Socializing at Work: Evidence from a Field Experiment with Manufacturing Workers

By Sangyoon Park

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2019

Through a field experiment at a seafood-processing plant, I examine how working alongside friends affects employee productivity and how this effect is heterogeneous with respect to an employee's personality. This paper presents two main findings. First, w...

Foreign Rivals Are Coming to Town: Responding to the Threat of Foreign Multinational Entry

By Cathy Ge Bao and Maggie Xiaoyang Chen

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2018

How do domestic firms respond to the threat of foreign competition? This paper quantifies foreign competition threats by exploiting news of potential multinational investments from over 35,000 media outlets around the world. Using firm-specific measures o...

Fiscal Rules, Bailouts, and Reputation in Federal Governments

By Alessandro Dovis and Rishabh Kirpalani

American Economic Review, March 2020

Expectations of transfers by central governments incentivize overborrowing by local governments. In this paper, we ask if fiscal rules can reduce overborrowing if central governments cannot commit to enforce penalties when rules are violated. We study a m...

The Evolution of Physician Practice Styles: Evidence from Cardiologist Migration

By David Molitor

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2018

Physician treatment choices for observably similar patients vary dramatically across regions. This paper exploits cardiologist migration to disentangle the role of physician-specific factors such as preferences and learned behavior versus environment-leve...

Estimating the Value of Public Insurance Using Complementary Private Insurance

By Marika Cabral and Mark R. Cullen

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2019

The welfare associated with public insurance is often difficult to quantify because the demand for coverage is unobserved and thus cannot be used to analyze welfare. However, in many settings, individuals can purchase private insurance to supplement publi...

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 ...

Does Incomplete Spanning in International Financial Markets Help to Explain Exchange Rates?

By Hanno Lustig and Adrien Verdelhan

American Economic Review, June 2019

We assume that domestic (foreign) agents, when investing abroad, can only trade in the foreign (domestic) risk-free rates. In a preference-free environment, we derive the exchange rate volatility and risk premia in any such incomplete spanning model, as w...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, May 2019

Raising Capital from Heterogeneous Investors

By Marina Halac, Ilan Kremer, and Eyal Winter

American Economic Review, March 2020

A firm raises capital from multiple investors to fund a project. The project succeeds only if the capital raised exceeds a stochastic threshold, and the firm offers payments contingent on success. We study the firm's optimal unique-implementation scheme, ...

Strategic Ignorance in Sequential Procurement

By Silvana Krasteva and Huseyin Yildirim

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2019

Should a buyer approach sellers of complementary goods informed or uninformed of her private valuations, and if informed, in which sequence? In this paper, we show that an informed buyer would start with the high-value seller to minimize future holdup. In...

Wealth Shocks and Health Outcomes: Evidence from Stock Market Fluctuations

By Hannes Schwandt

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2018

Do wealth shocks affect the health of elderly in developed countries? I exploit the booms and busts in the US stock market as a natural experiment that generated considerable gains and losses in the wealth of stock-holding retirees. Using data from the 19...

Regulating Innovation with Uncertain Quality: Information, Risk, and Access in Medical Devices

By Matthew Grennan and Robert J. Town

American Economic Review, January 2020

We study the impact of regulating product entry and quality information requirements on an oligopoly equilibrium and consumer welfare. Product testing can reduce consumer uncertainty, but also increase entry costs and delay entry. Using variation between ...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2019

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2019

Effects of Austerity: Expenditure- and Tax-Based Approaches

[Symposium: Fiscal Policy]

By Alberto Alesina, Carlo Favero, and Francesco Giavazzi

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2019

We review the debate surrounding the macroeconomic effects of deficit reduction policies (austerity). The discussion about "austerity" in general has distracted commentators and policymakers from a very important result, namely the enormous difference, on...

Subsidizing Health Insurance for Low-Income Adults: Evidence from Massachusetts

By Amy Finkelstein, Nathaniel Hendren, and Mark Shepard

American Economic Review, April 2019

How much are low-income individuals willing to pay for health insurance, and what are the implications for insurance markets? Using administrative data from Massachusetts' subsidized insurance exchange, we exploit discontinuities in the subsidy schedule...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2013

Slow Post-financial Crisis Recovery and Monetary Policy

By Daisuke Ikeda and Takushi Kurozumi

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2019

Post-financial crisis recoveries tend to be slow and accompanied by slowdowns in total factor productivity (TFP) and permanent losses in GDP. To prevent them, how should monetary policy be conducted? We address this issue by developing a model with endoge...

Numbing the China shock

[Research Highlight]

March 06, 2020

Is there a link between free trade and deaths of despair?

The Long-Term Effects of Management and Technology Transfers

By Michela Giorcelli

American Economic Review, January 2019

This paper examines the long-run causal effects of management on firm performance. Under the Productivity Program (1952–1958), the US organized management-training trips for Italian managers to U.S. firms and granted technologically advanced machines to...