What Can UWE Do for Economics?

By Tatyana Avilova and Claudia Goldin

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Men outnumber women as undergraduate economics majors by three to one nationwide. Even at the best research universities and liberal arts colleges men outnumber women by two to one or more. The Undergraduate Women in Economics Challenge began in 2015 as a...

A Dialogue between a Populist and an Economist

By Tito Boeri, Prachi Mishra, Chris Papageorgiou, and Antonio Spilimbergo

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

In this imaginary dialogue, a populist and an economist discuss the role of economic shocks to explain populism. A simple correlation between economic shocks and populism is weak. However, economic shocks can explain well the phenomenon of populism in cou...

Is Populism Necessarily Bad Economics?

By Dani Rodrik

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

I distinguish between political and economic populism. Both are averse to agencies of restraint, or, equivalently, delegation to technocrats or external rules. In the economic domain, delegation to independent agencies (domestic or foreign) occurs in two ...

Economic Drivers of Populism

By Sergei Guriev

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

The recent wave of populism is different from the previous ones, thus generating the demand for noneconomic explanations, such as identity politics and cultural factors. In this paper, I discuss several pieces of evidence that show that economic factors, ...

Studying the (Economic) Consequences of Populism

By Cristóbal Kaltwasser

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Pundits and academics alike are increasingly interested in populism. This is a welcome development, since not long ago research on populism was relegated to the margins of the social sciences. Among those who are starting to undertake comparative research...

On the Returns to Invention within Firms: Evidence from Finland

By Philippe Aghion, Ufuk Akcigit, Ari Hyytinen, and Otto Toivanen

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

In this paper we merge individual income data, firm-level data, patenting data, and IQ data in Finland over the period 1988–2012 to analyze the returns to invention for inventors and their coworkers or stakeholders within the same firm. We find that: (i...

Local Violence, Academic Performance, and School Accountability

By Marcus Casey, Jeffrey C. Schiman, and Maciej Wachala

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Standardized test scores and value-added measures largely determine "grades" assigned to teachers and schools. Poor evaluations have severe implications: in some cases, entire schools may be closed or replaced by a charter. Although evaluation depends on ...

Racial Differences in Police Use of Force: Evidence from the 1960s Civil Disturbances

By Jamein P. Cunningham and Rob Gillezeau

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

There is little empirical evidence as to whether protests against policy brutality impact the behavior of police forces. We seek to close this gap by considering the impact of the racial civil disturbances in the 1960s and 1970s on deaths by legal interve...

Last Place? The Intersection of Ethnicity, Gender, and Race in Biomedical Authorship

By Gerald Marschke, Allison Nunez, Bruce A. Weinberg, and Huifeng Yu

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Applying big data methods to biomedical science articles, we show that women and underrepresented racial and ethnic groups are less likely to be last authors, an indicator of career independence. We leverage the massive size of our data to highlight the i...

Reconciling Results on Racial Differences in Police Shootings

By Roland G. Fryer Jr.

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Police use of force, particularly lethal force, is one of the most divisive issues of the twenty-first century. To understand the nexus of race, criminal justice, and police brutality, academics and journalists have begun to amass impressive datasets on o...

Intergenerational Effects of Incarceration

By Manudeep Bhuller, Gordon B. Dahl, Katrine V. Loken, and Magne Mogstad

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

An often overlooked population in discussions of prison reform is the children of inmates. How a child is affected depends both on what incarceration does to their parent and what they learn from their parent's experience. To overcome endogeneity concerns...

Racial and Ethnic Sentencing Differentials in the Federal Criminal Justice System

By Brendon McConnell and Imran Rasul

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

A large body of multidisciplinary research has documented how sentencing outcomes vary tremendously across racial and ethnic groups. The research challenge lies in establishing whether these sentencing differentials are driven by unobserved heterogeneity ...

Participating or Not? Characteristics of Female Entrepreneurs Participating in and Completing an Entrepreneurial Training Program

By Leonardo Iacovone, Gabriela Calderón, and Cristina MacGregor

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Who are the female entrepreneurs who end up starting and completing entrepreneurial training programs? In this paper, relying on a large set of baseline characteristics collected before the entrepreneurs are selected into an entrepreneurial training progr...

Mind The (Profit) Gap: Why Are Female Enterprise Owners Earning Less Than Men?

By Morgan Hardy and Gisella Kagy

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

We explore potential causes for the well-documented profit gap between male- and female-owned microenterprises in low-income countries. We use rich data from an ongoing field project in Ghana's garment making sector, and our study sample consists of all g...

Is Personal Initiative Training a Substitute or Complement to the Existing Human Capital of Women? Results from a Randomized Trial in Togo

By Francisco Campos, Michael Frese, Markus Goldstein, Leonardo Iacovone, Hillary C. Johnson, David McKenzie, and Mona Mensmann

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Personal initiative training—a psychology-based mindset training program—delivers lasting improvements for female business owners in Togo. Which types of women benefit most? Theories of dynamic complementarity would suggest training should work better...

Disability Saliency and Discrimination in Hiring

By Philip Armour, Patrick Button, and Simon Hollands

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Theory suggests that disability discrimination protections may adversely affect the hiring of individuals with disabilities by making them more expensive. Using SIPP data, we explore how the ADA Amendments Act (ADAAA), which expanded disability discrimina...

The Effect of the Disability Insurance Application Decision on the Employment of Denied Applicants

By Mashfiqur R. Khan

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) affects the labor supply of applicants through its work discouragement and through human capital deterioration regardless of the ultimate acceptance or denial of the claim. In this paper, I provide an estimate o...

Return-to-Work Policies and Labor Supply in Disability Insurance Programs

By Arezou Zaresani

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Return-to-work policies in disability insurance (DI) programs allow beneficiaries to collect a portion of their benefits while working. I investigate whether a large increase in incentives to work in a return-to-work policy could induce benefit recipients...

Income Volatility and the PSID: Past Research and New Results

By Robert Moffitt and Sisi Zhang

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

The PSID has major advantages for studying income volatility and, because of this, research using it has been responsible for major improvements in the methodology of studying income volatility. Its research on calendar trends finds a reasonably consisten...

Nonlinear Persistence and Partial Insurance: Income and Consumption Dynamics in the PSID

By Manuel Arellano, Richard Blundell, and Stephane Bonhomme

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

In this paper we highlight the importance of the PSID in understanding income dynamics and consumption insurance. We explore the nonlinear nature of income shocks and describe a new quantile-based panel data framework for income dynamics. In this approach...