Front Matter

American Economic Review, January 2018

The Design and Price of Information

By Dirk Bergemann, Alessandro Bonatti, and Alex Smolin

American Economic Review, January 2018

A data buyer faces a decision problem under uncertainty. He can augment his initial private information with supplemental data from a data seller. His willingness to pay for supplemental data is determined by the quality of his initial private information...

Unemployment Insurance as a Housing Market Stabilizer

By Joanne W. Hsu, David A. Matsa, and Brian T. Melzer

American Economic Review, January 2018

This paper studies the impact of unemployment insurance (UI) on the housing market. Exploiting heterogeneity in UI generosity across US states and over time, we find that UI helps the unemployed avoid mortgage default. We estimate that UI expansions durin...

The Micro Origins of International Business-Cycle Comovement

By Julian di Giovanni, Andrei A. Levchenko, and Isabelle Mejean

American Economic Review, January 2018

This paper investigates the role of individual firms in international business-cycle comovement using data covering the universe of French firm-level value added and international linkages over the period 1993–2007. At the micro level, trade and mul...

Trade, Quality Upgrading, and Input Linkages: Theory and Evidence from Colombia

By Ana Cecília Fieler, Marcela Eslava, and Daniel Yi Xu

American Economic Review, January 2018

A quantitative model brings together theories linking international trade to quality, technology, and demand for skills. Standard effects of trade on importers and exporters are magnified through domestic input linkages. We estimate the model with data fr...

Bid Shading and Bidder Surplus in the US Treasury Auction System

By Ali Hortaçsu, Jakub Kastl, and Allen Zhang

American Economic Review, January 2018

We analyze bidding data from uniform price auctions of US Treasury bills and notes between July 2009 and October 2013. Primary dealers consistently bid higher yields compared to direct and indirect bidders. We estimate a structural model of bidding that t...

How Do Hours Worked Vary with Income? Cross-Country Evidence and Implications

By Alexander Bick, Nicola Fuchs-Schündeln, and David Lagakos

American Economic Review, January 2018

This paper builds a new internationally comparable database of hours worked to measure how hours vary with income across and within countries. We document that average hours worked per adult are substantially higher in low-income countries than in high-in...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2018

Hospitals as Insurers of Last Resort

By Craig Garthwaite, Tal Gross, and Matthew J. Notowidigdo

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2018

American hospitals are required to provide emergency medical care to the uninsured. We use previously confidential hospital financial data to study the resulting uncompensated care, medical care for which no payment is received. Using both panel-data meth...

The Price of Prejudice

By Morten Størling Hedegaard and Jean-Robert Tyran

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2018

We present a new type of field experiment to investigate ethnic prejudice in the workplace. Our design allows us to study how potential discriminators respond to changes in the cost of discrimination. We find that ethnic discrimination is common but highl...

For Better or for Worse?: Education and the Prevalence of Domestic Violence in Turkey

By Bilge Erten and Pinar Keskin

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2018

We exploit a change in the compulsory schooling law in Turkey to estimate the causal effects of education on the prevalence of domestic violence. By adopting a regression discontinuity design, we find that the reform increased women's schooling by one yea...

Demand for Alcohol Consumption in Russia and Its Implication for Mortality

By Evgeny Yakovlev

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2018

Alcohol abuse is widely blamed for the very high rate of male mortality in Russia. I estimate a structural model of the demand for alcohol that incorporates two features of alcohol consumption, peer effects and habits. I use a kink in the policy regime of...

Social Media and Corruption

By Ruben Enikolopov, Maria Petrova, and Konstantin Sonin

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2018

Does new media promote accountability in nondemocratic countries, where offline media is often suppressed? We show that blog posts, which exposed corruption in Russian state-controlled companies, had a negative causal impact on their market returns. For i...

Free to Choose: Can School Choice Reduce Student Achievement?

By Atila Abdulkadiroğlu, Parag A. Pathak, and Christopher R. Walters

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2018

A central argument for school choice is that parents can choose schools wisely. This principle may underlie why lottery-based school evaluations have almost always reported positive or zero achievement effects. This paper reports on a striking counterexam...

Together We Will: Experimental Evidence on Female Voting Behavior in Pakistan

By Xavier Giné and Ghazala Mansuri

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2018

In many emerging democracies women are less likely to vote than men and, when they do vote, are likely to follow the wishes of male household and clan heads. We assess the impact of a voter awareness campaign on female turnout, candidate choice and party ...

College Party Culture and Sexual Assault

By Jason M. Lindo, Peter Siminski, and Isaac D. Swensen

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2018

This paper considers the degree to which events that intensify partying increase sexual assault. Estimates are based on panel data from campus and local law enforcement agencies and an identification strategy that exploits plausibly random variation in th...

The Impact of AIDS Treatment on Savings and Human Capital Investment in Malawi

By Victoria Baranov and Hans-Peter Kohler

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2018

Antiretroviral therapy (ART), a treatment for AIDS, is rapidly increasing life expectancy throughout sub-Saharan African countries affected by the AIDS epidemic. This change in life expectancy has potentially profound influences on life-cycle decisions. A...

Do Low Levels of Blood Lead Reduce Children's Future Test Scores?

By Anna Aizer, Janet Currie, Peter Simon, and Patrick Vivier

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2018

We construct a unique individual-level dataset linking preschool blood lead levels with third grade test scores for Rhode Island children born 1997–2005. Using two identification strategies, we show for the first time that reductions of lead from ev...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2018

Measuring Job-Finding Rates and Matching Efficiency with Heterogeneous Job-Seekers

By Robert E. Hall and Sam Schulhofer-Wohl

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2018

Matching efficiency is the productivity of the process for matching job-seekers to available jobs. Job-finding is the output; vacant jobs and active job-seekers are the inputs. We develop a framework for measuring matching productivity when the population...