Report of the Treasurer

By Peter L. Rousseau

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

The Long-Run Impacts of a Universal Child Care Program

By Michael Baker, Jonathan Gruber, and Kevin Milligan

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2019

Past research documents the persistence of positive impacts of early life interventions on noncognitive skills. We test the symmetry of this finding by studying the persistence of a sizeable negative shock to noncognitive outcomes arising with the introdu...

What Can Be Learned from Spatial Economics?

By Stef Proost and Jacques-François Thisse

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2019

Spatial economics aims to explain why there are peaks and troughs in the spatial distribution of wealth and people, from the international and regional to the urban and local. The main task is to identify the microeconomic underpinnings of centripetal for...

Report: Committee on the Status of Minority Groups in the Economics Profession (CSMGEP)

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Noisy Memory and Over-Reaction to News

By Rava Azeredo da Silveira and Michael Woodford

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We propose a model of optimal decision-making subject to a memory constraint. The constraint is a limit on the complexity of memory measured using Shannon's mutual information, as in models of rational inattention. We show that the model implies that both...

Empirical Bayes Estimation of Treatment Effects with Many A/B Tests: An Overview

By Eduardo M. Azevedo, Alex Deng, José L. Montiel Olea, and E. Glen Weyl

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

The use of large-scale experimentation to screen product innovations is increasingly common. This is a practical guide on how to use treatment effect estimates from a large number of experiments to improve estimates of the effects of each experiment. When...

Reconciling Data Access and Privacy: Building a Sustainable Model for the Future

By Katharine G. Abraham

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

An important factor in the government's ability to collect data from individuals and businesses is the promise that their information will be kept private. Given the explosion of other data increasingly available in electronic form, however, there is a gr...

Entertainment, Education, and Attitudes Toward Domestic Violence

By Abhijit Banerjee, Eliana La Ferrara, and Victor Orozco

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We study attitudes towards domestic violence in a sample of young women and men exposed to the edutainment TV series MTV Shuga 3, which features a sub-plot on this theme, and in a sample that was not. We measure viewers' memory of the characters and ident...

Using Shifts in Deployment and Operations to Test for Racial Bias in Police Stops

By John M. MacDonald and Jeffrey Fagan

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We rely on a policy experiment in the New York City Police Department (NYPD) to address the well-known problems of omitted variable bias and infra-marginality in traditional outcomes tests of racial bias in police stops. The NYPD designated specific areas...

New Evidence on the Cyclicality of Employer-to-Employer Flows from Canada

By Alice Nakamura, Emi Nakamura, Kyle Phong, and Jón Steinsson

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

This paper presents new estimates of gross worker flows for Canada for the sample period 1978 to 2016. We use administrative data from the Canadian Record of Employment in combination with the Canadian Labor Force Survey to estimate employer-to-employer f...

Does Getting Health Insurance Affect Women's Fertility? Evidence from the United Mine Workers' Health Insurance

By Erin Troland and Theodore F. Figinski

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Does health insurance affect fertility decisions? Fertility may increase if insurance lowers the costs of having a child. Fertility may decrease if children are more likely to survive into adulthood (quality-quantity tradeoff). We study a largely permanen...

Memory and Reference Prices: An Application to Rental Choice

By Pedro Bordalo, Nicola Gennaioli, and Andrei Shleifer

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Loewenstein and Simonsohn (2006) found that movers across US cities anchor their rental choices to rents in the city of origin, but subsequently converge to comparable local households. We explain this finding using the authors' (2019) model of memory and...

Flow Origins of Labor Force Participation Fluctuations

By Michael Elsby, Bart Hobijn, Fatih Karahan, Gizem Koşar, and Ayşegül Şahin

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We investigate the origins of cyclical and trend movements in the labor force participation rate (LFPR) using a three-state flow decomposition. The procyclicality of LFPR can be traced to cyclical flows between employment and unemployment. By contrast, la...

Toward the Next Generation of Scholarship: Challenges and Opportunities for Full Participation in PhD Training in Economics

By Thomas D. Jeitschko

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

A great advantage of our rigorous doctoral training is that as PhD economists we speak a common language that allows for efficient vetting and quick dissemination of ideas and insights. But what good is sophisticated grammar and a powerful vocabulary if t...

Simplified Distributional National Accounts

By Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

This paper develops a simplified methodology to distribute total national income across income groups that reproduces closely the sophisticated methodology of Piketty, Saez, and Zucman (2018). It starts from top income share series based on fiscal income ...

Unequal Distributions: EG DNA versus DINA Approach

By Jorrit Zwijnenburg

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

In the past years, projects have been initiated to develop distributional results in line with national accounts totals. Their results differ from those obtained from micro statistics, but also show differences across projects, due to different underlying...

An Economist's Perspective on the Bitcoin Payment System

By Gur Huberman, Jacob D. Leshno, and Ciamac Moallemi

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

The paper's introduction offers a high-level review of Bitcoin's features, especially its governance by protocol. The paper proceeds to summarize Bitcoin's analysis as a payment system. It pays particular attention to a comparison between Bitcoin and a fi...

Exploring Variation in College Counselor Effectiveness

By Andrew Barr and Ben Castleman

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Several recent studies have investigated the impact of college advising on whether students enter and succeed in postsecondary education. These papers generally find positive impacts from advising, yet few explore the extent of heterogeneity in impacts be...

A Cautionary Tale about Emergency Financial Assistance without Services: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial Evaluation at a Community College

By William N. Evans, Melissa S. Kearney, Brendan Perry, and James X. Sullivan

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Community college completion rates are extremely low, especially among low-income students. One potential explanation is that low-income students have limited capacity to overcome financial shocks, such as large medical, legal, or car repair bills. Some p...

How (Not) to Allocate Affordable Housing

By Nick Arnosti and Peng Shi

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We describe the wait-list procedure used in Providence and the lotteries used in New York City, and argue that despite their apparent differences, these systems should lead to similar outcomes. Neither approach effectively uses applicants' preferences to ...