A Spatial Knowledge Economy

By Donald R. Davis and Jonathan I. Dingel

American Economic Review, January 2019

Leading empiricists and theorists of cities have recently argued that the generation and exchange of ideas must play a more central role in the analysis of cities. This paper develops the first system of cities model with costly idea exchange as the agglo...

Railroads of the Raj: Estimating the Impact of Transportation Infrastructure

By Dave Donaldson

American Economic Review, April 2018

How large are the benefits of transportation infrastructure projects, and what explains these benefits? This paper uses archival data from colonial India to investigate the impact of India's vast railroad network. Guided by four results from a general equ...

Does Teacher Training Actually Work? Evidence from a Large-Scale Randomized Evaluation of a National Teacher Training Program

By Prashant Loyalka, Anna Popova, Guirong Li, and Zhaolei Shi

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2019

Despite massive investments in teacher professional development (PD) programs in developing countries, there is little evidence on their effectiveness. We present results of a large-scale, randomized evaluation of a national PD program in China in which t...

Structural Interpretation of Vector Autoregressions with Incomplete Identification: Revisiting the Role of Oil Supply and Demand Shocks

By Christiane Baumeister and James D. Hamilton

American Economic Review, May 2019

Traditional approaches to structural vector autoregressions (VARs) can be viewed as special cases of Bayesian inference arising from very strong prior beliefs. These methods can be generalized with a less restrictive formulation that incorporates uncertai...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2009

The Declining Labor Market Prospects of Less-Educated Men

[Symposium: The Problems of Men]

By Ariel J. Binder and John Bound

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2019

Over the last half century, US wage growth stagnated, wage inequality rose, and the labor-force participation rate of prime-age men steadily declined. In this article, we examine these worrying labor market trends, focusing on outcomes for males without...

Innovation and Production in the Global Economy

By Costas Arkolakis, Natalia Ramondo, Andrés Rodríguez-Clare, and Stephen Yeaple

American Economic Review, August 2018

We develop a quantifiable general equilibrium model of trade and multinational production (MP) in which countries can specialize in innovation or production. Home market effects or comparative advantage leads some countries to specialize in innovation and...

Public Spillovers from Private Insurance Contracting: Physician Responses to Managed Care

By Michael R. Richards and D. Sebastian Tello-Trillo

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2019

Managed care is rebounding as more emphasis is placed on cost containment. These efforts may benefit consumers but challenge providers; however, empirical evidence on how supply-side managed care influences physicians is incomplete. We leverage a quasi-ex...

Why Has Urban Inequality Increased?

By Nathaniel Baum-Snow, Matthew Freedman, and Ronni Pavan

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2018

This paper examines mechanisms driving the more rapid increases in wage inequality in larger cities between 1980 and 2007. Production function estimates indicate strong evidence of capital-skill complementarity and increases in the skill bias of agglomera...

Career Concerns and the Nature of Skills

By Gonzalo Cisternas

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2018

I examine how career concerns are shaped by the nature of productive actions taken by workers. A worker's skills follow a Gaussian process with an endogenous component reflecting human-capital accumulation. Effort and skills are substitutes both in th...

Measuring and Bounding Experimenter Demand

By Jonathan de Quidt, Johannes Haushofer, and Christopher Roth

American Economic Review, November 2018

We propose a technique for assessing robustness to demand effects of findings from experiments and surveys. The core idea is that by deliberately inducing demand in a structured way we can bound its influence. We present a model in which participants resp...

Supply-Side Drug Policy in the Presence of Substitutes: Evidence from the Introduction of Abuse-Deterrent Opioids

By Abby Alpert, David Powell, and Rosalie Liccardo Pacula

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2018

Overdose deaths from prescription opioid pain relievers nearly quadrupled between 1999 and 2010. We study the consequences of one of the largest supply disruptions to date to abusable opioids—the introduction of an abuse-deterrent version of OxyContin i...

Educational Investment Responses to Economic Opportunity: Evidence from Indian Road Construction

By Anjali Adukia, Sam Asher, and Paul Novosad

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2020

The rural poor in developing countries, once economically isolated, are increasingly being connected to outside markets. Whether these new connections crowd out or encourage educational investment is a central question. We examine the effects on education...

On the Returns to Invention within Firms: Evidence from Finland

By Philippe Aghion, Ufuk Akcigit, Ari Hyytinen, and Otto Toivanen

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

In this paper we merge individual income data, firm-level data, patenting data, and IQ data in Finland over the period 1988–2012 to analyze the returns to invention for inventors and their coworkers or stakeholders within the same firm. We find that: (i...

The "Standard Error" of Event Studies: Lessons from the 2016 Election

By Justin Wolfers and Eric Zitzewitz

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

The 2016 Election offers an unusually stark warning about the limitations of event studies. In four separate pre-election event windows, financial market responses to shifts in electoral probabilities were consistent with expectations that a surprise Trum...

Measuring Welfare with Massive Online Choice Experiments: A Brief Introduction

By Erik Brynjolfsson, Felix Eggers, and Avinash Gannamaneni

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

GDP is a measure of production, and yet it is widely used as a proxy for well-being. It is particularly ill-suited for assessing the contributions of digital goods which are free to consumers and thus excluded from GDP measures. This underscores the need ...

International Recessions

By Fabrizio Perri and Vincenzo Quadrini

American Economic Review, April 2018

Macro developments leading up to the 2008 crisis displayed an unprecedented degree of international synchronization. Before the crisis, all G7 countries experienced credit growth and, around the time of the Lehman bankruptcy, they all faced sharp and larg...

Low Real Interest Rates, Collateral Misrepresentation, and Monetary Policy

By Stephen D. Williamson

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2018

A model is constructed in which households and banks have incentives to fake the quality of collateral. These incentive problems matter when collateral is scarce in the aggregate—when real interest rates are low. Conventional monetary easing can exacerb...

Bargaining and News

By Brendan Daley and Brett Green

American Economic Review, February 2020

We study a bargaining model in which a buyer makes frequent offers to a privately informed seller, while gradually learning about the seller's type from "news." We show that the buyer's ability to leverage this information to extract more surplus from the...

Slow Moving Debt Crises

By Guido Lorenzoni and Iván Werning

American Economic Review, September 2019

We study slow moving debt crises: self-fulfilling equilibria in which high interest rates, due to the fear of a future default, lead to a gradual but faster accumulation of debt, ultimately validating investors' fear. We show that slow moving crises arise...