AEA Data Legality Policy and Explanations

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

Report of the Search Committee for the Editor for the American Economic Review: Insights

By Pinelopi Goldberg

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

Report of the Search Committee for the Editor for the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

By Anna Aizer

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

Report of the Search Committee for the Editor for the American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

By Doug Bernheim

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

Front Matter

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2023

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2005

The Agglomeration of Urban Amenities: Evidence from Milan Restaurants

By Marco Leonardi and Enrico Moretti

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2023

We estimate agglomeration externalities in Milan's restaurant sector using the abolition of a unique regulation that restricted where restaurants could locate. In 2005, Milan abolished a minimum distance requirement that had kept the number of establishme...

Reputation and Partial Default

By Manuel Amador and Christopher Phelan

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2023

This paper presents a continuous-time reputation model of sovereign debt allowing for both varying levels of partial default and full default. In it, a government can be a nonstrategic commitment type or a strategic opportunistic type, and a government's ...

Pandemic Schooling Mode and Student Test Scores: Evidence from US School Districts

By Rebecca Jack, Clare Halloran, James Okun, and Emily Oster

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2023

We estimate the impact of district-level schooling mode (in-person versus hybrid or virtual learning) in the 2020–2021 school year on students' pass rates on standardized tests in grades 3–8 across 11 states. Pass rates declined from 2019 to 2021: an ...

Status Quo Property Protection in Politico-Legal Systems

By Roger Lagunoff

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2023

This paper models status quo (SQ) protection of property rights. A politico-legal system determines eligibility of citizen groups for protection. A ruling authority can reallocate property if and only if reallocation is preferable to the status quo for on...

Technical Change and Superstar Effects: Evidence from the Rollout of Television

By Felix Koenig

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2023

Technical change that extends market scale can generate winner-take-all dynamics, with large income growth among top earners. I test this "superstar model" in the entertainer labor market, where the historic rollout of television creates a natural experim...

National and Global Impacts of Genetically Modified Crops

By Casper Worm Hansen and Asger Mose Wingender

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2023

We estimate the impact of genetically modified (GM) crops on countrywide yields, harvested area, and trade using a triple-differences rollout design that exploits variation in the availability of GM seeds across crops, countries, and time. We find positiv...

A Note on Temporary Supply Shocks with Aggregate Demand Inertia

By Ricardo J. Caballero and Alp Simsek

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2023

We study optimal monetary policy during temporary supply contractions when aggregate demand has inertia and the central bank is concerned about future constraints on expansionary policy. In this environment, it is optimal to run the economy hot until supp...

Should We Tax Capital Income or Wealth?

By Corina Boar and Virgiliu Midrigan

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2023

We study optimal capital income and wealth taxation in an economy that reproduces the importance of private businesses for output and inequality. If entrepreneurs are subject to collateral constraints, they face heterogeneous rates of return, which genera...

Influence Motives in Social Signaling: Evidence from COVID-19 Vaccinations in Germany

By Emilio Esguerra, Leonhard Vollmer, and Johannes Wimmer

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2023

We investigate whether a desire to influence others' choices affects our own behavior. To separate such influence motives from social pressure, we study participants' willingness to register for a COVID-19 vaccination in a field experiment in Germany. We ...

Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2005

Front Matter

American Economic Review, June 2023

Presidential Address: Does Monetary Policy Matter? The Narrative Approach after 35 Years

By Christina D. Romer and David H. Romer

American Economic Review, June 2023

The narrative approach to macroeconomic identification uses qualitative sources, such as newspapers or government records, to provide information that can help establish causal relationships. This paper discusses the requirements for rigorous narrative ...

The Birth of a Nation: Media and Racial Hate

By Desmond Ang

American Economic Review, June 2023

This paper documents the impact of popular media on racial hate by examining the first American blockbuster: 1915's The Birth of a Nation, a fictional portrayal of the KKK's founding rife with racist stereotypes. Exploiting the film's five-year "...

Reconciliation Narratives: The Birth of a Nation after the US Civil War

By Elena Esposito, Tiziano Rotesi, Alessandro Saia, and Mathias Thoenig

American Economic Review, June 2023

We study how the spread of the Lost Cause narrative—a revisionist and racist retelling of the US Civil War—shifted opinions and behaviors toward national reunification and racial discrimination against African Americans. Looking at screenings of T...