JEL Classification System

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2017

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2017

Cash for Corollas: When Stimulus Reduces Spending

By Mark Hoekstra, Steven L. Puller, and Jeremy West

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2017

The 2009 Cash for Clunkers program aimed to stimulate consumer spending in the new automobile industry, which experienced disproportionate reductions in demand and employment during the Great Recession. Exploiting program eligibility criteria in a regress...

The Effect of Labor Migration on the Diffusion of Democracy: Evidence from a Former Soviet Republic

By Toman Barsbai, Hillel Rapoport, Andreas Steinmayr, and Christoph Trebesch

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2017

Migration contributes to the circulation of goods, knowledge, and ideas. Using community and individual-level data from Moldova, we show that the emigration wave that started in the aftermath of the Russian crisis of 1998 strongly affected electoral outco...

Team Production in International Labor Markets: Experimental Evidence from the Field

By Elizabeth Lyons

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2017

Coworkers are increasingly diverse in their nationality and skill sets. This paper studies the effect of diversity on how workers are organized using data from a field experiment conducted in an environment where diversity is pervasive. Findings show that...

Do the Effects of Temporary Ethnic Group Quotas Persist? Evidence from India

By Rikhil R. Bhavnani

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2017

Do electoral quotas for ethnic groups continue to improve their chances of winning elections after quotas are withdrawn? This is an important question since ethnic group quotas are common, and are often intended to be temporary. Using natural experiments,...

Why Do College-Going Interventions Work?

By Scott Carrell and Bruce Sacerdote

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2017

We present evidence from a series of field experiments in college coaching/mentoring. We find large impacts on college attendance and persistence, but only in the treatments where we use an intensive boots-on-the-ground approach to helping students. Our...

The Persistent Effect of Temporary Affirmative Action

By Conrad Miller

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2017

I estimate the dynamic effects of federal affirmative action regulation, exploiting variation in the timing of regulation and deregulation across work establishments. Affirmative action increases the black share of employees over time: in 5 years after an...

Conflicts of Interest and Steering in Residential Brokerage

By Panle Jia Barwick, Parag A. Pathak, and Maisy Wong

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2017

This paper documents uniformity in real estate commission rates offered to buyers' agents using 653,475 residential listings in eastern Massachusetts from 1998–2011. Properties listed with lower commission rates experience less favorable transaction...

The Big Sort: College Reputation and Labor Market Outcomes

By W. Bentley MacLeod, Evan Riehl, Juan E. Saavedra, and Miguel Urquiola

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2017

We explore how college reputation affects the "big sort," the process by which students choose colleges and find their first jobs. We incorporate a simple definition of college reputation—graduates' mean admission scores—into a competitive lab...

A Short-Run View of What Computers Do: Evidence from a UK Tax Incentive

By Paul Gaggl and Greg C. Wright

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2017

We study the short-run causal effect of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) adoption on employment and wage distribution. We exploit a natural experiment generated by a tax allowance on ICT investments and find that the primary effect of ICT is...

Technology and Child Development: Evidence from the One Laptop per Child Program

By Julian Cristia, Pablo Ibarrarán, Santiago Cueto, Ana Santiago, and Eugenio Severín

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2017

This paper presents results from a large-scale randomized evaluation of the One Laptop per Child program, using data collected after 15 months of implementation in 318 primary schools in rural Peru. The program increased the ratio of computers per student...

Cycling to School: Increasing Secondary School Enrollment for Girls in India

By Karthik Muralidharan and Nishith Prakash

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2017

We study the impact of an innovative program in the Indian state of Bihar that aimed to reduce the gender gap in secondary school enrollment by providing girls who continued to secondary school with a bicycle that would improve access to school. Using d...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2017

Inflation Expectations, Learning, and Supermarket Prices: Evidence from Survey Experiments

By Alberto Cavallo, Guillermo Cruces, and Ricardo Perez-Truglia

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2017

Information frictions play a central role in the formation of household inflation expectations, but there is no consensus about their origins. We address this question with novel evidence from survey experiments. We document two main findings. First, indi...

Zipf's Law, Pareto's Law, and the Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States

By Shuhei Aoki and Makoto Nirei

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2017

We construct a tractable neoclassical growth model that generates Pareto's law of income distribution and Zipf's law of the firm size distribution from idiosyncratic, firm-level productivity shocks. Executives and entrepreneurs invest in risk-free assets,...

Free to Leave? A Welfare Analysis of Divorce Regimes

By Raquel Fernández and Joyce Cheng Wong

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2017

During the 1970s, the United States switched from mutual consent to a unilateral divorce regime. Who benefited/lost from this change? We develop a dynamic life cycle model in which agents make consumption, saving, work, and marital-status decisions under ...

Does Home Production Drive Structural Transformation?

By Alessio Moro, Solmaz Moslehi, and Satoshi Tanaka

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2017

Using new home production data for the United States, we estimate a model of structural transformation with a home production sector, allowing for both non-homotheticity of preferences and differential productivity growth in each sector. We report two mai...

Productivity Growth and Capital Flows: The Dynamics of Reforms

By Francisco J. Buera and Yongseok Shin

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2017

Why doesn't capital flow into fast-growing countries? Using a model with heterogeneous producers and underdeveloped domestic financial markets, we explain the joint dynamics of total factor productivity (TFP) and capital flows. When a large-scale economic...

Uncertainty at the Zero Lower Bound

By Taisuke Nakata

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2017

When the policy rate is at the zero lower bound (ZLB), an increase in uncertainty regarding the future path of exogenous shocks alters the conditional expectations of relevant prices facing households and firms. Accordingly, an increase in uncertainty alt...