The Roots of Health Inequality and the Value of Intrafamily Expertise

By Yiqun Chen, Petra Persson, and Maria Polyakova

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2022

In the context of Sweden, we show that having a doctor in the family raises preventive health investments throughout the life cycle, improves physical health, and prolongs life. Two quasi-experimental research designs—medical school admission lotteries ...

Historical Lynchings and the Contemporary Voting Behavior of Blacks

By Jhacova Williams

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2022

This paper analyzes the extent to which the political participation of Blacks can be traced to historical lynchings that took place from 1882 to 1930. Using county-level voter registration data, I show that Blacks who reside in southern counties that expe...

The Impact of School Facility Investments on Students and Homeowners: Evidence from Los Angeles

By Julien Lafortune and David Schönholzer

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2022

We study school facility investments using administrative records from Los Angeles. Exploiting quasi-random variation in the timing of new facility openings and using a residential assignment instrument, we find positive impacts on test scores, attendance...

The Side Effects of Immunity: Malaria and African Slavery in the United States

By Elena Esposito

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2022

This paper documents the role of malaria in the diffusion of African slavery in the United States. The novel empirical evidence reveals that the introduction of malaria triggered a demand for malaria-resistant labor, which led to a massive expansion of Af...

Breastfeeding and Child Development

By Emla Fitzsimons and Marcos Vera-Hernández

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2022

We show that children who are born at or just before the weekend are less likely to be breastfed, owing to poorer breastfeeding support services in hospitals at weekends. We use this variation to estimate the effect of breastfeeding on children's developm...

The Impact of Health on Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from a Large-Scale Health Experiment

By Melvin Stephens Jr. and Desmond Toohey

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2022

While economists have posited that health investments increase earnings, isolating the causal effect of health is challenging due to reverse causality and unobserved heterogeneity. We examine the labor market effects of a randomized controlled trial, the ...

Intrahousehold Consumption Allocation and Demand for Agency: A Triple Experimental Investigation

By Uzma Afzal, Giovanna d'Adda, Marcel Fafchamps, and Farah Said

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2022

We conduct lab experiments to investigate demand for consumption agency in married couples from Pakistan. Most subjects are no better at guessing their spouse's preferences than those of a stranger, suggesting that individual executive agency has instrume...

Political Institutions and Policy Choices: Evidence from the United States

By Timothy Besley and Anne Case

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2003

A rich array of institutional diversity makes the United States an excellent place to study the relationship between political institutions and public policy outcomes. This essay has three main aims. It reviews empirical evidence on the relationship betwe...

Assortative Matching at the Top of the Distribution: Evidence from the World's Most Exclusive Marriage Market

By Marc Goñi

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2022

Using novel data on peerage marriages in Britain, I find that low search costs and marriage-market segregation can generate sorting. Peers courted in the London Season, a matching technology introducing aristocratic bachelors to debutantes. When Queen Vic...

Peer Effects in Product Adoption

By Michael Bailey, Drew Johnston, Theresa Kuchler, Johannes Stroebel, and Arlene Wong

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2022

We use de-identified data from Facebook to study the nature of peer effects in the market for cell phones. To identify peer effects, we exploit variation in friends' new phone acquisitions resulting from random phone losses. A new phone purchase by a frie...

Emotions and Risk Attitudes

By Armando N. Meier

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2022

Previous work has shown that preferences are not always stable across time, but surprisingly little is known about the reasons for this instability. I examine whether variation in people's emotions over time predicts changes in risk attitudes. Using a lar...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, July 2022

Monopsony in the US Labor Market

By Chen Yeh, Claudia Macaluso, and Brad Hershbein

American Economic Review, July 2022

This paper quantifies employer market power in US manufacturing and how it has changed over time. Using administrative data, we estimate plant-level markdowns—the ratio between a plant's marginal revenue product of labor and its wage. We find most manuf...

Productivity Shocks, Long-Term Contracts, and Earnings Dynamics

By Neele Balke and Thibaut Lamadon

American Economic Review, July 2022

This paper examines how employer- and worker-specific productivity shocks transmit to earnings and employment. We develop an equilibrium search model and characterize the optimal contract offered by firms. Risk-neutral firms provide partial insurance agai...

Heterogeneous Global Booms and Busts

By Maryam Farboodi and Péter Kondor

American Economic Review, July 2022

We investigate the heterogeneous boom and bust patterns across countries that emerge as a result of global shocks. Our analysis sheds light on the emergence of core and periphery countries, and the joint determination of the depth of recessions and tightn...

Using the Retail Distribution of Sellers to Impute Expenditure Shares

By Alexis Antoniades, Robert C. Feenstra, and Mingzhi (Jimmy) Xu

American Economic Review, July 2022

Many price indices must be constructed without quantity data at the elementary level. The paper shows that for some consumer goods in the United States and other countries, one can approximate expenditure shares using weights derived from the retail distr...

When Choices Are Mistakes

By Kirby Nielsen and John Rehbeck

American Economic Review, July 2022

Using a laboratory experiment, we identify whether decision-makers consider it a mistake to violate canonical choice axioms. To do this, we incentivize subjects to report axioms they want their decisions to satisfy. Then, subjects make lottery choices whi...

The Gains from Pension Reform

By Assar Lindbeck and Mats Persson

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2003

We classify social security pension systems in three dimensions: actuarial versus non-actuarial, funded versus unfunded, and defined-benefit versus defined-contribution systems. Recent pension reforms are discussed in terms of these dimensions. Shifting t...

Belief Distortions and Macroeconomic Fluctuations

By Francesco Bianchi, Sydney C. Ludvigson, and Sai Ma

American Economic Review, July 2022

This paper combines a data-rich environment with a machine learning algorithm to provide new estimates of time-varying systematic expectational errors ("belief distortions") embedded in survey responses. We find sizable distortions even for professional f...

Factor Market Failures and the Adoption of Irrigation in Rwanda

By Maria Jones, Florence Kondylis, John Loeser, and Jeremy Magruder

American Economic Review, July 2022

Factor market failures can limit adoption of profitable technologies. We leverage a plot-level spatial regression discontinuity design in the context of irrigation use by farmers provided free access to water. Using irrigation boosts profits by 43–62 pe...