Challenges in the Measurement of Leakage Risk

By Meredith Fowlie and Mar Reguant

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Concerns about emissions leakage, i.e., the increase in emissions in foreign jurisdictions induced by a domestic emissions regulation, loom large in debates about unilateral climate change policy. Correctly identifying the kinds of economic activities mos...

Parental Aspirations for Children's Education: Is There a "Girl Effect"? Experimental Evidence from Rural Ethiopia

By Tanguy Bernard, Stefan Dercon, Kate Orkin, and Alemayehu Seyoum Taffesse

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We report on an experiment with poor rural households in Ethiopia, which aimed to boost aspirations for a better future through exposure to documentaries featuring local male and female role models. We explore effects on parents' educational aspirations...

Connecting across disciplines

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Other fields in the social sciences have been increasingly citing economics research. Has economics become more outward-looking, too?

Disenfranchisement and Economic Inequality: Downstream Effects of Shelby County v. Holder

By Abhay P. Aneja and Carlos F. Avenancio-León

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

The 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) is considered by many to be the most effective civil rights law ever passed. In 2013, the Supreme Court struck down important provisions from the VRA in Shelby County v. Holder. This paper first discusses how the ...

Some Principles for Regulating Cyber Risk

By Anil K. Kashyap and Anne Wetherilt

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We explain why cyber risk differs from other operational risks in the financial sector. The form of cyber shocks differs because of their intent, probability of success, possibility of a hidden phase, and evolving form of the risks. The impact differs bec...

Currency Substitution under Transaction Costs

By Linda M. Schilling and Harald Uhlig

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We consider a setting where agents can choose between two currencies to conduct their goods purchases. The usage of either currency comes with currency-specific transactions costs. For example, purchasing some goods with cryptocurrencies rather than dolla...

Challenges of Monitoring Tax Compliance by Multinational Firms: Evidence from Chile

By Sebastián Bustos, Dina Pomeranz, José Vila-Belda, and Gabriel Zucman

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

This paper reviews common challenges of taxing multinational firms, using Chile as a case study. We briefly describe key international tax avoidance methods: profit shifting to low-tax jurisdictions through transfer pricing and debt shifting. We discuss t...

China versus the United States: IMS Meets IPS

By Emmanuel Farhi and Matteo Maggiori

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Currently both the International Monetary System (IMS) and the International Price Systems (IPS) are dominated by the United States. The emergence of China, both as reserve currency and as a currency of invoicing, is likely to disrupt this status quo. We ...

Macroprudential Policy: What We've Learned, Don't Know, and Need to Do

By Kristin J. Forbes

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Over the last decade, macroprudential policy has made important advances and become more widely used. We have a better understanding of its goals and tools, and are accumulating evidence that it can be effective on its direct targets, albeit often with un...

On the Heterogeneity in Family Earnings and Income Dynamics in the PSID

By Dmytro Hryshko and Iourii Manovskii

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

A large body of knowledge on income dynamics in the United States is based on data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). We find two sets of households in the PSID that differ dramatically in the dynamics of their income. Households headed by th...

Measuring Productivity: Lessons from Tailored Surveys and Productivity Benchmarking

By David Atkin, Amit K. Khandelwal, and Adam Osman

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We use tailored surveys and benchmarking in the flat-weave rug industry to better understand the shortcomings of standard productivity measures. Quantity-based productivity (TFPQ) performs poorly because of variation in product specifications across firms...

Mastering Panel Metrics: Causal Impact of Democracy on Growth

By Shuowen Chen, Victor Chernozhukov, and Iván Fernández-Val

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We revisit the panel data analysis of Acemoglu et al. (forthcoming) on the relationship between democracy and economic growth using state-of-the-art econometric methods. We argue that panel data settings are high-dimensional, resulting in estimators to be...

Optimal Payment Areas or Optimal Currency Areas?

By Patrick Bolton and Haizhou Huang

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

We use the Optimal Capital Structure of Nations framework in Bolton and Huang (2018) to develop a new theory of Optimum Currency Areas. Whether two economically integrated nations should form an optimal currency area depends on a trade-off between financi...

Indoor Air Pollution and Infant Mortality: A New Approach

By Imelda

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

I propose a new approach to estimate the impact of changes in indoor air quality on infant mortality. I use a quasi-experimental design, leveraging the largest kerosene to liquid petroleum gas (LPG) conversion program implemented in a developing country. ...

Short-Term Impacts of a Pay-It-Forward Livestock Transfer and Training Program in Nepal

By Sarah Janzen, Nicholas Magnan, Sudhindra Sharma, and William Thompson

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

This study evaluates the short-term impacts of a livestock transfer and training program in Nepal using an RCT with three treatments to capture differential effects of program components. We also evaluate a unique "pay it forward" program rule where recip...

Estimating Heterogeneous Consumer Preferences for Restaurants and Travel Time Using Mobile Location Data

By Susan Athey, David Blei, Robert Donnelly, Francisco Ruiz, and Tobias Schmidt

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

We estimate a model of consumer choices over restaurants using data from several thousand anonymous mobile phone users. Restaurants have latent characteristics (whose distribution may depend on restaurant observables) that affect consumers' mean utility a...

The Rise of the Dollar and Fall of the Euro as International Currencies

By Matteo Maggiori, Brent Neiman, and Jesse Schreger

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

International currencies play important roles as foreign exchange reserves but are also most frequently used to denominate corporate and government bonds, bank loans, and import and export invoices. These currencies offer unrivaled liquidity, constituting...

Retrospectives: Tragedy of the Commons after 50 Years

By Brett M. Frischmann, Alain Marciano, and Giovanni Battista Ramello

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2019

Garrett Hardin's "The Tragedy of the Commons" (1968) has been incredibly influential generally and within economics, and it remains important despite some historical and conceptual flaws. Hardin focused on the stress population growth inevitably placed ...

The Gender Gap in Undergraduate Economics Course Persistence and Degree Selection

By Laura J. Ahlstrom and Carlos J. Asarta

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

This study examines male and female course persistence and choice of economics degree via a combination of student, instructor, and structural characteristics. We find that students of both genders who declare economics as their major are more likely to t...

Differential Privacy and Census Data: Implications for Social and Economic Research

By Steven Ruggles, Catherine Fitch, Diana Magnuson, and Jonathan Schroeder

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

The Census Bureau has announced new methods for disclosure control in public use data products. The new approach, known as differential privacy, represents a radical departure from current practice. In its pure form, differential privacy techniques may ma...