Time Aggregation in Health Insurance Deductibles

By Long Hong and Corina Mommaerts

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2024

Health insurance plans increasingly pay for expenses only beyond a large annual deductible. This paper explores the implications of deductibles that reset over shorter timespans. We develop a model of insurance demand between two actuarially equivalent de...

Efficiency and Incidence of Taxation with Free Entry and Love-of-Variety Preferences

By Kory Kroft, Jean-William Laliberté, René Leal-Vizcaíno, and Matthew J. Notowidigdo

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2024

We develop a theory of commodity taxation featuring imperfect competition along with love-of-variety preferences and endogenous firm entry and exit. We derive new formulas for the efficiency and pass-through of specific and ad valorem taxes. These formula...

Migrants at Sea: Unintended Consequences of Search and Rescue Operations

By Claudio Deiana, Vikram Maheshri, and Giovanni Mastrobuoni

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2024

Many countries are facing and resisting strong migratory pressure, fueling irregular migration. In response to mounting deaths in the Central Mediterranean, European nations intensified rescue operations in 2013. We develop a model of irregular migration ...

Public Pensions and Private Savings

By Esteban García-Miralles and Jonathan M. Leganza

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2024

How does the provision of public pension benefits impact private savings? We answer this question in the context of a Danish reform that increased social security eligibility ages. Using administrative data and a regression discontinuity design, we identi...

Refugee Benefit Cuts

By Christian Dustmann, Rasmus Landersø, and Lars Højsgaard Andersen

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2024

This paper analyzes the effects of Denmark's Start Aid welfare reform that targets refugees. Implemented in 2002, it enables us to study not only the reform's immediate effects but also its longer-term consequences and its repeal a decade later. The refor...

Saving Lives with Indexed Disaster Funds: Evidence from Mexico

By Alejandro del Valle

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2024

Developing economies are not disproportionately exposed to natural disasters, but they experience significantly more deaths. Exploiting a discontinuity in the eligibility rules for Mexico's indexed disaster fund (Fonden), I show that the accelerated recon...

Understanding the Link between Temperature and Crime

By François Cohen and Fidel Gonzalez

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2024

The correlation between hot weather and crime is well documented but not fully understood. We combine millions of administrative records, victimization surveys on unreported crime, and daily weather information to analyze the effect of temperatures on cri...

The Indirect Fiscal Benefits of Low-Skilled Immigration

By Mark Colas and Dominik Sachs

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2024

Low-skilled immigrants indirectly affect public finances through their effect on resident wages and labor supply. We operationalize this indirect fiscal effect in a model of immigration and the labor market. We derive closed-form expressions for this effe...

The Internet and International Trade in Services

By Caroline Freund and Diana Weinhold

American Economic Review, May 2002

Explaining Diversity: Symmetry-Breaking in Complementarity Games

By Kiminori Matsuyama

American Economic Review, May 2002

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2024

Spatial Agglomeration Dynamics

By Danny Quah

American Economic Review, May 2002

How Economists Could Help Inform Economic and Budget Analysis Used by the US Congress

[Symposium: How Research Informs Policy Analysis]

By Staff of the Congressional Budget Office

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2024

The US Congress uses economic and budgetary projections, cost estimates for proposed legislation, and other analyses provided by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) as part of its legislative process. CBO makes assessments based on an understanding of f...

The Economic Constitution of the United States

[Symposium: How Research Informs Policy Analysis]

By Cass R. Sunstein

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2024

The United States has an Economic Constitution, governing federal regulation, and explaining how to conduct regulatory impact analysis, with reference to quantification and monetization of the costs and benefits of proposed and final regulations. Known as...

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission and Economic Research

[Symposium: How Research Informs Policy Analysis]

By Wendy Edelberg and Greg Feldberg

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2024

Researchers and economic research were essential to the success of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. For example, researchers submitted testimony, briefed commissioners, and spoke with our staff in recorded interviews. They also provided access t...

Philanthropic Cause Prioritization

[Symposium: How Research Informs Policy Analysis]

By Emily Oehlsen

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2024

Many foundations decide how much and where to give based on their founders' personal precommitments to specific issues, geographies, and/or institutions. If a grantmaking organization instead wanted to select problems based on a general measure of impac...

The Shifting Reasons for Beveridge Curve Shifts

[Symposium: Labor Market and Macroeconomics]

By Gadi Barlevy, R. Jason Faberman, Bart Hobijn, and Ayşegül Şahin

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2024

We discuss how the relative importance of factors that contribute to movements of the US Beveridge curve has changed from 1959 to 2023. We review these factors in the context of a simple flow analogy used to capture the main insights of search and match...

Perspectives on the Labor Share

[Symposium: Labor Market and Macroeconomics]

By Loukas Karabarbounis

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2024

As of 2022, the share of US income accruing to labor is at its lowest level since the Great Depression. Updating previous studies with more recent observations, I document the continuing decline of the labor share for the United States, other countries, a...

Why Labor Supply Matters for Macroeconomics

[Symposium: Labor Market and Macroeconomics]

By Richard Rogerson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2024

Benchmark models taught in undergraduate macro do not attribute any role for labor supply as an important determinant of macroeconomic outcomes. The first part of this paper documents three facts. First, differences in hours of work across OECD economie...

How Cyclical Is the User Cost of Labor?

[Symposium: Labor Market and Macroeconomics]

By Marianna Kudlyak

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2024

In employment relationships, a wage is an installment payment on an implicit long-term agreement between a worker and a firm. The price of labor that impacts firm's hiring decisions, instead, reflects the hiring wage as well as the impact of economic cond...