Coordination and Bandwagon Effects: How Past Rankings Shape the Behavior of Voters and Candidates

By Riako Granzier, Vincent Pons, and Clemence Tricaud

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2023

Candidates' placements in polls and past elections can be powerful coordination devices for parties and voters. Using a regression discontinuity design in French two-round elections, we show that candidates who place first in the first round are more like...

Contagious Dishonesty: Corruption Scandals and Supermarket Theft

By Giorgio Gulino and Federico Masera

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2023

Is dishonest behavior contagious? We answer this question by studying whether corruption scandals affect the propensity of supermarket customers to steal while using a self-service checkout system. Crucially, this system allows shoppers to engage in disho...

Collateralized Marriage

By Jeanne Lafortune and Corinne Low

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2023

Marriage rates have become increasingly stratified by homeownership. We investigate this in a household model where investments in public goods reduce future earnings and, thus, divorce risk creates inefficiencies. Access to a joint savings technology, li...

How Cable News Reshaped Local Government

By Elliott Ash and Sergio Galletta

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2023

This paper shows that partisan cable news broadcasts have a causal effect on the size and composition of budgets in US localities. Using exogenous channel positioning as an instrument for viewership, we show that exposure to the conservative Fox News chan...

Hidden Income and the Perceived Returns to Migration

By Travis Baseler

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2023

In many developing economies, urban workers earn substantially more than rural workers with the same level of education. Why don't more rural workers migrate to cities? I use two field experiments in Kenya to show that low migration is partly due to under...

Returns to International Migration: Evidence from a Bangladesh-Malaysia Visa Lottery

By Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak, Iffath Sharif, and Maheshwor Shrestha

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2023

South Asians traveling to richer Asian nations is the world's largest migration corridor. We track down applicants to a government lottery that randomly allocated visas to Bangladeshis for temporary labor contracts in Malaysia, five years later. Most lott...

Owner-Occupied Housing and the Composition of the Household Portfolio

By Marjorie Flavin and Takashi Yamashita

American Economic Review, March 2002

Civil Liberties in Times of Crisis

By Marcella Alsan, Luca Braghieri, Sarah Eichmeyer, Minjeong Joyce Kim, Stefanie Stantcheva, and David Y. Yang

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2023

We study people's willingness to trade off civil liberties for increased health security in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic by deploying representative surveys involving around 550,000 responses across 15 countries. We document significant heterogene...

Discrimination in Times of Crises and the Role of the Media

By Asaf Zussman

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2023

Can the extent of ethnic discrimination change quickly, and what circumstances and mechanisms make such changes possible? I address these questions by using scraped data to study the daily evolution of customer discrimination against Arab doctors in Israe...

Physical Disability and Labor Market Discrimination: Evidence from a Video Résumé Field Experiment

By Charles Bellemare, Marion Goussé, Guy Lacroix, and Steeve Marchand

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2023

We sent fictitious applications to firms advertising job openings. We find that revealing a disability decreases callback rates by 25 percentage points. This result is not explained by accessibility constraints or lower productivity due to disability. We ...

The Effect of Hospital Postpartum Care Regulations on Breastfeeding and Maternal Time Allocation

By Emily C. Lawler and Katherine G. Yewell

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2023

We study the effects of state hospital regulations intended to increase breastfeeding by requiring certain standards of care during the immediate postpartum hospital stay. We find that these regulations significantly increased breastfeeding initiation by ...

Does Federalism Lead to Excessively High Taxes?

By Michael J. Keen and Christos Kotsogiannis

American Economic Review, March 2002

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2023

Work from Home before and after the COVID-19 Outbreak

By Alexander Bick, Adam Blandin, and Karel Mertens

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2023

Based on novel survey data, we document a persistent rise in work from home (WFH) over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using theory and direct survey evidence, we argue that three-quarters of this increase reflects the adoption of new work arrangemen...

Product Variety, the Cost of Living, and Welfare across Countries

By Alberto Cavallo, Robert C. Feenstra, and Robert Inklaar

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2023

We use the structure of the Melitz (2003) model to compute the cost of living and welfare across 47 countries, and compare these to conventional measures of prices and real consumption from the International Comparisons Project (ICP). The cost of living i...

Electricity and Firm Productivity: A General-Equilibrium Approach

By Stephie Fried and David Lagakos

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2023

Many policymakers view power outages as a major constraint on firm productivity in developing countries. Yet empirical studies find modest short-run effects of outages on firm performance. This paper builds a dynamic macroeconomic model to study the long-...

Trade Policies and Fiscal Devaluations

By Christopher Erceg, Andrea Prestipino, and Andrea Raffo

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2023

Fiscal devaluations—an increase in import tariffs and export subsidies (IX) or an increase in value-added taxes and payroll subsidies (VP)—have been shown to provide as much stimulus under fixed exchange rates as a currency devaluation. We find that i...

Monetary Policy in Sudden Stop-Prone Economies

By Louphou Coulibaly

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2023

This paper proposes a parsimonious theory explaining the cyclicality of monetary policy in emerging countries in a model where access to foreign financing depends on the real exchange rate and the government lacks commitment. The discretionary monetary po...

Taxation of Consumption and Labor Income: A Quantitative Approach

By Francesca Parodi

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2023

I quantitatively characterize optimal consumption and labor income taxes in a structural life-cycle model of household consumption, saving, and employment choices that allows for irreversibility of durable goods and preference heterogeneity. I find that d...

Disentangling COVID-19, Economic Mobility, and Containment Policy Shocks

By Annika Camehl and Malte Rieth

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2023

We study the dynamic interaction between COVID-19, economic mobility, and containment policy. We use Bayesian panel structural vector autoregressions with daily data for 44 countries, identified through traditional and narrative sign restrictions. We find...