Reminders Work, but for Whom? Evidence from New York City Parking Ticket Recipients

By Ori Heffetz, Ted O'Donoghue, and Henry S. Schneider

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2022

We investigate heterogeneity in responsiveness to reminder letters among New York City parking ticket recipients. Using variation in the timing of letters, we find a strong aggregate response. But we find large differences across individuals: those with a...

Multinationals' Sales and Profit Shifting in Tax Havens

By Sébastien Laffitte and Farid Toubal

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2022

We show that US multinationals record sales and the profits from these sales in tax havens while their goods and services are physically sold in other countries. We propose a framework illustrating the strategy of sales shifting. Our results reveal the im...

Health Care Rationing in Public Insurance Programs: Evidence from Medicaid

By Timothy J. Layton, Nicole Maestas, Daniel Prinz, and Boris Vabson

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2022

We study two mechanisms used by public health insurance programs for rationing health care: outsourcing to private managed care plans and quantity limits for prescription drugs. Leveraging a natural experiment in Texas's Medicaid program, we find that the...

Can Nudges Increase Take-Up of the EITC? Evidence from Multiple Field Experiments

By Elizabeth Linos, Allen Prohofsky, Aparna Ramesh, Jesse Rothstein, and Matthew Unrath

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2022

The Earned Income Tax Credit distributes more than $60 billion to over 20 million low-income families annually. Nevertheless, an estimated one-fifth of eligible households do not claim it. We ran six preregistered, large-scale field experiments with 1 mil...

Mandatory Energy Efficiency Disclosure in Housing Markets

By Erica Myers, Steven L. Puller, and Jeremy West

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2022

Mandatory disclosure policies are implemented broadly despite sparse evidence that they improve market outcomes. We study the effects of requiring home sellers to provide buyers with certified audits of residential energy efficiency. Using similar nearby ...

The Old-Age Security Motive for Fertility: Evidence from the Extension of Social Pensions in Namibia

By Pauline Rossi and Mathilde Godard

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2022

The old-age security motive for fertility postulates that people's needs for old-age support raise the demand for children. We exploit the extension of social pensions in Namibia during the 1990s to provide a quasi-experimental quantification of this wide...

Gerrymandering in State Legislatures: Frictions from Axiomatic Bargaining

By Hisam Sabouni and Cameron A. Shelton

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2022

Theories of partisan redistricting postulate unitary actors maximizing their party's expected seat share. Yet, the partition of a fixed supply of friendly voters necessarily implies a tragedy of the commons. We recast partisan redistricting as a bargainin...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2022

Trade Liberalization and Poverty: The Evidence So Far

By L. Alan Winters, Neil McCulloch, and Andrew McKay

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2004

This paper assesses the current state of evidence on the impact of trade policy reform on poverty in developing countries. There is little empirical evidence addressing this question directly, but a lot of related evidence on specific aspects. We summariz...

Is There Any Future for a US Labor Movement?

[Symposium: Labor Market Institutions]

By Suresh Naidu

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2022

A recent flurry of labor movement activity has been driven by younger workers, tight labor markets, and a sympathetic federal government. Nonetheless, US union density remains low, even as unions remain popular. This is because employer opposition and US ...

Facts and Fantasies about Wage Setting and Collective Bargaining

[Symposium: Labor Market Institutions]

By Manudeep Bhuller, Karl Ove Moene, Magne Mogstad, and Ola L. Vestad

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2022

In this article, we document and discuss salient features of collective bargaining systems in the OECD countries, with the goal of debunking some misconceptions and myths and revitalizing the general interest in wage setting and collective bargaining. We ...

The German Model of Industrial Relations: Balancing Flexibility and Collective Action

[Symposium: Labor Market Institutions]

By Simon Jäger, Shakked Noy, and Benjamin Schoefer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2022

We give an overview of the "German model" of industrial relations. We organize our review by focusing on the two pillars of the model: sectoral collective bargaining and firm-level codetermination. Relative to the United States, Germany outsources colle...

Danish Flexicurity: Rights and Duties

[Symposium: Labor Market Institutions]

By Claus Thustrup Kreiner and Michael Svarer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2022

Denmark is one of the richest countries in the world and achieves this in combination with low inequality, low unemployment, and high-income security. This performance is often attributed to the Danish labor market model characterized by what has become...

Debt Revenue and the Sustainability of Public Debt

[Symposium: The Size of Government Debt]

By Ricardo Reis

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2022

While public debt has risen in the last two decades, the return that it offers to investors has fallen, especially relative to the return on private investment. This creates a revenue for the government as the supplier of the special services offered by p...

Fiscal Histories

[Symposium: The Size of Government Debt]

By John H. Cochrane

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2022

The fiscal theory states that inflation adjusts so that the real value of government debt equals the present value of real primary surpluses. Monetary policy remains important. The central bank can set an interest rate target, which determines the path of...

Emerging Market Sovereign Debt in the Aftermath of the Pandemic

[Symposium: The Size of Government Debt]

By Kenneth Rogoff

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2022

For emerging markets, fiscal space is a very real constraint that can surface under a variety of circumstances, including rising world interest rates, falling commodity prices, or a global recession. Some emerging markets, and the majority of low-income d...

Popular Personal Financial Advice versus the Professors

By James J. Choi

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2022

I survey the advice given by the fifty most popular personal finance books and compare it to the prescriptions of normative academic economic models. Popular advice frequently departs from normative principles derived from economic theory, which should mo...

A Linear Panel Model with Heterogeneous Coefficients and Variation in Exposure

By Liyang Sun and Jesse M. Shapiro

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2022

Linear panel models featuring unit and time fixed effects appear in many areas of empirical economics. An active literature studies the interpretation of the ordinary least squares estimator of the model, commonly called the two-way fixed effects (TWFE) e...

Sadie T. M. Alexander: Black Women and a "Taste of Freedom in the Economic World"

By Nina Banks

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2022

The employment history of African American women is notable because of their higher labor force participation rates compared to other women in the US. This essay discusses Sadie T. M. Alexander's analysis of Black women and work based on her 1930s speec...

Empirical Studies of Financial Innovation: Lots of Talk, Little Action?

By W. Scott Frame and Lawrence J. White

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2004

This paper reviews the extant empirical studies of financial innovation. Adopting broad criteria and spanning a long time horizon, we found surprisingly few studies (39), with most (23) having been conducted since 1998. Especially striking is that only tw...