Fighting for Tyranny: State Repression and Combat Motivation

By Arturas Rozenas, Roya Talibova, and Yuri M. Zhukov

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2024

We utilize over 100 million declassified Red Army personnel records from World War II to study how state repression shapes soldiers' motivation to exert effort in fighting. Exploiting multiple complementary identification strategies, we find that soldiers...

Activated History: The Case of the Turkish Sieges of Vienna

By Christian Ochsner and Felix Roesel

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2024

We show that history stored in collective memories and activated by political campaigns can create xenophobia and radicalization. Turkish troops besieged Vienna in 1529 and 1683 and pillaged individual Austrian villages, killing and kidnapping in the proc...

Health Care Centralization: The Health Impacts of Obstetric Unit Closures in the United States

By Stefanie Fischer, Heather Royer, and Corey White

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2024

Over the last few decades, health care services in the United States have become more geographically centralized. We study how the loss of hospital-based obstetric units in over 400 counties affects maternal and infant health via a difference-in-differenc...

The Impacts of Physician Payments on Patient Access, Use, and Health

By Diane Alexander and Molly Schnell

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2024

We examine how supply-side health insurance generosity affects patient access, use, and health. Exploiting large, exogenous changes in Medicaid reimbursement rates for physicians, we find that increasing payments for new patient office visits reduces repo...

Patient versus Provider Incentives in Long-Term Care

By Martin B. Hackmann, R. Vincent Pohl, and Nicolas R. Ziebarth

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2024

How do patient and provider incentives affect the provision of long-term care? Our analysis of 551,000 nursing home stays yields three main insights. First, due to limited cost-sharing, Medicaid-covered residents prolong their nursing home stays instead o...

Socioeconomic Disparities in Privatized Pollution Remediation: Evidence from Toxic Chemical Spills

By Justin Marion and Jeremy West

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2024

Governments often privatize the administration of regulations to third-party specialists paid for by the regulated parties. We study how the resulting conflict of interest can have unintended consequences for the distributional impacts of regulation. In M...

Civil Service Exams and Organizational Performance: Evidence from the Pendleton Act

By Diana Moreira and Santiago Pérez

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2024

We use newly digitized data to study the impacts of a historical reform that mandated exams for some employees in the largest US customs-collection districts. Although the reform improved targeted employees' professional backgrounds and reduced turnover, ...

Labor Supply at the Extensive and Intensive Margins: The EITC, Welfare, and Hours Worked

By Bruce D. Meyer

American Economic Review, May 2002

When Individual Politics Become Public: Do Civil Service Protections Insulate Government Workers?

By Morgan Foy

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2024

This paper examines whether the civil service system protected state bureaucrats from political interference following a recall petition against the governor of Wisconsin. I find that most classified workers, who were covered by the state civil service la...

Public Information Is an Incentive for Politicians: Experimental Evidence from Delhi Elections

By Abhijit Banerjee, Nils Enevoldsen, Rohini Pande, and Michael Walton

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2024

Two years prior to elections, two-thirds of Delhi municipal councillors learned they had been randomly chosen for a preelection newspaper report card. Treated councillors in high-slum areas increased pro-poor spending, relative both to control counterpart...

The Great Migration and Educational Opportunity

By Cavit Baran, Eric Chyn, and Bryan A. Stuart

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2024

This paper studies the impact of the First Great Migration on children. We use the complete-count 1940 census to estimate selection-corrected place effects on education for children of Black migrants. On average, Black children gained 0.8 years of schooli...

The Evolution of Local Labor Markets after Recessions

By Brad Hershbein and Bryan A. Stuart

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2024

This paper studies how US local labor markets respond to employment losses that occur during recessions. Following recessions from 1973 through 2009, we find areas that lose more jobs during the recession experience persistent relative declines in employm...

The Impact of Benefit Generosity on Workers' Compensation Claims: Evidence and Implications

By Marika Cabral and Marcus Dillender

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2024

Leveraging unique administrative data and a sharp increase in benefit generosity in a difference-in-differences research design, we estimate the impact of workers' compensation wage replacement benefits on individual behavior and program costs. We find th...

Spillovers without Social Interactions in Urban Sanitation

By Joshua W. Deutschmann, Molly Lipscomb, Laura Schechter, and Jessica Zhu

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2024

We run a randomized controlled trial coupled with lab-in-the-field social network experiments in urban Dakar. Decision spillovers and health externalities play a large role in determining uptake of sanitation technology, with decision spillovers being lar...

The Human Capital Effects of Access to Elite Jobs

By Huayu Xu and Achyuta Adhvaryu

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2024

We study the human capital effects of access to elite bureaucratic jobs in Taiwan, where performance on an examination determines entry into the civil service. Historically, quotas for successful applicants were set based on the 1948 populations of indivi...

Consumer Protection in an Online World: An Analysis of Occupational Licensing

By Chiara Farronato, Andrey Fradkin, Bradley J. Larsen, and Erik Brynjolfsson

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2024

We study the demand and supply implications of occupational licensing using transaction-level data from a large online platform for home improvement services. We find that demand is more responsive to a professional's reviews than to the professional's pl...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, July 2024

Information Choice in Auctions

By Nina Bobkova

American Economic Review, July 2024

The choice of an auction mechanism influences which object characteristics bidders learn about and whether the object is allocated efficiently. Some object characteristics are valued equally by all bidders and thus are inconsequential for the efficient al...

Welfare, Employment, and Income: Evidence on the Effects of Benefit Reductions from California

By V. Joseph Hotz, Charles H. Mullin, and John Karl Scholz

American Economic Review, May 2002

Revealing Stereotypes: Evidence from Immigrants in Schools

By Alberto Alesina, Michela Carlana, Eliana La Ferrara, and Paolo Pinotti

American Economic Review, July 2024

We study how people change their behavior after being made aware of bias. Teachers in Italian schools give lower grades to immigrant students relative to natives of comparable ability. In two experiments, we reveal to teachers their own stereotypes, measu...