Global Managers, Local Workers: Wage Setting inside a Multinational Firm

By Virginia Minni

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

How are wages set within a multinational firm? Combining cross-country data on wages and labor regulations with personnel records of a large multinational firm, I find that wage setting depends on the rank of the employee in the firm hierarchy. For manage...

Regional Differences in Public-Sector Productivity and Managerial Talent

By Alessandra Fenizia

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

This paper studies whether regional differences in the productivity of Italian Social Security Agency offices can be explained by variation in manager characteristics. Consistent with other settings, offices in the North are more productive on average tha...

Negative Weights Are No Concern in Design-Based Specifications

By Kirill Borusyak and Peter Hull

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

Recent work shows that popular partially linear regression specifications can put negative weights on some treatment effects, potentially producing incorrectly signed estimands. We show that this is not an issue in design-based specifications, in which lo...

Event Studies with a Continuous Treatment

By Brantly Callaway, Andrew Goodman-Bacon, and Pedro H. C. Sant'Anna

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

This paper builds on the identification results and estimation tools for continuous difference-in-difference designs in Callaway, Goodman-Bacon, and Sant'Anna (2024) to discuss aggregation strategies for event studies with continuous treatments. Estimates...

(Empirical) Bayes Approaches to Parallel Trends

By Soonwoo Kwon and Jonathan Roth

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

We consider Bayes and Empirical Bayes (EB) approaches for dealing with violations of parallel trends. In the Bayes approach, the researcher specifies a prior over both the pretreatment violations of parallel trends δpre and the posttr...

Difference-in-Difference Estimators with Continuous Treatments and No Stayers

By Clément de Chaisemartin, Xavier D'Haultfœuille, and Gonzalo Vazquez-Bare

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

Many treatments, such as prices, taxes, or temperatures, are continuous in nature. Empirical researchers usually rely on two-way fixed effect regressions to estimate treatment effects in such cases. However, such estimators are not robust to heterogeneous...

Temporal Aggregation for the Synthetic Control Method

By Liyang Sun, Eli Ben-Michael, and Avi Feller

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

The synthetic control method (SCM) is a popular approach for estimating the impact of a treatment on a single unit with panel data. Two challenges arise with higher-frequency data (e.g., monthly versus yearly): (i) achieving excellent pretreatment fit is ...

A Dream Deferred or Realized: The Impact of Public Policy on Fostering Black Homeownership in New York City Throughout the 1990's

By Lance Freeman and Darrick Hamilton

American Economic Review, May 2002

Comparative Advantage of Humans versus AI in the Long Tail

By Nikhil Agarwal, Ray Huang, Alex Moehring, Pranav Rajpurkar, Tobias Salz, and Feiyang Yu

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

Machine learning algorithms now exceed human performance on several predictive tasks, generating concerns about widespread job displacement. However, supervised learning approaches rely on large amounts of high-quality labeled data and are designed for sp...

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Algorithms

By Jens Ludwig, Sendhil Mullainathan, and Ashesh Rambachan

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

We calculate the social return on algorithmic interventions (specifically, their marginal value of public funds (MVPF)) across multiple domains of interest to economists—regulation, criminal justice, medicine, and education. Though these algorithms are ...

Algorithmic Fairness and Social Welfare

By Annie Liang and Jay Lu

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

What constitutes a fair algorithm? In the literature on algorithmic fairness, a common approach is to formulate fairness concerns as statistical constraints and to select the most accurate algorithm satisfying this constraint. This approach is facially di...

Algorithmic Recommendations When the Stakes Are High: Evidence from Judicial Elections

By Victoria Angelova, Will Dobbie, and Crystal S. Yang

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

We ask whether increased public scrutiny leads to the more effective use of predictive algorithms. We focus on the context of bail, where judges face heightened public scrutiny during competitive partisan elections. We find that judges up for reelection a...

Constructing Confidence Intervals for BIFSG Disparity Estimates

By Elena Derby, Connor Dowd, and Jacob Mortenson

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

This paper describes a method to construct confidence intervals for estimates of disparities in outcomes between racial/ethnic groups when race and ethnicity are estimated using Bayesian Improved First Name and Surname Geocoding (BIFSG). Standard errors p...

Marriage Penalties and Bonuses by Race and Ethnicity: An Application of Race and Ethnicity Imputation

By Rachel Costello, Portia DeFilippes, Robin Fisher, Ben Klemens, and Emily Y. Lin

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

The Office of Tax Analysis of the Treasury Department imputes race and ethnicity information to its tax model. We apply the imputed information to the calculation of marriage penalties and bonuses for married couples and find differences in the penalty an...

Refundable Credits by Race/Hispanic Ethnicity, Income, and Filing Status

By Julie-Anne Cronin, Portia DeFilippes, and Robin Fisher

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

Using the US Department of the Treasury's tax model with an updated race and Hispanic ethnicity (RH) imputation, we find that Hispanic and Black families are not more likely than White families to benefit from the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) or Child ...

Using Multiple Data Sources to Learn about the Race and Ethnicity of Taxpayers

By Rebecca Heller, Shannon Mok, James Pearce, and Jonathan Rothbaum

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

Recently, studying income by race and ethnicity has gained interest among policymakers. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) regularly reports on the distribution of household income, using a statistically matched dataset with survey and administrative t...

Change Behavior, Motivation Will Follow(?): Acquired Taste and Incentives

By Gretchen Chapman and Uri Gneezy

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

Whereas it is well established that changing motivation can affect behavior, we pose the opposite question: can changing behavior alter motivation? We examine three phenomena that provide an affirmative answer. Preference discovery occurs when a new behav...

Go Vegan? Prejudice, (Blind) Experimentation, and Food Choices

By Michèle Belot and Adelson Teh

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

We examine the role of prejudice and experimentation in the evaluation of a nonmainstream product. We conduct a randomized controlled experiment where participants evaluate a plant-based product. We vary (i) whether they can taste the product, (ii) whethe...

Cooperatives and Wealth Accumulation: Preliminary Analysis

By Jessica Gordon Nembhard

American Economic Review, May 2002

Sleep Norms

By Osea Giuntella, Andrea Kiss, and Stephanie W. Wang

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

This study documents sleep norms and studies the effect of norm information on anticipated behavioral change. Participants were shown either a small or large gap between others' ideal sleep duration (injunctive norm) and actual sleep patterns (descriptive...