Financial Incentives and the Fertility-Sex Ratio Trade-Off

By S Anukriti

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2018

Can financial incentives resolve the fertility-sex ratio trade-off faced by countries with persistent son preference and easy access to sex-selection technology? An Indian program, Devi Rupak, that seeks to lower fertility and the sex ratio is unable to d...

Asymmetric Information and Remittances: Evidence from Matched Administrative Data

By Thomas Joseph, Yaw Nyarko, and Shing-Yi Wang

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2018

Using new large-scale, administrative data matching remittances and monthly payroll disbursals, we demonstrate how migrants' earnings in the United Arab Emirates affect their remittances. We consider several types of income changes: Ramadan, weather shock...

The Effects of Micro-entrepreneurship Programs on Labor Market Performance: Experimental Evidence from Chile

By Claudia Martínez A., Esteban Puentes, and Jaime Ruiz-Tagle

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2018

We investigate the impact of a program providing asset transfers and business training to low income individuals in Chile, and asked whether a larger asset transfer would magnify the program's impact. We randomly assigned participation in a large scale, p...

Neighborhood Sanitation and Infant Mortality

By Michael Geruso and Dean Spears

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2018

In this paper, we shed new light on a long-standing puzzle: in India, Muslim children are substantially more likely than Hindu children to survive to their first birthday, even though Indian Muslims have lower wealth, consumption, educational attainment, ...

Borrowing Trouble? Human Capital Investment with Opt-In Costs and Implications for the Effectiveness of Grant Aid

By Benjamin M. Marx and Lesley J. Turner

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2018

We estimate the effect of grant aid on City University of New York (CUNY) students' borrowing and attainment using a regression discontinuity/kink design based on the federal Pell Grant formula. Each dollar of grant aid reduces loans by $1.80 among borrow...

The Economic Impact of Hurricane Katrina on Its Victims: Evidence from Individual Tax Returns

By Tatyana Deryugina, Laura Kawano, and Steven Levitt

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2018

Hurricane Katrina destroyed over 200,000 homes and led to massive economic and physical dislocation. Using a panel of tax return data, we provide one of the first comprehensive analyses of the hurricane's long-term economic impact on its victims. Hurrican...

Education and Mortality: Evidence from a Social Experiment

By Costas Meghir, Mårten Palme, and Emilia Simeonova

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2018

We examine the effects on mortality and health due to a major Swedish educational reform that increased the years of compulsory schooling. Using the gradual phase-in of the reform between 1949 and 1962 across municipalities, we estimate insignificant effe...

Banking the Unbanked? Evidence from Three Countries

By Pascaline Dupas, Dean Karlan, Jonathan Robinson, and Diego Ubfal

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2018

We experimentally test the impact of expanding access to basic bank accounts in Uganda, Malawi, and Chile. Over two years, 17, 10, and 3 percent of treatment individuals made five or more deposits, respectively. Average monthly deposits in treatment accou...

Do Risk Preferences Change? Evidence from the Great East Japan Earthquake

By Chie Hanaoka, Hitoshi Shigeoka, and Yasutora Watanabe

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2018

We investigate whether individuals' risk preferences change after experiencing a natural disaster, specifically, the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. Exploiting the panels of nationally representative surveys on risk preferences, we find that men who exp...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2018

Wages, Human Capital, and Barriers to Structural Transformation

By Berthold Herrendorf and Todd Schoellman

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2018

We document for 13 countries ranging from rich (Canada, United States) to poor (India, Indonesia) that average wages are considerably lower in agriculture than in the other sectors. Moreover, agriculture has less educated workers and lower Mincer returns....

Proposition 13: An Equilibrium Analysis

By Ayşe İmrohoroğlu, Kyle Matoba, and Şelale Tüzel

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2018

There are many federal, state, and local laws that distort housing decisions and prices. However, it is often difficult to tease out the quantitative impact of such policies. In this paper, we examine the implications of one of the most significant tax ch...

Cyclical Job Ladders by Firm Size and Firm Wage

By John C. Haltiwanger, Henry R. Hyatt, Lisa B. Kahn, and Erika McEntarfer

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2018

We study whether workers progress up firm wage and size job ladders, and the cyclicality of this movement. Search theory predicts that workers should flow toward larger, higher paying firms. However, we see little evidence of a firm size ladder, partly be...

Entry and Exit, Multiproduct Firms, and Allocative Distortions

By Roberto N. Fattal Jaef

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2018

Most studies quantifying the gains from reversing allocative distortions are static in nature. We propose a model of firm dynamics featuring entry, exit, and multiproduct firms to understand the contribution of these dynamic factors in shaping the welfare...

Investment Hangover and the Great Recession

By Matthew Rognlie, Andrei Shleifer, and Alp Simsek

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2018

We present a model of investment hangover motivated by the Great Recession. Overbuilding of durable capital such as housing requires a reallocation of productive resources to other sectors, which is facilitated by a reduction in the interest rate. When mo...

A Quantitative Theory of Information, Worker Flows, and Wage Dispersion

By Amanda M. Michaud

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2018

Employer learning provides a link between wage and employment dynamics. Workers who are selectively terminated when their low productivity is revealed subsequently earn lower wages. If learning is asymmetric across employers, randomly separated high-produ...

Predation, Protection, and Productivity: A Firm-Level Perspective

By Timothy Besley and Hannes Mueller

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2018

This paper studies the consequences of predation when firms deploy guard labor as a means of protecting themselves. We build a simple model and combine it with data for 144 countries from the World Bank enterprise surveys, which ask about firm-level exper...

Labor Market Uncertainty and Portfolio Choice Puzzles

By Yongsung Chang, Jay H. Hong, and Marios Karabarbounis

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2018

The standard life-cycle models of household portfolio choice have difficulty generating a realistic age profile of risky share. These models not only imply a high risky share on average but also a steeply decreasing age profile, whereas the risky share is...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, April 2018

Railroads of the Raj: Estimating the Impact of Transportation Infrastructure

By Dave Donaldson

American Economic Review, April 2018

How large are the benefits of transportation infrastructure projects, and what explains these benefits? This paper uses archival data from colonial India to investigate the impact of India's vast railroad network. Guided by four results from a general equ...