Gender Peer Effects in a Predominantly Male Environment: Evidence from West Point

By Nick Huntington-Klein and Elaina Rose

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

There is considerable interest in the success of women in overwhelmingly male environments. One hypothesized determinant of success is the increased presence of other women. However, the theoretical direction of this effect is uncertain. Previous studies ...

Time and Money: Social Security Benefits and Intergenerational Transfers

By Anita Mukherjee

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

I examine the relationship between Social Security benefits, a major component of income in older age, and intergenerational transfers of financial help and caregiving. I find that the net pass-through rate of Social Security benefits from parents to chil...

In Debt and Approaching Retirement: Claim Social Security or Work Longer?

By Barbara A. Butrica and Nadia S. Karamcheva

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Over the past couple of decades, older Americans have become considerably more leveraged. This paper considers whether household debt affects the timing of retirement and Social Security benefit claiming. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study, w...

The Changing Face of Debt and Financial Fragility at Older Ages

By Annamaria Lusardi, Olivia S. Mitchell, and Noemi Oggero

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

We investigate changes in older individuals' financial fragility as they stand on the verge of retirement. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), we compare how debt has changed for successive cohorts of people age 56–61. Our analysis sh...

The Price of Labor: Evaluating the Impact of Eliminating User Fees on Maternal and Infant Health Outcomes

By Anne Fitzpatrick

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Since 2001, several sub-Saharan African countries have eliminated user fees for childbirth. Although intended to improve maternal and infant health outcomes, service quality also fell as facilities became overburdened. In this paper I combine DHS surveys ...

Indoor Air Pollution and Infant Mortality: A New Approach

By Imelda

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

I propose a new approach to estimate the impact of changes in indoor air quality on infant mortality. I use a quasi-experimental design, leveraging the largest kerosene to liquid petroleum gas (LPG) conversion program implemented in a developing country. ...

Short-Term Impacts of a Pay-It-Forward Livestock Transfer and Training Program in Nepal

By Sarah Janzen, Nicholas Magnan, Sudhindra Sharma, and William Thompson

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

This study evaluates the short-term impacts of a livestock transfer and training program in Nepal using an RCT with three treatments to capture differential effects of program components. We also evaluate a unique "pay it forward" program rule where recip...

Intangibles, Investment, and Efficiency

By Nicolas Crouzet and Janice Eberly

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Recent work on macroeconomic trends has emphasized slowing capital investment, but strong business profits and valuations. The retail sector is a microcosm of these trends, and accounts for a large share of the increase in aggregate business concentration...

Ownership, Concentration, and Investment

By Germán Gutiérrez and Thomas Philippon

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

The US business sector has underinvested relative to profits, funding costs, and Tobin's Q since the early 2000s. Building on prior work, we argue that decreasing competition, rising intangibles, and tightening governance explain, respectively, about one-...

Workplace Signaling and Financial Commitment: Evidence from a Field Experiment

By Emily Breza, Martin Kanz, and Leora Klapper

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

We provide evidence of strategic behavior in financial decisions that occur in the workplace and are observable to one's employer. We offer factory workers the opportunity to sign up for a commitment savings account that credibly signals the intention to ...

Digital Financial Services Go a Long Way: Transaction Costs and Financial Inclusion

By Pierre Bachas, Paul Gertler, Sean Higgins, and Enrique Seira

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Debit cards reduce the travel distance to access bank accounts and can increase financial inclusion. We show that in Mexico, cash transfer beneficiaries who already received their transfers in bank accounts and subsequently received debit cards reduce the...

Salary Delays and Overdrafts in Rural Ghana

By Niklas Buehren, Virginia Ceretti, Ervin Dervisevic, Markus Goldstein, Leora Klapper, Tricia Koroknay-Palicz, and Simone Schaner

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Checking overdrafts are an expensive yet common way for bank account holders to obtain short-term credit when faced with unexpected shocks. In developing countries, one common shock that many salaried workers face is late or erratic payment from their emp...

Carbon Pricing Induces Innovation: Evidence from China's Regional Carbon Market Pilots

By Jingbo Cui, Junjie Zhang, and Yang Zheng

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

China has launched seven regional pilots of emission trading scheme (ETS) to limit its carbon emissions. Taking advantage of the variations in the regional ETS pilots across regions and sectors and over time, we employ a difference-in-difference-in-differ...

China's Rate-Based Approach to Reducing CO₂ Emissions: Attractions, Limitations, and Alternatives

By Lawrence H. Goulder and Richard D. Morgenstern

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

A distinguishing feature of China's recently launched emissions trading system (ETS) is its rate-based structure. This structure governs the way emissions allowances are allocated and the conditions for compliance, and it has important implications for sy...

China's New National Carbon Market

By William A. Pizer and Xiliang Zhang

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

On December 19, 2017, China announced the official start of its national emissions trading system (ETS) construction program. When fully implemented, this program will more than double the volume of worldwide carbon dioxide emissions covered by either tax...

Institutions and Emissions Trading in China

By Valerie Jean Karplus

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Variation in the extent of state control in industry may affect China's efforts to establish a national emissions trading system (ETS) capable of supporting the implementation of the country's CO2 intensity reduction goals through 2030. This pa...

Measuring Welfare with Massive Online Choice Experiments: A Brief Introduction

By Erik Brynjolfsson, Felix Eggers, and Avinash Gannamaneni

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

GDP is a measure of production, and yet it is widely used as a proxy for well-being. It is particularly ill-suited for assessing the contributions of digital goods which are free to consumers and thus excluded from GDP measures. This underscores the need ...

The Empirics of Social Progress: The Interplay between Subjective Well-Being and Societal Performance

By Daniel Fehder, Michael Porter, and Scott Stern

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Though economists have long recognized that GDP is not by itself a measure of societal well-being, most GDP alternatives incorporate direct measures of economic performance. We propose instead an independently constructed measure, a social progress index,...

Using Online Prices for Measuring Real Consumption across Countries

By Alberto Cavallo, W. Erwin Diewert, Robert C. Feenstra, Robert Inklaar, and Marcel P. Timmer

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

We show that online prices can be used to construct quarterly purchasing power parities (PPPs) with a closely matched set of goods and identical methodologies in a variety of developed and developing countries. Our results are close to those reported by t...

Internet Rising, Prices Falling: Measuring Inflation in a World of E-Commerce

By Austan D. Goolsbee and Peter J. Klenow

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

The rise of ecommerce and the contrasts between online and traditional retail pricing behavior have raised questions about potential bias in CPI inflation. Using new data on online transactions, this paper shows that aggregate matched-model inflation onli...