The Effects of DNA Databases on Crime

By Jennifer L. Doleac

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2017

Every US state has a database of criminal offenders' DNA profiles. These databases receive widespread attention in the media and popular culture, but there has been no rigorous analysis of their impact on crime. This paper intends to fill that gap. I expl...

Risky Transportation Choices and the Value of a Statistical Life

By Gianmarco León and Edward Miguel

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2017

This paper exploits an unusual transportation setting to generate some of the first revealed preference value of a statistical life (VSL) estimates from a low-income setting. We estimate the trade-offs individuals are willing to make between mortality ris...

Politics and Local Economic Growth: Evidence from India

By Sam Asher and Paul Novosad

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2017

Political favoritism affects the allocation of government resources, but is it consequential for growth? Using a close election regression discontinuity design and data from India, we measure the local economic impact of being represented by a politician ...

Tax Me, but Spend Wisely? Sources of Public Finance and Government Accountability

By Lucie Gadenne

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2017

Existing evidence suggests that extra grant revenues lead to little improvements in public services in developing countries--but would governments spend tax revenues differently? This paper considers a program that invests in the tax capacity of Brazilian...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, January 2017

Networks, Markets, and Inequality

By Julien Gagnon and Sanjeev Goyal

American Economic Review, January 2017

The interaction between community and markets remains a central theme in the social sciences. The empirical evidence is rich: in some instances, markets strengthen social ties, while in others they undermine them. The impact of markets on inequality and w...

Beeps

By Jeffrey C. Ely

American Economic Review, January 2017

I introduce and study dynamic persuasion mechanisms. A principal privately observes the evolution of a stochastic process and sends messages over time to an agent. The agent takes actions in each period based on her beliefs about the state of the process ...

Microeconomic Origins of Macroeconomic Tail Risks

By Daron Acemoglu, Asuman Ozdaglar, and Alireza Tahbaz-Salehi

American Economic Review, January 2017

Using a multisector general equilibrium model, we show that the interplay of idiosyncratic microeconomic shocks and sectoral heterogeneity results in systematic departures in the likelihood of large economic downturns relative to what is implied by the no...

Coarse Competitive Equilibrium and Extreme Prices

By Faruk Gul, Wolfgang Pesendorfer, and Tomasz Strzalecki

American Economic Review, January 2017

We introduce a notion of coarse competitive equilibrium, to study agents' inability to tailor their consumption to prices. Our goal is to incorporate limited cognitive ability (in particular limited attention, memory, and complexity) into the analysis of ...

Clicking on Heaven's Door: The Effect of Immigrant Legalization on Crime

By Paolo Pinotti

American Economic Review, January 2017

We estimate the effect of immigrant legalization on the crime rate of immigrants in Italy by exploiting an ideal regression discontinuity design: fixed quotas of residence permits are available each year, applications must be submitted electronically on s...

Deposit Competition and Financial Fragility: Evidence from the US Banking Sector

By Mark Egan, Ali Hortaçsu, and Gregor Matvos

American Economic Review, January 2017

We develop a structural empirical model of the US banking sector. Insured depositors and run-prone uninsured depositors choose between differentiated banks. Banks compete for deposits and endogenously default. The estimated demand for uninsured deposits d...

Tax Policy and Heterogeneous Investment Behavior

By Eric Zwick and James Mahon

American Economic Review, January 2017

We estimate the effect of temporary tax incentives on equipment investment using shifts in accelerated depreciation. Analyzing data for over 120,000 firms, we present three findings. First, bonus depreciation raised investment in eligible capital relative...

Price Setting in Online Markets: Basic Facts, International Comparisons, and Cross-Border Integration

By Yuriy Gorodnichenko and Oleksandr Talavera

American Economic Review, January 2017

We document basic facts about prices in online markets in the United States and Canada, which is a rapidly growing segment of the retail sector. Relative to prices in regular stores, prices in online markets are more flexible and exhibit stronger pass-thr...

Are Online and Offline Prices Similar? Evidence from Large Multi-channel Retailers

By Alberto Cavallo

American Economic Review, January 2017

Online prices are increasingly used for measurement and research applications, yet little is known about their relation to prices collected offline, where most retail transactions take place. I conduct the first large-scale comparison of prices simultaneo...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2017

Social Status in Networks

By Nicole Immorlica, Rachel Kranton, Mihai Manea, and Greg Stoddard

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2017

We study social comparisons and status seeking in an interconnected society. Individuals take costly actions that have direct benefits and also confer social status. A new measure of interconnectedness--cohesion--captures the intensity of incentives for s...

Bargaining over Entry with a Compulsory License Deadline: Price Spillovers and Surplus Expansion

By Eric W. Bond and Kamal Saggi

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2017

We analyze bargaining between a developing country (South) and a multinational firm over the local price of its patented product. We use an alternating offers bargaining game in which the South can resort to compulsory licensing (CL) if the two parties fa...

Resale Price Maintenance with Secret Contracts and Retail Service Externalities

By Tommy Staahl Gabrielsen and Bjørn Olav Johansen

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2017

We analyze a setting where a monopolist sells through retailers that set prices and provide valuable but non-contractible services to customers. We assume that contracts are private. We find that purely bilateral price restraints have no effect on the equ...

Dynamic Assignment of Objects to Queuing Agents

By Francis Bloch and David Cantala

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2017

We analyze the dynamic assignment of objects to agents organized in a constant size waiting list. Applications include the assignment of social housing and organs for transplants. We analyze the optimal design of probabilistic queuing disciplines, punishm...

Making Case-Based Decision Theory Directly Observable

By Han Bleichrodt, Martin Filko, Amit Kothiyal, and Peter P. Wakker

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2017

Case-based decision theory (CBDT) provided a new way of revealing preferences, with decisions under uncertainty determined by similarities with cases in memory. This paper introduces a method to measure CBDT that requires no commitment to parametric famil...