Staggered Difference-in-Differences in Gravity Settings: Revisiting the Effects of Trade Agreements

By Arne J. Nagengast and Yoto V. Yotov

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2025

We nest an extended two-way fixed effect (ETWFE) estimator for staggered difference-in-differences within the structural gravity model. To test the ETWFE, we estimate the effects of regional trade agreements (RTAs). The results suggest that RTA estimates ...

Location, Location, Location

By David Card, Jesse Rothstein, and Moises Yi

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2025

We use linked employer–employee data to study the causal effects of location on earnings in the United States. We estimate a model with employer and employee effects, then aggregate to the commuting zone (CZ) level. Sorting across firms biases tradition...

Media Coverage of Immigration and the Polarization of Attitudes

By Sarah Schneider-Strawczynski and Jérôme Valette

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2025

This paper investigates the effect of media coverage on immigration attitudes. It combines data on immigration coverage in French television with individual panel data from 2013 to 2017 that records respondents' preferred television channel and attitudes ...

Changes in Family Structure and Welfare Participation since the 1960s: The Role of Legal Services

By Jamein Cunningham and Andrew Goodman-Bacon

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2025

This paper evaluates the effects of the War on Poverty's legal services program (LSP), which provided subsidized legal assistance to poor communities, focusing on divorce and welfare access. We use a difference-in-difference (DiD) research design based on...

Wealth Tax Mobility and Tax Coordination

By David R. Agrawal, Dirk Foremny, and Clara Martínez-Toledano

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2025

We study the effects of decentralized wealth taxation on mobility and the effectiveness of tax coordination at mitigating tax competition. We exploit the reintroduction of the Spanish wealth tax, after which all regions except Madrid levied positive tax r...

Careers and Intergenerational Income Mobility

By Catherine Haeck and Jean-William Laliberté

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2025

This paper uses census microdata linked with tax records to quantify the contribution of occupations to intergenerational income mobility. We document substantial segregation into occupations by parental income. Children of high-income parents are signifi...

Betting on the House: Subjective Expectations and Market Choices

By Nicolas Bottan and Ricardo Perez-Truglia

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2025

Home price expectations play a central role in macroeconomics and finance. However, there is little direct evidence on their effect on market choices. We provide causal evidence using a large-scale, high-stakes field experiment in the United States. We se...

Changes in Nutrient Intake at Retirement

By Melvin Stephens Jr. and Desmond Toohey

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2025

Prior research finds food expenditure decreases at retirement, which suggests households are inadequately saving. In contrast, other evidence shows that direct measures of food intake are unaffected by exiting the labor force. Using a wide array of data s...

The Returns to Entrepreneurial Investment: A Private Equity Premium Puzzle?

By Tobias J. Moskowitz and Annette Vissing-Jørgensen

American Economic Review, September 2002

We document the return to investing in U.S. nonpublicly traded equity. Entrepreneurial investment is extremely concentrated, yet despite its poor diversification, we find that the returns to private equity are no higher than the returns to public equity. ...

Digital Information Provision and Behavior Change: Lessons from Six Experiments in East Africa

By Raissa Fabregas, Michael Kremer, Matthew Lowes, Robert On, and Giulia Zane

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2025

While some studies suggest mobile phone–based information programs change behavior; others find no effect. We evaluate six text message agricultural extension programs, collectively covering 128,000 farmers. A meta-analysis finds a 1.22-fold increase in...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2025

Singles, Couples, and Their Labor Supply: Long-Run Trends and Short-Run Fluctuations

By Jonna Olsson

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2025

Women's increased involvement in the economy has been an important change in labor markets during the past century. I show that a macroeconomic model taking into account gender and household composition in an otherwise parsimonious off-the-shelf setting c...

Estimating Hysteresis Effects

By Francesco Furlanetto, Antoine Lepetit, Ørjan Robstad, Juan Rubio-Ramírez, and Pål Ulvedal

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2025

In this paper we identify demand shocks that can have a permanent effect on output through hysteresis effects. We call these shocks permanent demand shocks. They are found to be quantitatively important in the United States, in particular in samples start...

The Evolution of US Retail Concentration

By Dominic A. Smith and Sergio Ocampo

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2025

Increasing national concentration has contributed to market power concerns. Yet local trends are more informative about market power in retail, where consumers have traditionally shopped at nearby stores. Using novel product-level census data for all US r...

Permanent Income Shocks, Target Wealth, and the Wealth Gap

By Tullio Jappelli and Luigi Pistaferri

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2025

We test the key implication of the buffer-stock model, namely that any revision in permanent income leads to a proportionate revision in target wealth. We use panel data on the amount of wealth that people think they must hold for precautionary purposes. ...

From Blue- to Steel-Collar Jobs: The Decline in Employment Gaps?

By Benjamin Lerch

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2025

I investigate how the introduction of industrial robots is shaping the demographic composition of the US labor force between 1993 and 2014. I find that robots decreased employment of men and women by 3.7 and 1.6 percentage points, contributing to the secu...

Medical Expenses and Saving in Retirement: The Case of the United States and Sweden

By Makoto Nakajima and Irina A. Telyukova

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2025

Many US households have significant wealth late in life, contrary to the predictions of a simple life-cycle model. By comparison, retirees in Sweden decumulate wealth more quickly while facing smaller out-of-pocket medical expense risks late in life. In t...

Optimal Bank Reserve Remuneration and Capital Control Policy

By Chun-Che Chi, Stephanie Schmitt-Grohé, and Martín Uribe

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2025

A central prediction of open economy models with a pecuniary externality due to a collateral constraint is that the unregulated economy overborrows relative to what occurs under optimal policy. A maintained assumption in this literature is that households...

Managing Dynamic Competition

By Tracy R. Lewis and Huseyin Yildirim

American Economic Review, September 2002

In many important high-technology markets, including software development, data processing, communications, aeronautics, and defense, suppliers learn through experience how to provide better service at lower cost. This paper examines how a buyer designs d...

US Treasury Auctions: A High-Frequency Identification of Supply Shocks

By Maxime Phillot

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2025

We identify Treasury supply shocks using auction data, interpreting changes in futures prices around announcements as shocks to expected supply. We isolate the component of futures price variations pertaining to US Treasury announcements between 1998 and ...