A Characterization for Optimal Bundling of Products with Nonadditive Values

By Soheil Ghili

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2023

This paper studies the optimal bundling of products with nonadditive values. Under monotonic preferences and single-peaked profits, I show that a monopolist finds pure bundling optimal if and only if the optimal sales volume for the grand bundle is larger...

Reducing Frictions in Health Care Access: The ActionHealthNYC Experiment for Undocumented Immigrants

By Adrienne Sabety, Jonathan Gruber, Jin Yung Bae, and Rishi Sood

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2023

In 2016, New York City designed and implemented an intervention to reduce frictions in accessing safety net care: randomly making initial primary care appointments for 2,428 undocumented immigrants. We leverage a novel survey-administrative data linkage t...

A Minimalist Model for the Ruble during the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

By Guido Lorenzoni and Iván Werning

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2023

This note isolates an overlooked economic force for the ruble to appreciate in response to international sanctions limiting exports to Russia. The intuition is that when Russians are unable to buy the mix of foreign goods they wish, foreign goods become l...

Decision Theory and Stochastic Growth

By Arthur Robson, Larry Samuelson, and Jakub Steiner

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2023

This paper examines connections between stochastic growth and decision problems. We use tools from the theory of large deviations to show that wishful thinking decision problems are equivalent to utility maximization problems, both of which are equivalent...

The Educational Consequences of Remote and Hybrid Instruction during the Pandemic

By Dan Goldhaber, Thomas J. Kane, Andrew McEachin, Emily Morton, Tyler Patterson, and Douglas O. Staiger

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2023

Using testing data from over two million students in nearly 10,000 schools in 49 states (plus the District of Columbia), we investigate the role of remote and hybrid instruction in widening gaps in achievement by race and school poverty. We find that remo...

The Unequal Consequences of Job Loss across Countries

By Antoine Bertheau, Edoardo Maria Acabbi, Cristina Barceló, Andreas Gulyas, Stefano Lombardi, and Raffaele Saggio

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2023

We document the consequences of losing a job across countries using a harmonized research design applied to seven matched employer-employee datasets. Workers in Denmark and Sweden experience the lowest earnings declines following job displacement, while w...

Finance, Managerial Inputs, and Misallocation

By Chaoran Chen, Ashique Habib, and Xiaodong Zhu

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2023

In standard macrofinance models, financial constraints mainly affect small or young firms but not large or old ones due to the self-financing mechanism, and the dispersion of marginal revenue product of capital (MRPK) of a firm cohort is less persistent t...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2023

Perspectives on Race/Ethnicity and Economic Justice

By Gerald Jaynes

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2023

Machiavellian Privatization

By Bruno Biais and Enrico Perotti

American Economic Review, March 2002

We analyze politically motivated privatization in a bipartisan environment. When median-class voters a priori favor redistributive policies, a strategic privatization program allocating them enough shares can induce a voting shift away from left-wing part...

The Long-Run Effects of the 1930s Redlining Maps on Children

By Daniel Aaronson, Daniel Hartley, Bhashkar Mazumder, and Martha Stinson

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2023

We estimate the long-run effects of the 1930s Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) redlining maps by linking children in the full count 1940 census to 1) the universe of Internal Revenue Service (IRS) tax data in 1974 and 1979 and 2) the long form 2000 c...

Dividing Lines: Racial Segregation across Local Government Boundaries

By Tomás Monarrez and David Schönholzer

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2023

We describe the empirical relationship between local government boundaries and residential segregation in the United States. First, we study recent changes in the distribution of segregation within and between local governments in all metropolitan areas, ...

The Long-Run Impacts of Mexican American School Desegregation

By Francisca M. Antman and Kalena E. Cortes

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2023

We present the first quantitative analysis of the impact of ending de jure segregation of Mexican American schoolchildren in the United States by examining the effects of the 1947 Mendez v. Westminster court decision on long-run educational attai...

A Constructivist Perspective on Empirical Discrimination Research

By Evan K. Rose

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2023

Contemporary scholars view race as a constructed social category, not a biological fact. Yet most empirical discrimination research treats race no differently than other individual characteristics typically observed in data. This article considers the imp...

The Enduring Effects of Racial Discrimination on Income and Health

By Shari J. Eli, Trevon D. Logan, and Boriana Miloucheva

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2023

We investigate the effect of income on the long-standing racial mortality gap in the United States by using evidence from White and Black Civil War veterans who went on to receive postwar pensions. To circumvent endogeneity, we propose an exogenous source...

Meritocracy and Representation

By Rajiv Sethi and Rohini Somanathan

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2023

A standard conception of meritocracy, reflected in state referenda and the many legal filings against university admissions policies, is that selection rules should be blind to group identity and monotonic in measures of past accomplishment. We present th...

Immigration and Support for Redistribution: Lessons from Europe

By Charlotte Cavaillé and Karine Van der Straeten

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2023

Research shows that opposition to policies that redistribute across racial divides has affected the development of the American welfare state. Are similar dynamics at play in Western Europe? For many scholars, the answer is yes. In contrast, we argue that...

The Minimum Wage as a Tool for Racial Economic Justice

By Andria Smythe and Linchi Hsu

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2023

Participants at the 1963 civil rights march on Washington supported minimum wage laws using arguments of economic justice. Many economists at the time argued against the minimum wage based on efficiency concerns rooted in neoclassical theory. After decade...

Measuring Intergenerational Income Mobility: A Synthesis of Approaches

By Nathan Deutscher and Bhashkar Mazumder

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2023

The literature on intergenerational income mobility uses a diverse set of measures and there is limited knowledge about whether these measures provide similar information and yield similar conclusions. We provide a framework to highlight the key concept...

Choosing the Future: Markets, Ethics, and Rapprochement in Social Discounting

By Antony Millner and Geoffrey Heal

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2023

This paper provides a critical review of the literature on choosing social discount rates (SDRs) for public cost-benefit analysis. We discuss two dominant approaches, the first based on market prices and the second based on intertemporal ethics. While bot...