Report: American Economic Association Committee on Statistics (AEAStat)

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Taken by Storm: Hurricanes, Migrant Networks, and US Immigration

By Parag Mahajan and Dean Yang

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2020

Do negative shocks in origin countries encourage or inhibit international migration? What roles do networks play in modifying out-migration responses? The answers to these questions are not theoretically obvious, and past empirical findings are equivocal....

Bargaining over Babies: Theory, Evidence, and Policy Implications

By Matthias Doepke and Fabian Kindermann

American Economic Review, September 2019

It takes a woman and a man to make a baby. This fact suggests that for a birth to take place, the parents should first agree on wanting a child. Using newly available data on fertility preferences and outcomes, we show that indeed, babies are likely to ar...

Diffusion Games

By Evan Sadler

American Economic Review, January 2020

Behaviors and information often spread via person-to-person diffusion. This paper highlights how diffusion processes can facilitate coordination. I study contagion in a discrete network with Bayesian players. In addition to characterizing the extent and r...

Participating or Not? Characteristics of Female Entrepreneurs Participating in and Completing an Entrepreneurial Training Program

By Leonardo Iacovone, Gabriela Calderón, and Cristina MacGregor

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Who are the female entrepreneurs who end up starting and completing entrepreneurial training programs? In this paper, relying on a large set of baseline characteristics collected before the entrepreneurs are selected into an entrepreneurial training progr...

Internet Rising, Prices Falling: Measuring Inflation in a World of E-Commerce

By Austan D. Goolsbee and Peter J. Klenow

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

The rise of ecommerce and the contrasts between online and traditional retail pricing behavior have raised questions about potential bias in CPI inflation. Using new data on online transactions, this paper shows that aggregate matched-model inflation onli...

Dynamics of Child Mortality Inequality

By Tom S. Vogl

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Half a century of economic research asks how economic inequality evolves during aggregate economic progress. I extend this literature to quantify inequality in the incidence of child death across mothers and study its evolution during aggregate mortality ...

Family Disadvantage and the Gender Gap in Behavioral and Educational Outcomes

By David Autor, David Figlio, Krzysztof Karbownik, Jeffrey Roth, and Melanie Wasserman

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2019

Boys born to disadvantaged families have higher rates of disciplinary problems, lower achievement scores, and fewer high school completions than girls from comparable backgrounds. Using birth certificates matched to schooling records for Florida children ...

The Welfare Effects of Nudges: A Case Study of Energy Use Social Comparisons

By Hunt Allcott and Judd B. Kessler

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2019

"Nudge"-style interventions are often deemed successful if they generate large behavior change at low cost, but they are rarely subjected to full social welfare evaluations. We combine a field experiment with a simple theoretical framework to evaluate the...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2020

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2018

Do Management Interventions Last? Evidence from India

By Nicholas Bloom, Aprajit Mahajan, David McKenzie, and John Roberts

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2020

We revisited Indian weaving firms nine years after a randomized experiment that changed their management practices. While about half of the practices adopted in the original experimental plants had been dropped, there was still a large and significant gap...

Peeking on others' paychecks

[Research Highlight]

March 18, 2020

Income transparency might help reduce wage disparity, but would it make us happier?

The Paper Trail of Knowledge Spillovers: Evidence from Patent Interferences

By Ina Ganguli, Jeffrey Lin, and Nicholas Reynolds

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2020

We show evidence of localized knowledge spillovers using a new database of US patent interferences terminated between 1998 and 2014. Interferences resulted when two or more independent parties submitted identical claims of invention nearly simultaneously....

Saving by Default: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Rural India

By Vincent Somville and Lore Vandewalle

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2018

Access to banks is rapidly increasing worldwide, and allows account-based instead of cash transfers. We conduct a randomized experiment documenting the impact of the payment method on savings behavior. In India, we allocate identical weekly payments into ...

Health Care Access, Costs, and Treatment Dynamics: Evidence from In Vitro Fertilization

By Barton H. Hamilton, Emily Jungheim, Brian McManus, and Juan Pantano

American Economic Review, December 2018

We study public policies designed to improve access and reduce costs for In Vitro Fertilization (IVF). High out-of-pocket prices can deter potential patients from IVF, while active patients have an incentive to risk costly high-order pregnancies to improv...

ProPelled: The Effects of Grants on Graduation, Earnings, and Welfare

By Jeffrey T. Denning, Benjamin M. Marx, and Lesley J. Turner

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2019

We estimate effects of the Pell Grant—the largest US federal grant for college students—using administrative data from Texas public colleges and a discontinuity in grant generosity for low-income students. Within four-year institutions, eligibility fo...

A Theory of Organizational Dynamics: Internal Politics and Efficiency

By Hongbin Cai, Hong Feng, and Xi Weng

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2018

We consider a three-member organization in which one member retires in each period and the incumbent members vote to admit a candidate to fill the vacancy. Candidates differ in quality and belong to one of two types, and majority-type members share the to...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2018

Paying for Kidneys? A Randomized Survey and Choice Experiment

By Julio J. Elías, Nicola Lacetera, and Mario Macis

American Economic Review, August 2019

We conducted a randomized survey with 2,666 US residents to study preferences for legalizing payments to kidney donors. We found strong polarization, with many participants supporting or opposing payments regardless of potential transplant gains. However,...