Immigration and Entrepreneurship in the United States

By Pierre Azoulay, Benjamin F. Jones, J. Daniel Kim, and Javier Miranda

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2022

Immigrants can expand labor supply and compete for jobs with native-born workers. But immigrants may also start new firms, expanding labor demand. This paper uses US administrative data and other data sources to study the role of immigrants in entrepreneu...

Motivated Beliefs and Anticipation of Uncertainty Resolution

By Christoph Drobner

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2022

Manipulating subjects' expectations about the resolution of uncertainty, I show that subjects update beliefs about ego-relevant information optimistically when they expect no resolution of uncertainty but neutrally when they expect immediate uncertainty r...

Forward Guidance and Durable Goods Demand

By Alisdair McKay and Johannes F. Wieland

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2022

We study the monetary transmission mechanism in a quantitative fixed-cost model of durable goods demand. We show that aggregate demand is substantially more sensitive to contemporaneous interest rates than to forward guidance about future interest rates. ...

Persuasion with Correlation Neglect: A Full Manipulation Result

By Gilat Levy, Inés Moreno de Barreda, and Ronny Razin

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2022

We consider an information design problem in which a sender tries to persuade a receiver that has "correlation neglect," i.e., fails to understand that signals might be correlated. We show that a sender with unlimited number of signals can fully manipulat...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, March 2022

Poverty in America: Trends and Explanations

[Symposium: Poverty]

By Hilary W. Hoynes, Marianne E. Page, and Ann Huff Stevens

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2006

Despite robust growth in real GDP per capita in the last three decades, U.S. poverty rates have changed very little. We summarize some basic facts about poverty in the United States, relying on a combination of previously published data from the Census Bu...

State-Dependent Effects of Monetary Policy: The Refinancing Channel

By Martin Eichenbaum, Sergio Rebelo, and Arlene Wong

American Economic Review, March 2022

This paper studies how the impact of monetary policy depends on the distribution of savings from refinancing mortgages. We show that the efficacy of monetary policy is state dependent, varying in a systematic way with the pool of potential savings from re...

Local Elites as State Capacity: How City Chiefs Use Local Information to Increase Tax Compliance in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

By Pablo Balán, Augustin Bergeron, Gabriel Tourek, and Jonathan L. Weigel

American Economic Review, March 2022

This paper investigates the trade-offs between local elites and state agents as tax collectors in low-capacity states. We study a randomized policy experiment assigning neighborhoods of a large Congolese city to property tax collection by city chiefs or s...

Fictional Money, Real Costs: Impacts of Financial Salience on Disadvantaged Students

By Claire Duquennois

American Economic Review, March 2022

Disadvantaged students perform differentially worse when randomly given a financially salient mathematics exam. For students with socioeconomic indicators below the national median, a 10 percentage point increase in the share of monetary themed questions ...

Does Race Matter for Police Use of Force? Evidence from 911 Calls

By Mark Hoekstra and CarlyWill Sloan

American Economic Review, March 2022

This paper examines race and police use of force using data on 1.6 million 911 calls in two cities, neither of which allows for discretion in officer dispatch. Results indicate White officers increase force much more than minority officers when dispatched...

Targeting High Ability Entrepreneurs Using Community Information: Mechanism Design in the Field

By Reshmaan Hussam, Natalia Rigol, and Benjamin N. Roth

American Economic Review, March 2022

Identifying high-growth microentrepreneurs in low-income countries remains a challenge due to a scarcity of verifiable information. With a cash grant experiment in India we demonstrate that community knowledge can help target high-growth microentrepreneur...

Reshaping Adolescents' Gender Attitudes: Evidence from a School-Based Experiment in India

By Diva Dhar, Tarun Jain, and Seema Jayachandran

American Economic Review, March 2022

This paper evaluates an intervention in India that engaged adolescent girls and boys in classroom discussions about gender equality for two years, aiming to reduce their support for societal norms that restrict women's and girls' opportunities. Using a ra...

Misspecified Politics and the Recurrence of Populism

By Gilat Levy, Ronny Razin, and Alwyn Young

American Economic Review, March 2022

We develop a dynamic model of political competition between two groups that differ in their subjective model of the data generating process for a common outcome. One group has a simpler model than the other group as they ignore some relevant policy variab...

Designing Deadlines

By Erik Madsen

American Economic Review, March 2022

I study how an organization should manage a project of uncertain scope, when it is advised by a privately informed expert who prefers to prolong his employment. The optimal long-term contract combines a deadline for project completion and incentive paymen...

Employer Incentives and Distortions in Health Insurance Design: Implications for Welfare and Costs

By Nicholas Tilipman

American Economic Review, March 2022

This paper studies employer incentives in designing health insurance provider networks and whether observed offerings reflect preferences that are aligned with employees. I estimate a model of supply and demand where I endogenize employer health plan offe...

Estimating Social Preferences and Gift Exchange at Work

By Stefano DellaVigna, John A. List, Ulrike Malmendier, and Gautam Rao

American Economic Review, March 2022

We design three field experiments to estimate how workers' social preferences toward their employer motivates their work effort. We vary the pay rates offered to workers, the return to the employer, and employer generosity demonstrated via unexpected gift...

Poor People in Rich Nations: The United States in Comparative Perspective

[Symposium: Poverty]

By Timothy Smeeding

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2006

Cross-national comparisons can teach lessons about antipoverty policy. While all nations value low poverty, high levels of economic self-reliance and equality of opportunity for younger persons, they differ dramatically in the extent to which they reach t...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2022

Epidemics, Inequality, and Poverty in Preindustrial and Early Industrial Times

By Guido Alfani

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2022

Recent research has explored the distributive consequences of major historical epidemics, and the current crisis triggered by COVID-19 prompts us to look at the past for insights about how pandemics can affect inequalities in income, wealth, and health....

The 1918 Influenza Pandemic and Its Lessons for COVID-19

By Brian Beach, Karen Clay, and Martin Saavedra

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2022

This article reviews the global health and economic consequences of the 1918 influenza pandemic, with a particular focus on topics that have seen a renewed interest because of COVID-19. We begin by providing an overview of key contextual and epidemiologic...