No Spending without Representation: School Boards and the Racial Gap in Education Finance

By Brett Fischer

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2023

This paper provides causal evidence that greater minority representation on school boards translates into greater investment in minority students. Focusing on California school boards, I instrument for minority (specifically, Hispanic) representation usin...

Does Pay Transparency Affect the Gender Wage Gap? Evidence from Austria

By Andreas Gulyas, Sebastian Seitz, and Sourav Sinha

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2023

We study the 2011 Austrian pay transparency law, which requires firms above a size threshold to publish internal reports on the gender pay gap. Using an event-study design, we show that the policy had no discernible effects on male and female wages, thus ...

Peer Effects in Police Use of Force

By Justin E. Holz, Roman G. Rivera, and Bocar A. Ba

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2023

We study the link between police officers' on-duty injuries and their peers' force use using a network of officers who attended the police academy together through a random lottery. On-duty injuries increase the probability of officers using force by 7 pe...

Can Forward Commodity Markets Improve Spot Market Performance? Evidence from Wholesale Electricity

By Akshaya Jha and Frank A. Wolak

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2023

Forward markets are believed to aggregate information about future spot prices and reduce the cost of producing the commodity. We develop a measure of the extent to which forward and spot prices agree in markets with transaction costs. Using this measure,...

Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2005

Borrowing Costs after Sovereign Debt Relief

By Valentin Lang, David Mihalyi, and Andrea F. Presbitero

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2023

Can debt moratoria help countries weather negative shocks? We exploit the Debt Service Suspension Initiative (DSSI) to study the bond market effects of deferring official debt repayments. Using daily data on sovereign bond spreads and synthetic control me...

Ask and You Shall Receive? Gender Differences in Regrades in College

By Cher Hsuehhsiang Li and Basit Zafar

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2023

Using administrative data from a large public university, we show that male students are 18.6 percent more likely than female students to receive favorable grade changes made by instructors. Surveys of students and instructors reveal that regrade requests...

Climate Change and Labor Reallocation: Evidence from Six Decades of the Indian Census

By Maggie Liu, Yogita Shamdasani, and Vis Taraz

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2023

How do rising temperatures affect long-term labor reallocation in developing economies? In this paper we examine how increases in temperature impact structural transformation and urbanization within Indian districts between 1951 and 2011. We find that ris...

Taxing Billionaires: Estate Taxes and the Geographical Location of the Ultra-Wealthy

By Enrico Moretti and Daniel J. Wilson

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2023

We contribute to the literature on the effect of taxes on the locational choices of wealthy individuals by examining the geographical sensitivity of the Forbes 400 richest Americans to state estate taxes. Though we find billionaires' effective tax rates a...

Go with the Politician

By Yongwei Nian and Chunyang Wang

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2023

Chinese local leaders are frequently moved across prefectures. By combining local leader rotation data and comprehensive firm land parcel purchase data across prefectures from 2006 to 2016, this paper examines how firm-politician connections affect resour...

Externalities in International Tax Enforcement: Theory and Evidence

By Thomas Tørsløv, Ludvig Wier, and Gabriel Zucman

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2023

We show that the fiscal authorities of high-tax countries can lack the incentives to combat profit shifting to tax havens. Instead, they have incentives to focus their enforcement efforts on relocating profits booked by multinationals in other high-tax co...

Coase and Cap-and-Trade: Evidence on the Independence Property from the European Carbon Market

By Aleksandar Zaklan

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2023

I examine the Coasean independence property in a large multinational cap-and-trade scheme for greenhouse gas emissions, the EU Emissions Trading System. I analyze whether emissions of power producers are independent from allowance allocations by leveragin...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2023

Economic Activity across Space: A Supply and Demand Approach

[Symposium: Spatial and Urban Economics]

By Treb Allen and Costas Arkolakis

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2023

What do recent advances in economic geography teach us about the spatial distribution of economic activity? We show that the equilibrium distribution of economic activity can be determined simply by the intersection of labor supply and demand curves. We d...

Neighborhood Change, Gentrification, and the Urbanization of College Graduates

[Symposium: Spatial and Urban Economics]

By Victor Couture and Jessie Handbury

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2023

We study changing trends in within-city sorting by education over the last 40 years. We show that neighborhoods closest to the centers of large US cities rose from having the lowest levels of college attainment in 1980 to the highest in 2017. We discuss t...

Heterogeneity and Aggregation

By Richard Blundell and Thomas M. Stoker

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2005

This survey covers recent solutions to aggregation problems in three application areas, consumer demand analysis, consumption growth and wealth, and labor participation and wages. Each area involves treatment of heterogeneity and nonlinearity at the indiv...

Constraints on City and Neighborhood Growth: The Central Role of Housing Supply

[Symposium: Spatial and Urban Economics]

By Nathaniel Baum-Snow

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2023

The US urban population increased by almost 50 percent between 1980 and 2020, with this growth heavily concentrated in the Sun Belt and at the fringes of metropolitan areas. This paper considers the role of housing supply in shaping the growth of cities...

Quantitative Urban Models: From Theory to Data

[Symposium: Spatial and Urban Economics]

By Stephen J. Redding

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2023

Economic activity is highly unevenly distributed within cities, as reflected in the concentration of economic functions in specific locations, such as finance in the Square Mile in London. The extent to which this concentration reflects natural advantages...

Achieving Universal Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: Addressing Market Failures or Providing a Social Floor?

[Symposium: Universal Health Insurance]

By Katherine Baicker, Amitabh Chandra, and Mark Shepard

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2023

The United States spends substantially more on health care than most developed countries, yet leaves a greater share of the population uninsured. We argue that incremental insurance expansions focused on addressing market failures will propagate inefficie...

The Prices in the Crises: What We Are Learning from 20 Years of Health Insurance in Low- and Middle-Income Countries

[Symposium: Universal Health Insurance]

By Jishnu Das and Quy-Toan Do

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2023

Governments in many low- and middle-income countries are developing health insurance products as a complement to tax-funded, subsidized provision of healthcare through publicly-operated facilities. We discuss two rationales for this transition. First, h...