Universalism: Global Evidence

By Alexander W. Cappelen, Benjamin Enke, and Bertil Tungodden

American Economic Review, January 2025

This paper leverages nationally representative surveys across 60 countries and 64,000 respondents to present novel stylized facts about the relationship-specific nature of altruism. Across individuals, universalist preferences systematically vary with dem...

In Harm's Way? Infrastructure Investments and the Persistence of Coastal Cities

By Clare Balboni

American Economic Review, January 2025

Coasts contain a disproportionate share of the world's population, reflecting historical advantages, but environmental change threatens a reversal of coastal fortune in the coming decades as natural disasters intensify and sea levels rise. This paper cons...

Price Floors and Employer Preferences: Evidence from a Minimum Wage Experiment

By John J. Horton

American Economic Review, January 2025

Firms posting job openings in an online labor market were randomly assigned minimum hourly wages. When facing a minimum wage, fewer firms hired, but those they did hire paid higher wages. Hours-worked fell substantially. Treated firms shifted to hiring mo...

Heterogeneity in School Value Added and the Private Premium

By Tahir Andrabi, Natalie Bau, Jishnu Das, and Asim I. Khwaja

American Economic Review, January 2025

We estimate and validate test score–based measures of school quality (school value added, or SVA) in Pakistan. We document substantial variation in SVA within villages and within the public and private sectors, leading to a wide range of possible estima...

Organized Voters: Elections and Public Funding of Nonprofits

By Camille Urvoy

American Economic Review, January 2025

What makes politicians respond to civil society organizations' demands? I use new data on government transfers to French associations and exploit close elections to show that politicians grant more funds to ideologically close organizations when the local...

The Global Financial Resource Curse

By Gianluca Benigno, Luca Fornaro, and Martin Wolf

American Economic Review, January 2025

We provide a model connecting the global saving glut to productivity growth. The key feature is that the tradable sector is the engine of growth of the economy. Capital flows from developing countries to the United States boost demand for US nontradable g...

Dying or Lying? For-Profit Hospices and End-of-Life Care

By Jonathan Gruber, David H. Howard, Jetson Leder-Luis, and Theodore L. Caputi

American Economic Review, January 2025

The Medicare hospice program is intended to provide palliative care to terminal patients, but patients with long stays in hospice are highly profitable, motivating concerns about overuse among the Alzheimer's and Dementia (ADRD) population in the rapidly ...

The Household Bankruptcy Decision

By Scott Fay, Erik Hurst, and Michelle J. White

American Economic Review, June 2002

Whatever It Takes? The Impact of Conditional Policy Promises

By Valentin Haddad, Alan Moreira, and Tyler Muir

American Economic Review, January 2025

At the announcement of a new policy, agents form a view of state-contingent policy actions and impact. We develop a method to estimate this state-contingent perception and implement it for many asset-purchase interventions worldwide. Expectations of large...

Dynamic Inconsistency in Risky Choice: Evidence from the Lab and Field

By Rawley Heimer, Zwetelina Iliewa, Alex Imas, and Martin Weber

American Economic Review, January 2025

We document a robust dynamic inconsistency in risky choice. Using a unique brokerage dataset and a series of experiments, we compare people's initial risk-taking plans to their subsequent decisions. Across settings, people accept risk as part of a loss-ex...

Auditors' Report/Audited Financial Statements

American Economic Review, June 2002

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2025

Do Carbon Offsets Offset Carbon?

By Raphael Calel, Jonathan Colmer, Antoine Dechezleprêtre, and Matthieu Glachant

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2025

We develop and implement a new method for identifying wasted subsidies and use it to provide systematic evidence of the misallocation of carbon offsets in the Clean Development Mechanism—the world's largest carbon offset program. Using newly constructed...

The Simpler the Better? Threshold Effects of Energy Labels on Property Prices and Energy Efficiency Investments

By Rodolfo Sejas-Portillo, Mirko Moro, and Till Stowasser

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2025

Using British data on over 7 million residential property sales, we find that simplified energy efficiency (EE) information leads to important market effects. UK legislation requires the use of an energy label that shows an EE rating score (1–100) mappe...

Smart Thermostats, Automation, and Time-Varying Prices

By Joshua Blonz, Karen Palmer, Casey J. Wichman, and Derek C. Wietelman

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2025

Can automation complement economic incentives? We explore this question by randomly encouraging households to activate a feature on their existing smart thermostat that automates responsiveness to time-of-use electricity pricing. The feature reduces air c...

The Willingness to Pay for a Cooler Day: Evidence from 50 Years of Major League Baseball Games

By Kevin Kuruc, Melissa LoPalo, and Sean O'Connor

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2025

The climate economy literature has documented adverse effects of extreme temperatures on well-being through mechanisms such as mortality, productivity, and conflict. Impacts due simply to discomfort are less well understood. This paper investigates indivi...

Better Alone? Evidence on the Costs of Intermunicipal Cooperation

By Clemence Tricaud

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2025

This paper provides new evidence on why municipalities are often reluctant to integrate. Exploiting a French reform that made intermunicipal cooperation mandatory, I find that municipalities forced to integrate experienced a large increase in construction...

Inequality Among World Citizens: 1820-1992

By François Bourguignon and Christian Morrisson

American Economic Review, September 2002

This paper investigates the distribution of well being among world citizens during the last two centuries. The estimates show that inequality of world distribution of income worsened from the beginning of the 19th century to World War II and after that se...

Rising Import Tariffs, Falling Exports: When Modern Supply Chains Meet Old-Style Protectionism

By Kyle Handley, Fariha Kamal, and Ryan Monarch

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2025

We examine the impacts of the 2018–2019 US import tariff increases on US exports through the lens of supply chain linkages. Using 2016 confidential firm-trade linked data, we identify exporters who were importing products that eventually faced tariff in...

Trade Disruptions and Reshoring

By Anindya S. Chakrabarti, Kanika Mahajan, and Shekhar Tomar

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2025

Firms are increasingly concerned about the resilience of their sales and sourcing decisions. Using administrative data, we show that a temporary disruption in trade due to state border closures in India led to a persistent trade collapse within the countr...