Front Matter

American Economic Review, July 2019

Helping moms be happier

[Research Highlight]

February 27, 2020

Providing cognitive behavioral therapy to depressed new mothers yielded benefits seven years later.

Risk and Return in Village Economies

By Krislert Samphantharak and Robert M. Townsend

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2018

This paper provides a theory-based empirical framework for understanding the risk and return on productive capital assets and their allocation across activities in an economy characterized by idiosyncratic and aggregate risk and thin formal markets for re...

Multidimensional Skill Mismatch

By Fatih Guvenen, Burhan Kuruscu, Satoshi Tanaka, and David Wiczer

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2020

What determines the earnings of a worker relative to his peers in the same occupation? What makes a worker fail in one occupation but succeed in another? More broadly, what are the factors that determine the productivity of a worker-occupation match? To...

One Markup to Rule Them All: Taxation by Liquor Pricing Regulation

By Eugenio J. Miravete, Katja Seim, and Jeff Thurk

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2020

Commodity taxation often involves uniform tax rates. We use alcohol laws that tax differentiated spirits with a comprehensive uniform markup to evaluate redistribution generated by such simple tax policy. We document preference heterogeneity among consume...

Corporate Cash and Employment

By Philippe Bacchetta, Kenza Benhima, and Céline Poilly

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2019

In the aftermath of the US financial crisis, both a sharp drop in employment and a surge in corporate cash have been observed. In this paper, based on US data, we argue that the negative relationship between the corporate cash ratio and employment is syst...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2020

Editor's Note

By Esther Duflo

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2009

The Race between Man and Machine: Implications of Technology for Growth, Factor Shares, and Employment

By Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo

American Economic Review, June 2018

We examine the concerns that new technologies will render labor redundant in a framework in which tasks previously performed by labor can be automated and new versions of existing tasks, in which labor has a comparative advantage, can be created. In a s...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2020

Effectiveness of Fiscal Incentives for R&D: Quasi-experimental Evidence

By Irem Guceri and Li Liu

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2019

We exploit a 2008 UK policy reform that increased the tax incentives for R&D in medium-sized enterprises relative to large ones, to overcome the endogeneity of exposure to such tax credits. We estimate a difference-in-difference design on the universe of ...

Markets with Multidimensional Private Information

By Veronica Guerrieri and Robert Shimer

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2018

This paper explores price formation when sellers are privately informed about their preferences and the quality of their asset. There are many equilibria, including a semi-separating one in which each seller's price depends on a one-dimensional index of h...

The Long-Run Effects of Disruptive Peers

By Scott E. Carrell, Mark Hoekstra, and Elira Kuka

American Economic Review, November 2018

A large and growing literature has documented the importance of peer effects in education. However, there is relatively little evidence on the long-run educational and labor market consequences of childhood peers. We examine this question by linking admin...

Rural Roads and Local Economic Development

By Sam Asher and Paul Novosad

American Economic Review, March 2020

Nearly one billion people worldwide live in rural areas without access to national paved road networks. We estimate the impacts of India's 40 billion USD national rural road construction program using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design and comprehens...

Crafting Intellectual Property Rights: Implications for Patent Assertion Entities, Litigation, and Innovation

By Josh Feng and Xavier Jaravel

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2020

We show that examiner-driven variation in patent rights leads to quantitatively large impacts on several patent outcomes, including patent value, citations, and litigation. Notably, Patent Assertion Entities (PAEs) overwhelmingly purchase patents granted ...

Dynamic Noisy Signaling

By Sander Heinsalu

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 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 ...

Trading across Borders in Online Auctions

By Elena Krasnokutskaya, Christian Terwiesch, and Lucia Tiererova

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2018

We invoke the insights from the auction literature to study trade in services using data from an online market for programming support. We find that the observed clustering of trade between countries can be rationalized through a model featuring endogenou...

Revealed Preferences for Diamond Goods

By Sam Cosaert

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2018

When consumers care not only for the quantity but also the value of a product, it could be rational to purchase products as they become more expensive. This study provides nonparametric—revealed preference—conditions to measure consumers' marg...

Report of the Editor: Journal of Economic Literature

By Steven Durlauf

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Report: Committee on Government Relations

By Phillip Swagel

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019