Hub-and-Spoke Cartels: Theory and Evidence from the Grocery Industry

By Robert Clark, Ig Horstmann, and Jean-François Houde

American Economic Review, March 2024

Numerous recently uncovered cartels operated along the supply chain, with firms at one end facilitating collusion at the other—hub-and-spoke arrangements. These cartels are hard to rationalize because they induce double marginalization and higher costs....

The U.S. Demographic Transition

By Jeremy Greenwood and Ananth Seshadri

American Economic Review, May 2002

Does the Squeaky Wheel Get More Grease? The Direct and Indirect Effects of Citizen Participation on Environmental Governance in China

By Mark T. Buntaine, Michael Greenstone, Guojun He, Mengdi Liu, Shaoda Wang, and Bing Zhang

American Economic Review, March 2024

We conducted a nationwide field experiment in China to evaluate the direct and indirect impacts of assigning firms to public or private citizen appeals when they violate pollution standards. There are three main findings. First, public appeals to the regu...

The Gender Gap in Confidence: Expected but Not Accounted For

By Christine L. Exley and Kirby Nielsen

American Economic Review, March 2024

We investigate how the gender gap in confidence affects the views that evaluators (e.g., employers) hold about men and women. We find the confidence gap is contagious, causing evaluators to form overly pessimistic beliefs about women. This result arises e...

Front Matter

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2024

Steady-State Social Distancing and Vaccination

By Christopher Avery, Frederick Chen, and David McAdams

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2024

This paper analyzes an economic-epidemiological model of infectious disease where it is possible to become infected more than once and individual agents make endogenous choices of social distancing and vaccine adoption. Protective actions adopted by any o...

Race and the Mismeasure of School Quality

By Joshua Angrist, Peter Hull, Parag A. Pathak, and Christopher R. Walters

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2024

In large urban districts, schools enrolling more White students tend to have higher performance ratings. We use an instrumental variables strategy leveraging centralized school assignment to explore this relationship. Estimates from Denver and New York Ci...

Wage Garnishment in the United States: New Facts from Administrative Payroll Records

By Anthony A. DeFusco, Brandon Enriquez, and Maggie Yellen

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2024

Wage garnishment allows creditors to deduct money from workers' paychecks to repay defaulted debts. We document new facts about wage garnishment between 2014 and 2019 using data from a large payroll processor that distributes paychecks to approximately 20...

The Irrelevance of Fee Structures for Certification

By Martin Pollrich and Roland Strausz

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2024

In models of certification, possible restrictions on the nature of the fee structures are commonly analyzed. We show that they are irrelevant for the certifier's ability to maximize profits and trade efficiency. Our results establish that certification sc...

Real Effects of Markets on Politics: Evidence from US Presidential Elections

By Alan D. Crane, Andrew Koch, and Leming Lin

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2024

Despite the economic importance of the US stock market, there is strikingly little evidence of its impact on elections. Using county-level variation in stock market participation, we document the impact of market returns on election outcomes. High-partici...

Interest Rates and the Spatial Polarization of Housing Markets

By Francisco Amaral, Martin Dohmen, Sebastian Kohl, and Moritz Schularick

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2024

Rising within-country differences in house values are a much-debated trend in the United States and internationally. Using new long-run regional data for 15 advanced economies, we show that standard explanations linking growing price dispersion to rent di...

The Marginal Disutility from Corruption in Social Programs: Evidence from Program Administrators and Beneficiaries

By Arya Gaduh, Rema Hanna, and Benjamin A. Olken

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2024

Concerns about fraud in welfare programs are common arguments worldwide against such programs. We conducted a survey experiment with over 28,000 welfare program administrators and over 19,000 beneficiaries in Indonesia to elicit the "marginal disutility f...

The Role of Agriculture in Development

By Douglas Gollin, Stephen Parente, and Richard Rogerson

American Economic Review, May 2002

Can Financial Incentives to Firms Improve Apprenticeship Training? Experimental Evidence from Ghana

By Gabriel Brown, Morgan Hardy, Isaac Mbiti, Jamie McCasland, and Isabelle Salcher

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2024

We use a field experiment to test whether financial incentives can improve the quality of apprenticeship training. Trainers (firm owners) in the treatment group participated in a tournament incentive scheme where they received a payment based on their app...

Cash and Conflict: Large-Scale Experimental Evidence from Niger

By Patrick Premand and Dominic Rohner

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2024

Conflict undermines development, while adverse economic shocks, in turn, can increase conflict risk. Policy interventions such as cash transfers could attenuate conflict risk by raising poor households' opportunity costs. However, cash transfers may also ...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2024

The Political Effects of Immigration: Culture or Economics?

By Alberto Alesina and Marco Tabellini

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2024

We review the growing literature on the political economy of immigration. First, we discuss the effects of immigration on a wide range of political and social outcomes. The existing evidence suggests that immigrants often, but not always, trigger backlash...

New Russian Economic History

By Ekaterina Zhuravskaya ⓡ Sergei Guriev ⓡ Andrei Markevich

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2024

This survey discusses recent developments in the growing literature on the economic history of Russia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Using novel data and modern empirical methods, this research provides important lessons for development and ...

From Outcome-Based to Language-Based Preferences

By Valerio Capraro, Joseph Y. Halpern, and Matjaž Perc

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2024

We review the literature on models that try to explain human behavior in social interactions described by normal-form games with monetary payoffs. We start by covering social and moral preferences. We then focus on the growing body of research showing tha...

Interpreting the Tariff-Growth Correlation of the Late 19th Century

By Douglas A. Irwin

American Economic Review, May 2002