Public Schooling for Young Children and Maternal Labor Supply

By Jonah B. Gelbach

American Economic Review, March 2002

Front Matter

American Economic Review, October 2023

The Economic Origins of Government

By Robert C. Allen, Mattia C. Bertazzini, and Leander Heldring

American Economic Review, October 2023

We test between cooperative and extractive theories of the origins of government. We use river shifts in southern Iraq as a natural experiment, in a new archeological panel dataset. A shift away creates a local demand for a government to coordinate becaus...

Regulation Design in Insurance Markets

By Dhruva Bhaskar, Andrew McClellan, and Evan Sadler

American Economic Review, October 2023

Regulators often impose rules that constrain the behavior of market participants. We study the design of regulatory policy in an insurance market as a delegation problem. A regulator restricts the menus of contracts an informed firm is permitted to offer,...

Optimal Insurance: Dual Utility, Random Losses, and Adverse Selection

By Alex Gershkov, Benny Moldovanu, Philipp Strack, and Mengxi Zhang

American Economic Review, October 2023

We study a generalization of the classical monopoly insurance problem under adverse selection (see Stiglitz 1977) where we allow for a random distribution of losses, possibly correlated with the agent's risk parameter that is private information. Our mode...

Does Increasing Women's Schooling Raise the Schooling of the Next Generation?

By Jere R. Behrman and Mark R. Rosenzweig

American Economic Review, March 2002

Intrinsic Information Preferences and Skewness

By Yusufcan Masatlioglu, Yeşim Orhun, and Collin Raymond

American Economic Review, October 2023

We examine whether people have an intrinsic preference for negatively skewed or positively skewed information structures and how these preferences relate to intrinsic preferences for informativeness. The results from lab experiments show a strong intrinsi...

A Signal to End Child Marriage: Theory and Experimental Evidence from Bangladesh

By Nina Buchmann, Erica Field, Rachel Glennerster, Shahana Nazneen, and Xiao Yu Wang

American Economic Review, October 2023

Child marriage remains common even where female schooling and employment opportunities have grown. We experimentally evaluate a financial incentive to delay marriage alongside a girls' empowerment program in Bangladesh. While girls eligible for two years ...

Matching Mechanisms for Refugee Resettlement

By David Delacrétaz, Scott Duke Kominers, and Alexander Teytelboym

American Economic Review, October 2023

Current refugee resettlement processes account for neither the preferences of refugees nor the priorities of hosting communities. We introduce a new framework for matching with multidimensional knapsack constraints that captures the (possibly multidimensi...

The Behavioral Foundations of Default Effects: Theory and Evidence from Medicare Part D

By Zarek Brot-Goldberg, Timothy Layton, Boris Vabson, and Adelina Yanyue Wang

American Economic Review, October 2023

We show in two natural experiments that default rules in Medicare Part D have large, persistent effects on enrollment and drug utilization of low-income beneficiaries. The implications of this phenomenon for welfare and optimal policy depend on the sensit...

Profits, Scale Economies, and the Gains from Trade and Industrial Policy

By Ahmad Lashkaripour and Volodymyr Lugovskyy

American Economic Review, October 2023

This paper examines the efficacy of second-best trade restrictions at correcting sectoral misallocation due to scale economies or profit-generating markups. To this end, we characterize optimal trade and industrial policies in an important class of quanti...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2023

How Do Households Respond to Job Loss? Lessons from Multiple High-Frequency Datasets

By Asger Lau Andersen, Amalie Sofie Jensen, Niels Johannesen, Claus Thustrup Kreiner, Søren Leth-Petersen, and Adam Sheridan

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2023

How much and through which channels do households self-insure against job loss? Combining data from a large bank and from government sources, we quantify a broad range of responses to job loss in a unified empirical framework. Cumulated over a two-year pe...

Intergenerational Income Mobility Among Daughters

By Laura Chadwick and Gary Solon

American Economic Review, March 2002

Improving Regulatory Effectiveness through Better Targeting: Evidence from OSHA

By Matthew S. Johnson, David I. Levine, and Michael W. Toffel

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2023

We study how a regulator can best target inspections. Our case study is a US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) program that randomly allocated some inspections. On average, each inspection led to 2.4 (9 percent) fewer serious injuries o...

Temporal Instability of Risk Preference among the Poor: Evidence from Payday Cycles

By Mika Akesaka, Peter Eibich, Chie Hanaoka, and Hitoshi Shigeoka

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2023

The poor live paycheck to paycheck and are repeatedly exposed to strong cyclical income fluctuations. We investigate whether such income fluctuations affect their risk preference. If risk preference temporarily changes around payday, optimal decisions mad...

Coming Apart? Cultural Distances in the United States over Time

By Marianne Bertrand and Emir Kamenica

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2023

We analyze trends in cultural distances between groups in the United States defined by income, education, gender, race, and political ideology. We measure cultural distance as the ability to infer an individual's group based on media diet, consumer behavi...

Immigration, Crime, and Crime (Mis)Perceptions

By Nicolás Ajzenman, Patricio Dominguez, and Raimundo Undurraga

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2023

This paper studies the effects of immigration on crime and crime perceptions in Chile, where the foreign-born population tripled in less than ten years. We document null effects of immigration on crime but positive and significant effects on crime-related...