Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2021

The Political Premium of Television Celebrity

By Heyu Xiong

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2021

This paper studies the electoral consequences of television stardom through the career of Ronald Reagan. I utilize quasi-experimental variation in television reception to estimate the causal effect of celebrity exposure on political support. I find that...

Different Strokes for Different Folks? Experimental Evidence on the Effectiveness of Input and Output Incentive Contracts for Health Care Providers with Varying Skills

By Manoj Mohanan, Katherine Donato, Grant Miller, Yulya Truskinovsky, and Marcos Vera-Hernández

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2021

A central issue in designing incentive contracts is the decision to reward agents' input use versus outputs. The trade-off between risk and return to innovation in production can also lead agents with varying skill levels to perform differentially under d...

Air Pollution and Criminal Activity: Microgeographic Evidence from Chicago

By Evan Herrnstadt, Anthony Heyes, Erich Muehlegger, and Soodeh Saberian

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2021

A growing literature documents that air pollution adversely impacts health, productivity, and cognition. This paper provides the first evidence of a causal link between air pollution and aggressive behavior, as documented by violent crime. Using the geolo...

Temperature, Labor Reallocation, and Industrial Production: Evidence from India

By Jonathan Colmer

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2021

To what degree can labor reallocation mitigate the economic consequences of weather-driven agricultural productivity shocks? I estimate that temperature-driven reductions in the demand for agricultural labor in India are associated with increases in nonag...

Copying and Copyright

[Symposium: Intellectual Property Rights]

By Hal R. Varian

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2005

Today most newly created textual, photographic, audio, and video content is available in digital form. Even older content that was not "born digital" can relatively easily converted to machine-readable formats. At same time, the world has become more netw...

Teaching Labor Laws: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial in South Africa

By Marianne Bertrand and Bruno Crépon

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2021

We assess whether imperfect knowledge of labor regulation hinders job creation at small and medium-sized firms. We partner with a labor law expert organization that provides information about labor regulation via newsletters and access to a specialized we...

Using Nonlinear Budget Sets to Estimate Extensive Margin Responses: Method and Evidence from the Earnings Test

By Alexander M. Gelber, Damon Jones, Daniel W. Sacks, and Jae Song

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2021

We estimate the impact of the Social Security Annual Earnings Test (AET) on older workers' employment. The AET reduces social security claimants' current benefits in proportion to their earnings in excess of an exempt amount. Using a regression kink desig...

The Effects of DNA Databases on the Deterrence and Detection of Offenders

By Anne Sofie Tegner Anker, Jennifer L. Doleac, and Rasmus Landersø

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2021

This paper studies the effects of adding criminal offenders to a DNA database. Using a large expansion of Denmark's DNA database, we find that DNA registration reduces recidivism within the following year by up to 42 percent. It also increases the probabi...

"Too Young to Die": Deprivation Measures Combining Poverty and Premature Mortality

By Jean-Marie Baland, Guilhem Cassan, and Benoit Decerf

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2021

Most measures of deprivation concentrate on deprivation among the living population and, thus, ignore premature mortality. This omission leads to a severe bias in the evaluation of deprivation. We propose two different measures that combine information on...

Gender Identity, Coworking Spouses, and Relative Income within Households

By Natalia Zinovyeva and Maryna Tverdostup

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2021

Bertrand, Kamenica, and Pan (2015) document that in the United States there is a discontinuity to the right of 0.5 in the distribution of households according to the female share of total earnings, which they attribute to the existence of a gender identit...

The Economics of Speed: The Electrification of the Streetcar System and the Decline of Mom-and-Pop Stores in Boston, 1885–1905

By Wei You

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2021

Small firms dominated the American economy in the nineteenth century, and they still dominate in many developing economies today. This paper tests whether geographic market segmentation due to underdeveloped intracity transportation technology precludes t...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2021

Lessons About Markets from the Internet

By Glenn Ellison and Sara Fisher Ellison

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2005

Many of us have grown used to, tired of, and finally downright skeptical of claims of the transformative powers of the Internet. It was to usher in the New Economy, but we seem mostly to have the Old. It would transform retail, but Toys "R" Us has outlast...

MPC Heterogeneity and Household Balance Sheets

By Andreas Fagereng, Martin B. Holm, and Gisle J. Natvik

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2021

We use sizable lottery prizes in Norwegian administrative panel data to explore how transitory income shocks are spent and saved over time and how households' marginal propensities to consume (MPCs) vary with household characteristics and shock size. We...

Household Search and the Marital Wage Premium

By Laura Pilossoph and Shu Lin Wee

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2021

We develop a model where selection into marriage and household search generate a marital wage premium. Beyond selection, married individuals earn higher wages for two reasons. First, income pooling within a joint household raises risk-averse individuals' ...

The Young, the Old, and the Government: Demographics and Fiscal Multipliers

By Henrique S. Basso and Omar Rachedi

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2021

We document that government spending multipliers depend on the population age structure. Using the variation in military spending and birth rates across US states, we show that the local fiscal multiplier is 1.5 and increases with the population share of ...

Financial Risk Capacity

By Saki Bigio and Adrien d'Avernas

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2021

Financial crises are particularly severe and lengthy when banks fail to recapitalize after bearing large losses. We present a model that explains the slow recovery of bank capital and economic activity. Banks provide intermediation in markets with informa...

The Extensive Margin of Exporting Products: A Firm-Level Analysis

By Costas Arkolakis, Sharat Ganapati, and Marc-Andreas Muendler

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2021

To quantify trade frictions, we examine multiproduct exporters. We build a flexible general-equilibrium model and estimate market entry costs using Brazilian firm-product-destination data under rich demand and market access cost shocks. Our estimates show...

Money Mining and Price Dynamics

By Michael Choi and Guillaume Rocheteau

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2021

We develop a random-matching model to study the price dynamics of monies produced privately according to a time-consuming mining technology. For our leading example, there exists a unique equilibrium where the value of money increases over time and reache...