Strategyproof Choice of Social Acts

By Eric Bahel and Yves Sprumont

American Economic Review, February 2020

We model uncertain social prospects as acts mapping states of nature to (social) outcomes. A social choice function (or SCF) assigns an act to each profile of subjective expected utility preferences over acts. An SCF is strategyproof if no agent ever ha...

Aggregation and the Gravity Equation

By Stephen J. Redding and David E. Weinstein

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

One of the most successful empirical relationships in international trade is the gravity equation. A key decision for researchers in estimating this relationship is the level of aggregation, since the gravity equation is log linear, whereas aggregation in...

Trends and Disparities in Leave Use under California's Paid Family Leave Program: New Evidence from Administrative Data

By Sarah Bana, Kelly Bedard, and Maya Rossin-Slater

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

We use novel administrative data to study trends and disparities in usage of California's first-in-the-nation paid family leave (PFL) program. We show that take-up for both bonding with a new child and caring for an ill family member increased over 2005â€...

Investment Strategy and Selection Bias: An Equilibrium Perspective on Overoptimism

By Philippe Jehiel

American Economic Review, June 2018

Investors implement projects based on idiosyncratic signal observations, without knowing how signals and returns are jointly distributed. The following heuristic is studied: investors collect information on previously implemented projects with the same si...

Report of the Editor: American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

By Matthew D. Shapiro

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

When Work Disappears: Manufacturing Decline and the Falling Marriage Market Value of Young Men

By David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2019

We exploit the gender-specific components of large-scale labor demand shocks stemming from rising international manufacturing competition to test how shifts in the relative economic stature of young men versus young women affected marriage, fertility, and...

Promotion Signaling and Human Capital Investments

By Michael Waldman and Ori Zax

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2020

In a world characterized by asymmetric learning, promotions can serve as signals of worker ability, and this, in turn, can result in inefficient promotion decisions. If the labor market is competitive, the result will be practices that reduce this distort...

Demand and Supply of Infrequent Payments as a Commitment Device: Evidence from Kenya

By Lorenzo Casaburi and Rocco Macchiavello

American Economic Review, February 2019

Despite extensive evidence that preferences are often time-inconsistent, there is only scarce evidence of willingness to pay for commitment. Infrequent payments for frequently provided goods and services are a common feature of many markets and they may n...

Disentangling the Effects of a Banking Crisis: Evidence from German Firms and Counties

By Kilian Huber

American Economic Review, March 2018

Lending cuts by banks directly affect the firms borrowing from them, but also indirectly depress economic activity in the regions in which they operate. This paper moves beyond firm-level studies by estimating the effects of an exogenous lending cut by a ...

A Cross-Country Comparison of Dynamics in the Large Firm Wage Premium

By Emanuele Colonnelli, Joacim TÃ¥g, Michael Webb, and Stefanie Wolter

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

We provide stylized facts on the existence and dynamics over time of the large firm wage premium for four countries. We examine matched employer-employee micro-data from Brazil, Germany, Sweden, and the UK, and find that the large firm premium exists in a...

Ramsey Strikes Back: Optimal Commodity Tax and Redistribution in the Presence of Salience Effects

By Hunt Allcott, Benjamin Lockwood, and Dmitry Taubinsky

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

An influential result in modern optimal tax theory, the Atkinson and Stiglitz (1976) theorem, holds that for a broad class of utility functions, all redistribution should be carried out through labor income taxation, rather than differential taxes on co...

Gender Norms and Relative Working Hours: Why Do Women Suffer More Than Men from Working Longer Hours Than Their Partners?

By Sarah Fleche, Anthony Lepinteur, and Nattavudh Powdthavee

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Constraints that prevent women from working longer hours are argued to be important drivers of the gender wage gap in the United States. We provide evidence that in couples where the wife's working hours exceed the husband's, the wife reports lower life s...

The Rise of the Gig Economy: Fact or Fiction?

By Katharine G. Abraham, John Haltiwanger, Kristin Sandusky, and James Spletzer

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Gig work mediated through online platforms has received much recent attention. We find only one sector—the transportation services sector—in which there is unambiguous evidence of substantial and rapidly growing gig activity. A challenge for tracking ...

Long-Term Treatment Effects of Job Search Assistance and Training: A Summary of Recent Evidence

By Day Manoli and Ankur Patel

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

This paper presents a summary of recent evidence on long-term treatment effects from job search assistance and training services on labor market outcomes. The evidence is based on merging program data from three randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to admi...

A Bias of Screening

By David Lagziel and Ehud Lehrer

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2019

This paper deals with the issue of screening. It focuses on a decision maker who, based on noisy unbiased assessments, screens elements from a general set. Our analysis shows that stricter screening not only reduces the number of accepted elements, but po...

How Elastic is the Demand for Tax Havens? Evidence from the US Possessions Corporations Tax Credit

By Daniel Garrett and Juan Carlos Suárez Serrato

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Why do some firms adopt certain tax havens, and how sensitive is the demand for tax havens? We address these questions by studying how the repeal of section 936 tax credits affected firms with affiliates in Puerto Rico. We first describe the characteristi...

Salary Delays and Overdrafts in Rural Ghana

By Niklas Buehren, Virginia Ceretti, Ervin Dervisevic, Markus Goldstein, Leora Klapper, Tricia Koroknay-Palicz, and Simone Schaner

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Checking overdrafts are an expensive yet common way for bank account holders to obtain short-term credit when faced with unexpected shocks. In developing countries, one common shock that many salaried workers face is late or erratic payment from their emp...

Gendered Language on the Economics Job Market Rumors Forum

By Alice H. Wu

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

This paper examines the existence of an unwelcoming or stereotypical culture using evidence on how women and men are portrayed in anonymous discussions on the Economics Job Market Rumors forum (EJMR). I use a Lasso-Logistic model to measure gendered langu...

Blockchains, Coordination, and Forks

By Bruno Biais, Christophe Bisière, Matthieu Bouvard, and Catherine Casamatta

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Blockchains are distributed ledgers. Their protocol aims at ensuring that the miners in charge of recording transactions reach a consensus about a unique ledger. In this paper, we highlight that the game induced by the blockchain proof-of-work protocol ge...

The Child Left Behind: Parental Incarceration and Adult Human Capital in the United States

By Laura E. Henkhaus

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Exposure to parental incarceration is particularly prevalent in the United States, where about 7 percent of children have lived with a parent who was incarcerated. In this paper, I use nationally representative US data and apply partial identification met...