Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2004

A Risky Venture: Income Dynamics among Pass-Through Business Owners

By Jason DeBacker, Vasia Panousi, and Shanthi Ramnath

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2023

We employ a large panel of US income tax returns for the period 1987–2018 to extensively characterize and quantify business income risk. Our findings show business income to be much riskier than labor income. Business income is less persistent and is ch...

Childcare Subsidies and Child Skill Accumulation in One- and Two-Parent Families

By Emily G. Moschini

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2023

I examine the role of family structure and childcare subsidies in child skill accumulation. I establish empirically that skill accumulation is more responsive to childcare price for one-parent families than for two-parent families. I analyze the effects o...

Firm Wages in a Frictional Labor Market

By Leena Rudanko

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2023

This paper studies wage setting in a directed search model of multiworker firms facing within-firm equity constraints on wages. The constraints reduce wages, as firms exploit their monopsony power over their existing workers, rendering wages less responsi...

Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2004

JEL Classification System

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2004

Front Matter

American Economic Review, February 2023

Trade Costs

By James E. Anderson and Eric van Wincoop

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2004

This paper surveys the measurement of trade costs: what we know and don't know but may usefully attempt to learn. Partial and incomplete data on direct measures of costs go with inference on implicit costs from trade flows and prices. Total trade costs in...

Technological Change and the Consequences of Job Loss

By J. Carter Braxton and Bledi Taska

American Economic Review, February 2023

We examine the role of technological change in explaining the large and persistent decline in earnings following job loss. Using detailed skill requirements from the near universe of online vacancies, we estimate technological change by occupation and fin...

Trade with Correlation

By Nelson Lind and Natalia Ramondo

American Economic Review, February 2023

We develop a trade model with correlation in productivity across countries. The model spans the full class of generalized extreme value import demand systems and implies that countries with relatively dissimilar technology gain more from trade. In the con...

Constrained-Efficient Capital Reallocation

By Andrea Lanteri and Adriano A. Rampini

American Economic Review, February 2023

We characterize efficiency in an equilibrium model of investment and capital reallocation with heterogeneous firms facing collateral constraints. The model features two types of pecuniary externalities: collateral externalities, because the resale price o...

Enabling or Limiting Cognitive Flexibility? Evidence of Demand for Moral Commitment

By Silvia Saccardo and Marta Serra-Garcia

American Economic Review, February 2023

Moral behavior is more prevalent when individuals cannot easily distort their beliefs self-servingly. Do individuals seek to limit or enable their ability to distort beliefs? How do these choices affect behavior? Experiments with over 9,000 participants s...

Droughts, Deluges, and (River) Diversions: Valuing Market-Based Water Reallocation

By Will Rafey

American Economic Review, February 2023

This paper develops and applies a method to value water trading on a river network. The framework relies on regulatory variation in diversion caps to identify production functions for irrigated farms, then uses the estimated shadow values to assess the ma...

Technology Gaps, Trade, and Income

By Thomas Sampson

American Economic Review, February 2023

This paper quantifies the contribution of technology gaps to international income inequality. I develop an endogenous growth model where cross-country differences in R&D efficiency and cross-industry differences in innovation and adoption opportunities to...

Electronic Food Vouchers: Evidence from an At-Scale Experiment in Indonesia

By Abhijit Banerjee, Rema Hanna, Benjamin A. Olken, Elan Satriawan, and Sudarno Sumarto

American Economic Review, February 2023

We compare how in-kind food assistance and an electronic voucher-based program affect the delivery of aid in practice. The Government of Indonesia randomized across 105 districts the transition from in-kind rice to approximately equivalent electronic vouc...

The Voice of Monetary Policy

By Yuriy Gorodnichenko, Tho Pham, and Oleksandr Talavera

American Economic Review, February 2023

We develop a deep learning model to detect emotions embedded in press conferences after the Federal Open Market Committee meetings and examine the influence of the detected emotions on financial markets. We find that, after controlling for the Federal Res...

International Technology Diffusion

By Wolfgang Keller

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2004

This paper surveys what is known about the extent of international technology diffusion and channels through which technology spreads. Productivity differences explain much of the variation in incomes across countries, and technology plays a key role in d...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2023

Price Transparency, Media, and Informative Advertising

By Itai Ater and Oren Rigbi

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2023

We study the effects of a price transparency regulation in Israeli supermarkets. Using price data collected before and after the regulation and a difference-in-difference research design, we show that price levels and price dispersion declined significant...