Supply Network Formation and Fragility

By Matthew Elliott, Benjamin Golub, and Matthew V. Leduc

American Economic Review, August 2022

We model the production of complex goods in a large supply network. Each firm sources several essential inputs through relationships with other firms. Individual supply relationships are at risk of idiosyncratic failure, which threatens to disrupt product...

The Economic Effects of Mafia: Firm Level Evidence

By Litterio Mirenda, Sauro Mocetti, and Lucia Rizzica

American Economic Review, August 2022

We analyze the effects of Mafia infiltration in the legal economy. Combining information from investigative records with panel data on firms' governance and balance sheets, we build an indicator of infiltration in firms located in an area with no traditio...

The Human Side of Structural Transformation

By Tommaso Porzio, Federico Rossi, and Gabriella Santangelo

American Economic Review, August 2022

We document that nearly half of the global decline in agricultural employment was driven by new cohorts entering the labor market. A new dataset of policy reforms supports an interpretation of these cohort effects as human capital. Using a model of fricti...

Dynamic Oligopoly and Price Stickiness

By Olivier Wang and Iván Werning

American Economic Review, August 2022

How does market concentration affect the potency of monetary policy? To address this question we embed a dynamic oligopolistic game into a general-equilibrium macroeconomic model. We provide a sufficient-statistic formula for the response to monetary shoc...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2022

Housing Lock: Dutch Evidence on the Impact of Negative Home Equity on Household Mobility

By Asaf Bernstein and Daan Struyven

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2022

This paper employs Dutch administrative population data to test the "housing lock hypothesis": the conjecture that homeowners with negative home equity, low levels of financial assets, and restricted opportunities to borrow reduce their mobility. Variatio...

Political Parties Do Matter in US Cities . . . for Their Unfunded Pensions

By Christian Dippel

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2022

This paper studies public sector pension obligations, the biggest fiscal challenge currently facing many US cities. Employing a regression discontinuity design around close elections, benefit payments out of a city's public sector pensions are shown to gr...

Review of Drug War Heresies by MacCoun and Reuter

By Steven D. Levitt

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2003

MacCoun and Reuter's primary goal is to understand how current U.S. drug policies can be improved. They carefully describe the facts and trends regarding drug usage, criminal justice enforcement, and the harms associated with drug use, then discuss the pu...

Checking and Sharing Alt-Facts

By Emeric Henry ⓡ Ekaterina Zhuravskaya ⓡ Sergei Guriev

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2022

During the 2019 European elections campaign, we exposed a random sample of French voting-age Facebook users to false statements by a far-right populist party. A randomly selected subgroup was also presented with fact-checking of these statements; another ...

Human Trafficking and Regulating Prostitution

By Samuel Lee and Petra Persson

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2022

Certain markets are illicit because part of the supply is coerced, but little is known about the optimal regulation of such markets. We model a prostitution market with voluntary and coerced prostitutes and ask what regulation can restore the benchmark ou...

The Long-Run Effects of Sports Club Vouchers for Primary School Children

By Jan Marcus, Thomas Siedler, and Nicolas R. Ziebarth

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2022

Childhood obesity is one of the most serious public health challenges of the twenty-first century. While small-scale experiments change behaviors among adults in the short run, we know little about the effectiveness of large-scale policies or the longer...

Centralized Admissions, Affirmative Action, and Access of Low-Income Students to Higher Education

By Ursula Mello

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2022

I analyze how two reforms, introduced to expand college access in Brazil, impacted enrollments of low-SES students. The first policy centralized applications in a nationwide platform (SISU), and the second expanded affirmative action quotas (AA) to a unif...

Does Virtual Advising Increase College Enrollment? Evidence from a Random-Assignment College Access Field Experiment

By Meredith Phillips and Sarah Reber

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2022

Although in-person college access programs can be effective, less is known about whether low-cost and scalable virtual interventions can achieve the same benefits. We evaluate two variants of a virtual college counseling program. Students randomly assigne...

Childhood Housing and Adult Outcomes: A Between-Siblings Analysis of Housing Vouchers and Public Housing

By Henry O. Pollakowski ⓡ Daniel H. Weinberg ⓡ Fredrik Andersson ⓡ John C. Haltiwanger ⓡ Giordano Palloni ⓡ Mark J. Kutzbach

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2022

We create a national-level longitudinal dataset to analyze how children's participation in public and voucher-assisted housing affects age-26 earnings and adult incarceration. Naïve OLS estimates suggest that returns to subsidized housing participation a...

Out of the Woodwork: Enrollment Spillovers in the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment

By Adam Sacarny, Katherine Baicker, and Amy Finkelstein

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2022

We study the impact of expanded adult Medicaid eligibility on the enrollment of already-eligible children. We analyze the 2008 Oregon Medicaid lottery, in which some low-income uninsured adults were randomly selected to be allowed to apply for Medicaid. C...

Lift and Shift: The Effect of Fundraising Interventions in Charity Space and Time

By Kimberley Scharf, Sarah Smith, and Mark Ottoni-Wilhelm

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2022

Fundraising interventions may lift donations and/or shift their composition and timing. Using data rich in both the charity space and time dimensions, we find that major fundraising appeals lift donations to the appeal charity and that this increase is no...

The Long-Run Effects of R&D Place-Based Policies: Evidence from Russian Science Cities

By Helena Schweiger, Alexander Stepanov, and Paolo Zacchia

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2022

We study the long-run effects of historical place-based R&D policies: the creation of Science Cities in Soviet Russia. We compare current demographic and economic characteristics of Science Cities with those of localities that were similar to them at the ...

Gini and Optimal Income Taxation by Rank

By Laurent Simula and Alain Trannoy

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2022

We solve the nonlinear income tax program for rank-dependent social welfare functions, expressing the trade-off between size and inequality using the Gini and related families of positional indices. Absent bunching, ranks in the actual and optimal allocat...

On Networks and Markets by Rauch and Casella, eds.

By Ezra W. Zuckerman

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2003

This essay reviews Networks and Markets, edited by James E. Rauch and Alessandra Casella. This book provides a useful vehicle for clarifying the main conceptual and operational issues facing the growing study of economic networks. Three types of ...

Adaptation and Adverse Selection in Markets for Natural Disaster Insurance

By Katherine R. H. Wagner

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2022

This paper quantifies frictions in uptake, tests for adverse selection, and analyzes welfare effects of proposed reforms in natural disaster insurance markets. I find that willingness to pay is remarkably low. In high-risk flood zones, fewer than 60 perce...