Incentivizing Safer Sexual Behavior: Evidence from a Lottery Experiment on HIV Prevention

By Martina Björkman Nyqvist, Lucia Corno, Damien de Walque, and Jakob Svensson

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2018

We investigate the effect of a financial lottery program in Lesotho with relatively low expected payments but a chance to win a high prize conditional on negative test results for sexually transmitted infections. The intervention resulted in a 21.4 percen...

Life after Lead: Effects of Early Interventions for Children Exposed to Lead

By Stephen B. Billings and Kevin T. Schnepel

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2018

Lead pollution is consistently linked to cognitive and behavioral impairments, yet little is known about the benefits of public health interventions for children exposed to lead. This paper estimates the long-term impacts of early-life interventions (e.g....

Academic Peer Effects with Different Group Assignment Policies: Residential Tracking versus Random Assignment

By Robert Garlick

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2018

I study the relative academic performance of students tracked or randomly assigned to South African university dormitories. Tracking reduces low-scoring students' GPAs and has little effect on high-scoring students, leading to lower and more dispersed GPA...

Ethnolinguistic Favoritism in African Politics

By Andrew Dickens

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2018

African political leaders have a tendency to favor members of their own ethnic group. Yet for all other ethnic groups in a country, it is unclear whether having a similar ethnicity to the leader is beneficial. To shed light on this issue, I use a continuo...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, July 2018

Marketplaces, Markets, and Market Design

By Alvin E. Roth

American Economic Review, July 2018

Marketplaces are often small parts of large markets, and both markets and marketplaces come in many varieties. Market design seeks to understand what marketplaces must accomplish to enable different kinds of markets. Marketplaces can have varying degrees ...

Asymmetric Information and Imperfect Competition in Lending Markets

By Gregory S. Crawford, Nicola Pavanini, and Fabiano Schivardi

American Economic Review, July 2018

We study the effects of asymmetric information and imperfect competition in the market for small business lines of credit. We estimate a structural model of credit demand, loan use, pricing, and firm default using matched firm-bank data from Italy. We fin...

News or Noise? The Missing Link

By Ryan Chahrour and Kyle Jurado

American Economic Review, July 2018

The literature on belief-driven business cycles treats news and noise as distinct representations of agents' beliefs. We prove they are empirically the same. Our result lets us isolate the importance of purely belief-driven fluctuations. Using three promi...

Do Recessions Accelerate Routine-Biased Technological Change? Evidence from Vacancy Postings

By Brad Hershbein and Lisa B. Kahn

American Economic Review, July 2018

We show that skill requirements in job vacancy postings differentially increased in MSAs that were hit hard by the Great Recession, relative to less hard-hit areas. These increases persist through at least the end of 2015 and are correlated with increases...

The Twin Ds: Optimal Default and Devaluation

By Seunghoon Na, Stephanie Schmitt-Grohé, Martín Uribe, and Vivian Yue

American Economic Review, July 2018

A salient characteristic of sovereign defaults is that they are typically accompanied by large devaluations. This paper presents new evidence of this empirical regularity known as the Twin Ds and proposes a model that rationalizes it as an optimal policy ...

Consumer Price Search and Platform Design in Internet Commerce

By Michael Dinerstein, Liran Einav, Jonathan Levin, and Neel Sundaresan

American Economic Review, July 2018

The platform design, the process that helps potential buyers on the internet navigate toward products they may purchase, plays a critical role in reducing search frictions and determining market outcomes. We study a key trade-off associated with two impor...

University Innovation and the Professor's Privilege

By Hans K. Hvide and Benjamin F. Jones

American Economic Review, July 2018

National policies take varied approaches to encouraging university-based innovation. This paper studies a natural experiment: the end of the "professor's privilege" in Norway, where university researchers previously enjoyed full rights to their innovation...

Export Markets and Labor Allocation in a Low-Income Country

By Brian McCaig and Nina Pavcnik

American Economic Review, July 2018

We study the effects of a positive export shock on labor allocation between the informal, microenterprise sector and the formal firm sector in a low-income country. The United States-Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement led to large reductions in US tariffs ...

The Persistence of Local Joblessness

By Michael Amior and Alan Manning

American Economic Review, July 2018

Differences in employment-population ratios across US commuting zones have persisted for many decades. We claim these disparities represent real gaps in economic opportunity for individuals of fixed characteristics. These gaps persist despite a strong mig...

Backward Induction in the Wild? Evidence from Sequential Voting in the US Senate

By Jörg L. Spenkuch, B. Pablo Montagnes, and Daniel B. Magleby

American Economic Review, July 2018

In the US Senate, roll calls are held in alphabetical order. We document that senators early in the order are less likely to vote with the majority of their own party than those whose last name places them at the end of the alphabet. To speak to the mecha...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2018

The Firm Size Distribution across Countries and Skill-Biased Change in Entrepreneurial Technology

By Markus Poschke

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2018

Development is associated with systematic changes in the firm size distribution. I document that the mean and dispersion of firm size are larger in rich countries, and increased over time for US firms. To analyze the firm size-development link, I construc...

Mismatch Unemployment and the Geography of Job Search

By Ioana Marinescu and Roland Rathelot

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2018

Could we significantly reduce US unemployment by helping job seekers move closer to jobs? Using data from the leading employment board CareerBuilder.com, we show that, indeed, workers dislike applying to distant jobs: job seekers are 35 percent less likel...

The Role of Annuitized Wealth in Post-retirement Behavior

By John Laitner, Dan Silverman, and Dmitriy Stolyarov

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2018

This paper develops a tractable model of post-retirement behavior with health status uncertainty and state-verification difficulties. The model distinguishes between annuitized and non-annuitized wealth and features means-tested Medicaid assistance with n...

Do Job Destruction Shocks Matter in the Theory of Unemployment?

By Melvyn G. Coles and Ali Moghaddasi Kelishomi

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2018

Because the data show that market tightness is not orthogonal to unemployment, this paper identifies the many empirical difficulties caused by adopting the free entry of vacancies assumption in the Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides (DMP) framework. Relaxing th...