Does It Matter if Your Health Insurer Is For Profit? Effects of Ownership on Premiums, Insurance Coverage, and Medical Spending

By Leemore Dafny

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2019

There is limited empirical evidence about the impact of for-profit health insurers on various outcomes. I study the effects of conversions to for-profit status by Blue Cross and Blue Shield (BCBS) affiliates in 11 states, spanning 28 geographic markets. I...

Steering clear of risky mortgages

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To what extent could financial education help home buyers make wiser decisions?

Oxera's Women in Economics Survey and Podcast

[News]

March 11, 2020

Learn about the survey results and listen to the podcast.

How Initial Conditions Can Have Permanent Effects: The Case of the Affordable Care Act

By Florian Scheuer and Kent Smetters

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2018

We document that states that experienced website glitches in the ACA's first year faced higher average costs that persisted into future years. These dynamics are inconsistent with the standard strategic-pricing model, which requires non-localized common k...

Financial Incentives and Earnings of Disability Insurance Recipients: Evidence from a Notch Design

By Philippe Ruh and Stefan Staubli

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2019

Most countries reduce disability insurance (DI ) benefits for beneficiaries earning above a specified threshold. Such an earnings threshold generates a discontinuous increase in tax liability—a notch—and creates an incentive to keep earnings below the...

The Weak Job Recovery in a Macro Model of Search and Recruiting Intensity

By Sylvain Leduc and Zheng Liu

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2020

We show that cyclical fluctuations in search and recruiting intensity are quantitatively important for explaining the weak job recovery from the Great Recession. We demonstrate this result using an estimated labor search model that features endogenous sea...

A Passage to America: University Funding and International Students

By John Bound, Breno Braga, Gaurav Khanna, and Sarah Turner

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2020

The number of international undergraduate students at US public research universities increased dramatically over the past two decades, alongside concurrent reductions in state support for universities. We show that these trends are closely connected as p...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2018

Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2018

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2019

The Marginal Cost of Traffic Congestion and Road Pricing: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Beijing

By Jun Yang, Avralt-Od Purevjav, and Shanjun Li

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2020

Severe traffic congestion is ubiquitous in large urban centers. This paper provides the first causal estimate of the relationship between traffic density and speed and optimal congestion charges using real-time fine-scale traffic data in Beijing. The iden...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2019

Incomplete Disclosure: Evidence of Signaling and Countersignaling

By Benjamin B. Bederson, Ginger Zhe Jin, Phillip Leslie, Alexander J. Quinn, and Ben Zou

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2018

In 2011, Maricopa County adopted voluntary restaurant hygiene grade cards (A, B, C, D). Using inspection results between 2007 and 2013, we show that only 58 percent of the subsequent inspections led to online grade posting. Although the disclosure rate in...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2018

Monetary Policy, Bounded Rationality, and Incomplete Markets

By Emmanuel Farhi and Iván Werning

American Economic Review, November 2019

This paper extends the benchmark New-Keynesian model by introducing two frictions: (i) agent heterogeneity with incomplete markets, uninsurable idiosyncratic risk, and occasionally-binding borrowing constraints; and (ii) bounded rationality in the form of...

Violence and Risk Preference: Experimental Evidence from Afghanistan: Comment

By Ferdinand M. Vieider

American Economic Review, August 2018

In this comment on Callen et al. (2014), I revisit recent evidence uncovering a "preference for certainty" in violation of dominant normative and descriptive theories of decision-making under risk. I show that the empirical findings are potentially confou...

Was the First Public Health Campaign Successful?

By D. Mark Anderson, Kerwin Kofi Charles, Claudio Las Heras Olivares, and Daniel I. Rees

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2019

The US tuberculosis (TB) movement pioneered many of the strategies of modern public health campaigns. Using newly transcribed mortality data at the municipal level for the period 1900–1917, we explore the effectiveness of public health measures champion...

Skewed Wealth Distributions: Theory and Empirics

By Jess Benhabib and Alberto Bisin

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2018

Invariably across a cross-section of countries and time periods, wealth distributions are skewed to the right displaying thick upper tails, that is, large and slowly declining top wealth shares. In this survey we categorize the theoretical studies on th...

Certified Random: A New Order for Coauthorship

By Debraj Ray ⓡ Arthur Robson

American Economic Review, February 2018

Alphabetical name order is the norm for joint publications in economics. However, alphabetical order confers greater benefits on the first author. In a two-author model, we introduce and study certified random order: the uniform randomization of names mad...

A Model of Safe Asset Determination

By Zhiguo He, Arvind Krishnamurthy, and Konstantin Milbradt

American Economic Review, April 2019

What makes an asset a "safe" asset? We study a model where two countries each issue sovereign bonds to satisfy investors' safe asset demands. The countries differ in the float of their bonds and the fundamental resources available to rollover debts. A sov...