How Much Can Expanding Access to Long-Acting Reversible Contraceptives Reduce Teen Birth Rates?

By Jason M. Lindo and Analisa Packham

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2017

We estimate the degree to which expanding access to long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs) can reduce teen birth rates by analyzing Colorado's Family Planning Initiative, the first large-scale policy intervention to expand access to LARCs in the Un...

Affirmative Action Exemptions and Capacity Constrained Firms

By Justin Marion

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2017

This paper studies how affirmative action exemptions in public procurement can improve efficiency and government expenditures without harming disadvantaged business enterprise (DBE) utilization. I examine a unique program employed by the Iowa Department o...

The Effects of State Medicaid Expansions for Working-Age Adults on Senior Medicare Beneficiaries

By Melissa McInerney, Jennifer M. Mellor, and Lindsay M. Sabik

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2017

Do Medicaid expansions to working-age adults affect healthcare spending and utilization among older Medicare beneficiaries? Although economic theory provides conflicting predictions about the presence and direction of such spillover effects, it does ident...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, September 2017

Culture, Ethnicity, and Diversity

By Klaus Desmet, Ignacio Ortuño-Ortín, and Romain Wacziarg

American Economic Review, September 2017

We investigate the empirical relationship between ethnicity and culture, defined as a vector of traits reflecting norms, values, and attitudes. Using survey data for 76 countries, we find that ethnic identity is a significant predictor of cultural values,...

The Margins of Global Sourcing: Theory and Evidence from US Firms

By Pol Antràs, Teresa C. Fort, and Felix Tintelnot

American Economic Review, September 2017

We develop a quantifiable multi-country sourcing model in which firms self-select into importing based on their productivity and country-specific variables. In contrast to canonical export models where firm profits are additively separable across destinat...

Bias in Cable News: Persuasion and Polarization

By Gregory J. Martin and Ali Yurukoglu

American Economic Review, September 2017

We measure the persuasive effects of slanted news and tastes for like-minded news, exploiting cable channel positions as exogenous shifters of cable news viewership. Channel positions do not correlate with demographics that predict viewership and voting, ...

Why Are Indian Children So Short? The Role of Birth Order and Son Preference

By Seema Jayachandran and Rohini Pande

American Economic Review, September 2017

Child stunting in India exceeds that in poorer regions like sub-Saharan Africa. Data on over 168,000 children show that, relative to Africa, India's height disadvantage increases sharply with birth order. We posit that India's steep birth order gradient i...

The Fundamental Surplus

By Lars Ljungqvist and Thomas J. Sargent

American Economic Review, September 2017

To generate big responses of unemployment to productivity changes, researchers have reconfigured matching models in various ways: by elevating the utility of leisure, by making wages sticky, by assuming alternating-offer wage bargaining, by introducing co...

Optimal Allocation with Ex Post Verification and Limited Penalties

By Tymofiy Mylovanov and Andriy Zapechelnyuk

American Economic Review, September 2017

Several agents with privately known social values compete for a prize. The prize is allocated based on the claims of the agents, and the winner is subject to a limited penalty if he makes a false claim. If the number of agents is large, the optimal mechan...

Relational Knowledge Transfers

By Luis Garicano and Luis Rayo

American Economic Review, September 2017

We study how relational contracts mitigate Becker's classic problem of providing general human capital when training contracts are incomplete. The firm's profit-maximizing agreement is a multiperiod apprenticeship in which the novice is trained gradually ...

Policy Uncertainty, Trade, and Welfare: Theory and Evidence for China and the United States

By Kyle Handley and Nuno Limão

American Economic Review, September 2017

We examine the impact of policy uncertainty on trade, prices, and real income through firm entry investments in general equilibrium. We estimate and quantify the impact of trade policy on China's export boom to the United States following its 2001 WTO acc...

WTO Accession and Performance of Chinese Manufacturing Firms

By Loren Brandt, Johannes Van Biesebroeck, Luhang Wang, and Yifan Zhang

American Economic Review, September 2017

We examine the effects of trade liberalization in China on the evolution of markups and productivity of manufacturing firms. Although these dimensions of performance cannot be separately identified when firm output is measured by revenue, detailed price d...

The Wind of Change: Maritime Technology, Trade, and Economic Development

By Luigi Pascali

American Economic Review, September 2017

The 1870-1913 period marked the birth of the first era of trade globalization. How did this tremendous increase in trade affect economic development? This work isolates a causality channel by exploiting the fact that the introduction of the steamship in t...

Virtual Classrooms: How Online College Courses Affect Student Success

By Eric P. Bettinger, Lindsay Fox, Susanna Loeb, and Eric S. Taylor

American Economic Review, September 2017

Online college courses are a rapidly expanding feature of higher education, yet little research identifies their effects relative to traditional in-person classes. Using an instrumental variables approach, we find that taking a course online, instead of i...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2017

The Gender Wage Gap: Extent, Trends, and Explanations

By Francine D. Blau and Lawrence M. Kahn

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2017

Using Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) microdata over the 1980-2010 period, we provide new empirical evidence on the extent of and trends in the gender wage gap, which declined considerably during this time. By 2010, conventional human capital vari...

Conditional Cash Transfers: The Case of Progresa/Oportunidades

By Susan W. Parker and Petra E. Todd

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2017

Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs innovate by conditioning transfers to poor families on investments in the human capital of children and other family members. The Mexican CCT program Progresa/Oportunidades began in 1997 and has served as a ...

The Political Economy of Dynamic Elections: Accountability, Commitment, and Responsiveness

By John Duggan and César Martinelli

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2017

We survey the literature on dynamic elections in the traditional settings of spatial preferences and rent seeking under perfect and imperfect monitoring of politicians. We define stationary electoral equilibrium, which encompasses notions used by Barro (1...

Static and Intertemporal Household Decisions

By Pierre-Andre Chiappori and Maurizio Mazzocco

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2017

We discuss the most popular static and dynamic models of household behavior. Our main objective is to explain which aspects of household decisions different models can account for. Using this insight, we describe testable implications, identification resu...