Private Paternalism, the Commitment Puzzle, and Model-Free Equilibrium

By David Laibson

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Paternalism is a policy that advances an individual's interests by restricting his or her freedom. In a setting with present-biased agents, I characterize the scope of private paternalism—paternalism implemented by private institutions. Private patern...

Economic Expectations, Voting, and Economic Decisions around Elections

By Gur Huberman, Tobias Konitzer, Masha Krupenkin, David Rothschild, and Shawndra Hill

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Survey respondents who associate themselves with the "winning team" in an election, substantially increase their expectations for their stock market, but only modestly increase their expected household economic well-being. The impact of the election outco...

Child Penalties across Countries: Evidence and Explanations

By Henrik Kleven, Camille Landais, Johanna Posch, Andreas Steinhauer, and Josef Zweimüller

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

This paper provides evidence on child penalties in female and male earnings in different countries. The estimates are based on event studies around the birth of the first child, using the specification proposed by Kleven et al. (2018). The analysis reveal...

The Empirics of Social Progress: The Interplay between Subjective Well-Being and Societal Performance

By Daniel Fehder, Michael Porter, and Scott Stern

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Though economists have long recognized that GDP is not by itself a measure of societal well-being, most GDP alternatives incorporate direct measures of economic performance. We propose instead an independently constructed measure, a social progress index,...

A Foundation for Efficiency Wage Contracts

By John Y. Zhu

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2018

In many jobs, the worker generates only subjective performance measures privately observed by the employer, and contracts must rely on employer reports about these measures. This setting is a game with private monitoring, and prior work suggests that the ...

Sophisticated Bidders in Beauty-Contest Auctions

By Stefano Galavotti, Luigi Moretti, and Paola Valbonesi

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2018

We study bidding behavior by firms in beauty-contest auctions, i.e., auctions in which the winning bid is the one which gets closest to some function (average) of all submitted bids. Using a dataset on public procurement beauty-contest auctions, we show t...

School Finance Reform and the Distribution of Student Achievement

By Julien Lafortune, Jesse Rothstein, and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2018

We study the impact of post-1990 school finance reforms, during the so-called "adequacy" era, on absolute and relative spending and achievement in low-income school districts. Using an event study research design that exploits the apparent randomness of r...

The Currency Composition of Sovereign Debt

By Pablo Ottonello and Diego J. Perez

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2019

We study the currency composition of sovereign debt in emerging economies through the lens of a model in which the government lacks commitment regarding debt and monetary policy. High levels of debt in local currency give rise to incentives to dilute debt...

Provider Supply, Utilization, and Infant Health: Evidence from a Physician Distribution Policy

By Bladimir Carrillo and Jose Feres

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2019

We analyze a policy that substantially expanded the supply of primary care physicians in Brazil. The program increased doctor visits across all age groups and led to greater utilization of doctors for prenatal care. However, these physicians replaced nurs...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2011

Links to individual book reviews now available online.

Education and Mortality: Evidence from a Social Experiment

By Costas Meghir, Mårten Palme, and Emilia Simeonova

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2018

We examine the effects on mortality and health due to a major Swedish educational reform that increased the years of compulsory schooling. Using the gradual phase-in of the reform between 1949 and 1962 across municipalities, we estimate insignificant effe...

Retirement Lock and Prescription Drug Insurance: Evidence from Medicare Part D

By Gal Wettstein

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2020

I examine whether lack of an individual market for prescription drug insurance causes individuals to delay retirement. Exploiting the 2006 introduction of Medicare Part D, which subsidized drug insurance for Americans over age 65, I use a triple-differenc...

Resurrecting the Role of the Product Market Wedge in Recessions

By Mark Bils, Peter J. Klenow, and Benjamin A. Malin

American Economic Review, April 2018

Employment and hours are more cyclical than dictated by productivity and consumption. This intratemporal labor wedge can arise from product or labor market distortions. Based on employee wages, the literature has attributed the intratemporal wedge almost ...

Social Media and Corruption

By Ruben Enikolopov, Maria Petrova, and Konstantin Sonin

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2018

Does new media promote accountability in nondemocratic countries, where offline media is often suppressed? We show that blog posts, which exposed corruption in Russian state-controlled companies, had a negative causal impact on their market returns. For i...

Learning Job Skills from Colleagues at Work: Evidence from a Field Experiment Using Teacher Performance Data

By John P. Papay, Eric S. Taylor, John H. Tyler, and Mary E. Laski

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2020

We study a program designed to encourage learning from coworkers among school teachers. In an experiment, we document gains in job performance when high- and low-skilled teachers are paired and asked to work together on improving their skills. Pairs are m...

Access to Migration for Rural Households

By Cynthia Kinnan, Shing-Yi Wang, and Yongxiang Wang

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2018

This paper exploits a unique feature of China's history, the "sent-down youth" (SDY) program, to study the effects of access to internal migration. We show that temporary migration due to the SDY program created lasting inter-province links. We interact t...

The Relation between Behavior under Risk and over Time

By Anujit Chakraborty, Yoram Halevy, and Kota Saito

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2020

The paper establishes a tight relation between nonstandard behaviors in the domains of risk and time, by considering a decision-maker with non-expected utility preferences who believes that only present consumption is certain while any future consumption ...

Frictions in a Competitive, Regulated Market: Evidence from Taxis

By Guillaume R. Fréchette, Alessandro Lizzeri, and Tobias Salz

American Economic Review, August 2019

This paper presents a dynamic equilibrium model of a taxi market. The model is estimated using data from New York City yellow cabs. Two salient features by which most taxi markets deviate from the efficient market ideal are, first, matching frictions cr...

Incentives and the Supply of Effective Charter Schools

By John D. Singleton

American Economic Review, July 2019

Charter school funding is typically set by formulas that provide the same amount for students regardless of advantage or need. I present evidence that this policy skews the distribution of students served by charters toward low-cost populations by influen...

2020 AEA Conference on Teaching and Research in Economic Education Cancelled

[News]

March 20, 2020

View member announcement from March 20, 2020.