Is American Pet Health Care (Also) Uniquely Inefficient?

By Liran Einav, Amy Finkelstein, and Atul Gupta

American Economic Review, May 2017

We document four similarities between American human healthcare and American pet care: (i) rapid growth in spending as a share of GDP over the last two decades; (ii) strong income-spending gradient; (iii) rapid growth in the employment of healthcare provi...

Mothers Care More, but Fathers Decide: Educating Parents about Child Health in Uganda

By Martina Björkman Nyqvist and Seema Jayachandran

American Economic Review, May 2017

Research on intrahousehold decision-making generally finds that fathers have more bargaining power than mothers, but mothers put more weight on children's well-being. This suggests a tradeoff when targeting policies to improve child health: fathers have m...

Precommitment, Cash Transfers, and Timely Arrival for Birth: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial in Nairobi Kenya

By Jessica Cohen, Katherine Lofgren, and Margaret McConnell

American Economic Review, May 2017

Maternal and neonatal mortality rates in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya are among the highest in the world. Mounting evidence suggests that delivering in a facility is not enough to ensure mortality reductions: women must deliver in high-quality facilities a...

Personality Traits and Performance Contracts: Evidence from a Field Experiment among Maternity Care Providers in India

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

American Economic Review, May 2017

We study how agents respond to performance incentives according to key personality traits (conscientiousness and neuroticism) through a field experiment offering financial incentives for improving maternal and neonatal health outcomes to rural Indian doct...

Traditional Beliefs and Learning about Maternal Risk in Zambia

By Nava Ashraf, Erica Field, Giuditta Rusconi, Alessandra Voena, and Roberta Ziparo

American Economic Review, May 2017

Maternal mortality remains very high in many parts of the developing world, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. While maternal deaths are observable, it may not be straightforward for individuals to learn about risk factors. This paper utilizes novel data o...

Does Forest Loss Increase Human Disease? Evidence from Nigeria

By Julia Berazneva and Tanya S. Byker

American Economic Review, May 2017

We examine the impact of forest loss on three infectious diseases attributed to modifiable environmental factors in the last decade in Nigeria. Geolinking a new high-resolution dataset of global forest change to child-level health data from the Nigeria De...

Shale Gas Development and Drinking Water Quality

By Elaine Hill and Lala Ma

American Economic Review, May 2017

Recent studies have linked shale gas development (SGD) to ground water contamination. The extent of these environmental externalities, to date, remains uncertain. To address this gap, we examine whether shale gas development systematically affects drinkin...

The Impact of Indonesian Forest Fires on Singaporean Pollution and Health

By Tamara L. Sheldon and Chandini Sankaran

American Economic Review, May 2017

Forest burning in Indonesia results in severe episodes of "seasonal haze" in neighboring Singapore. We offer the first causal analysis of the transboundary health effects of the Indonesian forest burning. Instrumenting for air pollution with satellite fir...

Disease and Gender Gaps in Human Capital Investment: Evidence from Niger's 1986 Meningitis Epidemic

By Belinda Archibong and Francis Annan

American Economic Review, May 2017

This paper examines whether disease burdens, especially prevalent in the tropics, contribute significantly to widening gender gaps in educational attainment. We estimate the impact of sudden exposure to the 1986 meningitis epidemic in Niger on girls' educ...

How Children with Mental Disabilities Affect Household Investment Decisions

By Vicki L. Bogan and Jose M. Fernandez

American Economic Review, May 2017

We analyze how children with mental disabilities influence parental portfolio allocation. We find that risky asset holding decreases among households with special needs children. However, conditional on participating in financial markets, households with ...

Excess Male Infant Mortality: The Gene-Institution Interactions

By Roland Pongou, Barthelemy Kuate Defo, and Zacharie Tsala Dimbuene

American Economic Review, May 2017

Excess male mortality at early ages is an important source of child inequality in most societies. We examine how improvement in the quality of political institutions affects the male survival disadvantage. Using data on twins in combination with a natural...

Using Causal Forests to Predict Treatment Heterogeneity: An Application to Summer Jobs

By Jonathan M.V. Davis and Sara B. Heller

American Economic Review, May 2017

To estimate treatment heterogeneity in two randomized controlled trials of a youth summer jobs program, we implement Wager and Athey's (2015) causal forest algorithm. We provide a step-by-step explanation targeted at applied researchers of how the algorit...

Does Public Assistance Reduce Recidivism?

By Crystal S. Yang

American Economic Review, May 2017

Under the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996, individuals convicted of drug-related felonies were permanently banned from receiving welfare and food stamps. Since then, over 30 states have opted out of the fed...

Moving to Job Opportunities? The Effect of "Ban the Box" on the Composition of Cities

By Jennifer L. Doleac and Benjamin Hansen

American Economic Review, May 2017

Jurisdictions across the United States have adopted "ban the box" (BTB) policies preventing employers from conducting criminal background checks until late in the job application process. Their primary goal is to increase employment for those with crimina...

The Effect of Criminal Records on Access to Employment

By Amanda Agan and Sonja Starr

American Economic Review, May 2017

This paper adds to the empirical evidence that criminal records are a barrier to employment. Using data from 2,655 online applications sent on behalf of fictitious male applicants, we show that employers are 60 percent more likely to call applicants that ...

Keeping It in the Family: Lineage Organization and the Scope of Trust in Sub-Saharan Africa

By Jacob Moscona, Nathan Nunn, and James A. Robinson

American Economic Review, May 2017

We present evidence that the traditional structure of society is an important determinant of the scope of trust today. Within Africa, individuals belonging to ethnic groups that organized society using segmentary lineages exhibit a more limited scope of t...

The Evolution of Egalitarian Sociolinguistic Conventions

By Suresh Naidu, Sung-Ha Hwang, and Samuel Bowles

American Economic Review, May 2017

Motivated by historical examples and ideas from socio-linguistics, in particular the "non-reciprocal power semantic" of Brown and Gilman (1960), we extend evolutionary models of language to incorporate intentional linguistic innovations among conventions ...

How the Second-Order Free Rider Problem Is Solved in a Small-Scale Society

By Sarah Mathew

American Economic Review, May 2017

Moralistic punishment enables human cooperation, but an outstanding question is why people voluntarily sanction when they can obtain the benefits of punishment without being enforcers themselves. To address how decentralized societies solve this second-or...

Why Being Wrong Can Be Right: Magical Warfare Technologies and the Persistence of False Beliefs

By Nathan Nunn and Raul Sanchez de la Sierra

American Economic Review, May 2017

Across human societies, one sees many examples of deeply rooted and widely held beliefs that are almost certainly untrue. Examples include beliefs about witchcraft, magic, ordeals, and superstitions. Why are such incorrect beliefs so prevalent and how do ...

Aggregate Demand and the Top 1 Percent

By Adrien Auclert and Matthew Rognlie

American Economic Review, May 2017

There has been a large rise in US top income inequality since the 1980s. We merge a widely studied model of the Pareto tail of labor incomes with a canonical model of consumption and savings to study the consequences of this increase for aggregate demand....