News or Noise? The Missing Link

By Ryan Chahrour and Kyle Jurado

American Economic Review, July 2018

The literature on belief-driven business cycles treats news and noise as distinct representations of agents' beliefs. We prove they are empirically the same. Our result lets us isolate the importance of purely belief-driven fluctuations. Using three promi...

Do Recessions Accelerate Routine-Biased Technological Change? Evidence from Vacancy Postings

By Brad Hershbein and Lisa B. Kahn

American Economic Review, July 2018

We show that skill requirements in job vacancy postings differentially increased in MSAs that were hit hard by the Great Recession, relative to less hard-hit areas. These increases persist through at least the end of 2015 and are correlated with increases...

Putting a price on prejudice

[Research Highlight]

June 08, 2018

Workplace discrimination is expensive. At what point does it become too costly for the discriminator?

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...

Bias at the polls

[Research Highlight]

May 02, 2018

Increased diversity of polling station administrators can influence bias on election day.

Embracing capitalism, concentrating wealth

[Page]

How did income inequality change in China and Russia when they shifted to market-oriented economies?

Winning votes, one conversation at a time

[Research Highlight]

June 26, 2018

The AEA interviews Vincent Pons about whether canvassing efforts can swing an election.

If Technology Has Arrived Everywhere, Why Has Income Diverged?

By Diego Comin and Martí Mestieri

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2018

We study the cross-country evolution of technology diffusion over the last two centuries. We document that adoption lags between poor and rich countries have converged, while the intensity of use of adopted technologies of poor countries relative to rich ...

Equity investments

[Page]

How do gender norms influence household decisions to participate in the stock market?

Get the lead out

[Research Highlight]

July 05, 2018

How much can we mitigate the damaging effects of lead exposure in kids?

Investing in neighborhoods

[Page]

Where are the biggest economic benefits when governments spend on infrastructure improvements?

IMF Conference on Sovereign Debt

[News]

July 17, 2018

The conference will be held on September 13-14, 2018 in Washington, DC.

The Great Divergence

[Research Highlight]

July 12, 2018

This video explains how technology diffusion contributes to the growing productivity gap between rich and poor countries.

Breaking down barriers

[Research Highlight]

July 16, 2018

What are the spillover effects from free trade agreements?

Multiple Activities in Networks

By Ying-Ju Chen, Yves Zenou, and Junjie Zhou

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2018

We consider a network model where individuals exert efforts in two types of activities that are interdependent. These activities can be either substitutes or complements. We provide a full characterization of the Nash equilibrium of this game for any netw...

Two-Sided Investment and Matching with Multidimensional Cost Types and Attributes

By Deniz Dizdar

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2018

Heterogeneous buyers and sellers must make investments before entering a continuum assignment market. I show that efficient ex post contracting equilibria (Cole, Mailath and Postlewaite 2001b) exist in a general assignment game framework. I then shed ligh...

Electoral Accountability and Interdistrict Competition

By Galina Zudenkova

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2018

This paper analyzes a multidistrict game of electoral accountability in which constituencies compete over scarce resources by setting expectations for targeted spending. I build a political agency model in which a vote-maximizing politician is subject to ...

When to Confront: The Role of Patience

By Alvaro Sandroni and Can Urgun

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2018

This paper examines the effects of patience on ordinary conflicts such as divorce, price wars and commercial litigation. Players optimally decide when, if ever, to start a destructive confrontation. In the unique equilibrium, there is a tight connection b...

Why Voting? A Welfare Analysis

By Moritz Drexl and Andreas Kleiner

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2018

This article studies costly signaling. The signaling effort is chosen in multiple periods and observed with noise. The signaler benefits from the belief of the market, not directly from the effort or the signal. Optimal signaling behavior in time-varying ...

Wall Street Journal features AER: Insights

[News]

July 23, 2018

Newspaper writes about growing demand for shorter economics papers.