Increasing the Cost of Informal Employment: Evidence from Mexico

By Brenda Samaniego de la Parra and León Fernández Bujanda

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2024

We estimate the effect of increasing the cost of informal jobs on formal firms' and workers' outcomes. We combine administrative records and household surveys and exploit exogenous variation in the cost of informality generated by over 480,000 random work...

What Impacts Can We Expect from School Spending Policy? Evidence from Evaluations in the United States

By C. Kirabo Jackson and Claire L. Mackevicius

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2024

We conduct meta-analysis on a comprehensive set of studies of the impacts of US K-12 public school spending on student outcomes—estimating average marginal impacts and heterogeneity across contexts. On average, a policy increasing spending by $1,000 per...

Employer Concentration and Wages for Specialized Workers

By Anna Thoresson

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2024

This paper studies how wages respond to a sudden change in employer concentration by using the deregulation of the Swedish pharmacy industry. The reform involved a substantial and policy-driven increase in the number of employers that varied by local labo...

Balance-Sheet Contagion

By Nobuhiro Kiyotaki and John Moore

American Economic Review, May 2002

The Virus of Fear: The Political Impact of Ebola in the United States

By Filipe Campante, Emilio Depetris-Chauvin, and Ruben Durante

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2024

We study how public anxiety over the threat of a disease outbreak can affect voter behavior by looking at the Ebola scare that hit the United States in 2014. Exploiting timing and locations of the four cases diagnosed in the country, we show that heighten...

Payment Arrangements and Inflation

By Edward J. Green

American Economic Review, May 2002

Front Matter

American Economic Review, January 2024

Disentangling Moral Hazard and Adverse Selection

By Henrique Castro-Pires, Hector Chade, and Jeroen Swinkels

American Economic Review, January 2024

While many real-world principal-agent problems have both moral hazard and adverse selection, existing tools largely analyze only one at a time. Do the insights from the separate analyses survive when the frictions are combined? We develop a simple methodâ...

Money: What's the Question and Why Should We Care About the Answer?

By Narayana R. Kocherlakota

American Economic Review, May 2002

Universal Basic Income: A Dynamic Assessment

By Diego Daruich and Raquel Fernández

American Economic Review, January 2024

Universal basic income (UBI) is an increasingly popular policy proposal, but there is no evidence regarding its longer-term consequences. We find that UBI generates large welfare losses in a general equilibrium model with imperfect capital markets, labor ...

Retirement Consumption and Pension Design

By Jonas Kolsrud, Camille Landais, Daniel Reck, and Johannes Spinnewijn

American Economic Review, January 2024

This paper analyzes consumption to evaluate the distributional effects of pension reforms. Using Swedish administrative data, we show that on average, workers who retire earlier consume less while retired and experience larger drops in consumption around ...

The Ends of 27 Big Depressions

By Martin Ellison, Sang Seok Lee, and Kevin Hjortshøj O'Rourke

American Economic Review, January 2024

How did countries recover from the Great Depression? In this paper, we explore the argument that leaving the gold standard helped by boosting inflationary expectations, lowering real interest rates, and stimulating interest-sensitive expenditures. We do s...

The Economic Impact of Depression Treatment in India: Evidence from Community-Based Provision of Pharmacotherapy

By Manuela Angelucci and Daniel Bennett

American Economic Review, January 2024

This study evaluates the impact of depression treatment on economic behavior in Karnataka, India. We cross-randomize pharmacotherapy and livelihoods assistance among 1,000 depressed adults and evaluate impacts on depression severity, socioeconomic outcome...

Market Power and Innovation in the Intangible Economy

By Maarten De Ridder

American Economic Review, January 2024

This paper offers a unified explanation for the slowdown of productivity growth, the decline in business dynamism, and the rise of market power. Using a quantitative framework, I show that the rise of intangible inputs, such as software, can explain these...

Propagation and Insurance in Village Networks

By Cynthia Kinnan, Krislert Samphantharak, Robert Townsend, and Diego Vera-Cossio

American Economic Review, January 2024

Firms in developing countries are embedded in supply chains and labor networks. These linkages may propagate or attenuate shocks. Using panel data from Thai villages, we document three facts: as households facing idiosyncratic shocks adjust their producti...

Competing to Commit: Markets with Rational Inattention

By Carlo M. Cusumano, Francesco Fabbri, and Ferdinand Pieroth

American Economic Review, January 2024

Two homogeneous-good firms compete for a consumer's unitary demand. The consumer is rationally inattentive and pays entropy costs to process information about firms' offers. Compared to a collusion benchmark, competition produces two effects. As in standa...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2024

Monetary Policy When the Phillips Curve Is Quite Flat

By Paul Beaudry, Chenyu Hou, and Franck Portier

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2024

This paper highlights how the presence of a monetary policy cost channel can offer new insights into the relation between monetary policy and inflation when the Phillips curve is quite flat. For instance, we highlight a key condition whereby lax monetary ...

Innovation-Led Transitions in Energy Supply

By Derek Lemoine

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2024

Generalizing models of directed technical change, I show that complementarities between innovations and factors of production (here, energy resources) can drive transitions away from a dominant sector. In a calibrated numerical implementation, the economy...