Williams

American Economic Review, May 2017

Alan Garber and Jonathan Skinner (2008) famously conjectured that the US health care system was "uniquely inefficient" relative to other countries. We test this idea using cross-country data on prescription drug sales newly linked with an arguably objecti...