How Social Security Reform Affects Retirement and Pension Claiming

By Rafael Lalive, Arvind Magesan, and Stefan Staubli

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2023

A reform increasing the full retirement age (FRA) by one year leads to larger than expected delays in pension claiming and retirement, while making late claiming more lucrative leads to a smaller than expected delay in pension claiming. Survey evidence sh...

Investing in Ex Ante Regulation: Evidence from Pharmaceutical Patent Examination

By Michael D. Frakes and Melissa F. Wasserman

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2023

We explore how the US Patent and Trademark Office may improve the quality of issued patents on "secondary" drug features by giving examiners more time to review drug patent applications. Our findings suggest that current time allocations are causing exami...

Increasing Returns and All That: A View from Trade

By Werner Antweiler and Daniel Trefler

American Economic Review, March 2002

Do scale economies help to explain international trade flows? Using a large database on output, trade flows, and factor endowments, we find that allowing for the presence of increasing returns to scale in production significantly increases our ability to ...

The Impact of Organizational Boundaries on Health Care Coordination and Utilization

By Leila Agha, Keith Marzilli Ericson, and Xiaoxi Zhao

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2023

We measure organizational concentration—the distribution of a patient's health care across organizations—to examine how firm boundaries affect health care efficiency. First, when patients move to regions where outpatient visits are typically concentra...

Corporate Tax Breaks and Executive Compensation

By Eric Ohrn

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2023

I analyze the effect of two corporate tax breaks, bonus depreciation and the Domestic Production Activities Deduction (DPAD), on executive compensation in publicly traded US firms. I find both tax breaks significantly increase executive compensation. For ...

Incentivizing School Attendance in the Presence of Parent-Child Information Frictions

By Damien de Walque and Christine Valente

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2023

Many countries use CCTs targeted to parents to promote schooling. Attendance conditions may work through two channels: incentivization and information. If children have private information, (i) providing attendance information to parents may increase atte...

The Costs of Misaligned Incentives: Energy Inefficiency and the Principal-Agent Problem

By Joshua A. Blonz

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2023

In many settings, misaligned incentives and inadequate monitoring lead employees to take self-interested actions. This paper identifies and quantifies the costs of this principal-agent problem in the context of an energy efficiency appliance replacement p...

Interregional Contact and the Formation of a Shared Identity

By Manuel Bagues and Christopher Roth

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2023

We study the long-run effects of contact with individuals from other regions in early adulthood on preferences, beliefs, and national identity. We combine a natural experiment, the random assignment of male conscripts to different locations throughout Spa...

More than Words: Leaders' Speech and Risky Behavior during a Pandemic

By Nicolás Ajzenman, Tiago Cavalcanti, and Daniel Da Mata

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2023

This paper investigates whether the anti-scientific rhetoric of modern populists can induce followers to engage in risky behavior. We gather electoral information, credit card expenses, and geo-localized mobile phone data for approximately 60 million devi...

ACE—Analytic Climate Economy

By Christian P. Traeger

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2023

I study optimal carbon taxation in an analytic quantitative integrated assessment model (IAM) that links IAM components, parametric assumptions, and calibration approaches directly to their policy impacts. I show how temperature's tax impact differs from ...

Immigrant Integration in the United States: The Role of Adult English Language Training

By Blake H. Heller and Kirsten Slungaard Mumma

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2023

The ability to speak and understand a host country's primary language is strongly associated with measures of immigrant integration. We estimate the causal effects of English language training for adult immigrants on participants' civic and economic outco...

Voting for Democracy: Chile's Plebiscito and the Electoral Participation of a Generation

By Ethan Kaplan, Fernando Saltiel, and Sergio Urzúa

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2023

This paper assesses the long-term consequences of voting for democracy. We study Chile's 1988 plebiscite, which ended 15 years of dictatorship and reestablished democracy. Taking advantage of individual-level voting data, we implement an age-based regress...

College Enrollment and Mandatory FAFSA Applications: Evidence from Louisiana

By Christa Deneault

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2023

I estimate the impact of a Louisiana state policy that mandated Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) applications as a high school graduation requirement. I find significant increases in FAFSA completion rates (19 percentage points), and my es...

Geographic Localization of International Technology Diffusion

By Wolfgang Keller

American Economic Review, March 2002

Income convergence across countries turns on whether technological knowledge spillovers are global or local. I estimate the amount of spillovers from R&D expenditures on a geographic basis, using a new data set which encompasses most of the world's in...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2023

How Far Goods Travel: Global Transport and Supply Chains from 1965–2020

[Symposium: Supply Chains]

By Sharat Ganapati and Woan Foong Wong

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2023

This paper considers the evolution of global transportation usage over the past half century and its implications for supply chains. Transportation usage has more than doubled as costs decreased by a third. Participation of emerging economies in world tra...

The Changing Firm and Country Boundaries of US Manufacturers in Global Value Chains

[Symposium: Supply Chains]

By Teresa C. Fort

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2023

This paper documents how US firms organize goods production across firm and country boundaries. Most US firms that perform physical transformation tasks in-house using foreign manufacturing plants in 2007 also own US manufacturing plants; moreover, manu...

Global Value Chains in Developing Countries: A Relational Perspective from Coffee and Garments

[Symposium: Supply Chains]

By Laura Boudreau, Julia Cajal-Grossi, and Rocco Macchiavello

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2023

There is a consensus that global value chains have aided developing countries' growth. This essay highlights the governance complexities arising from participating in such chains, drawing from lessons we have learned conducting research in the coffee and ...

Are Developed Countries Outsourcing Pollution?

[Symposium: International Dimensions of Climate Change Policy]

By Arik Levinson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2023

Have rich countries improved their environments by importing polluting goods? No, the mix of goods imported has shifted towards those from cleaner industries, not dirtier. Has pollution worsened in poor countries manufacturing goods for export to rich one...

Think Globally, Act Globally: Opportunities to Mitigate Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Low- and Middle-Income Countries

[Symposium: International Dimensions of Climate Change Policy]

By Rachel Glennerster and Seema Jayachandran

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2023

Reductions in greenhouse gas emissions are a global public good, which makes it efficient to act globally when addressing this challenge. We lay out several reasons that high-income countries seeking to mitigate climate change might have greater impact if...