Subsidies and Time Discounting in New Technology Adoption: Evidence from Solar Photovoltaic Systems

By Olivier De Groote and Frank Verboven

American Economic Review, June 2019

We study a generous program to promote the adoption of solar photovoltaic (PV) systems through subsidies on future electricity production, rather than through upfront investment subsidies. We develop a tractable dynamic model of new technology adoption, a...

Relative Price Dispersion: Evidence and Theory

By Greg Kaplan, Guido Menzio, Leena Rudanko, and Nicholas Trachter

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2019

Relative price dispersion refers to persistent differences in the price that different retailers set for one particular good relative to the price they set for other goods. Relative price dispersion accounts for 30 percent of the overall variance of price...

Now You See Me, Now You Don't: The Geography of Police Stops

By Jesse J. Kalinowski, Matthew B. Ross, and Stephen L. Ross

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

This paper uses state police stop data in Texas to assess patrol activity. We find that both the types of stops and allocation of resources over space change in darkness relative to daylight, and that the changes in stop type and manpower allocation are c...

Inventory Management, Product Quality, and Cross-Country Income Differences

By Bernardo S. Blum, Sebastian Claro, Kunal Dasgupta, and Ignatius J. Horstmann

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2019

Previous research has documented that export shipments are "lumpy"—exporters make infrequent and relatively large shipments to any given export destination. This fact has been interpreted as implying that fixed, per shipment cost and inventory man...

Test Design and Minimum Standards

By Peter M. DeMarzo, Ilan Kremer, and Andrzej Skrzypacz

American Economic Review, June 2019

We analyze test design and certification standards when an uninformed seller has the option to generate and disclose costly information regarding asset quality. We characterize equilibria by a minimum principle: the test and disclosure policy are chosen t...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2018

Screening in Contract Design: Evidence from the ACA Health Insurance Exchanges

By Michael Geruso, Timothy Layton, and Daniel Prinz

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2019

We study insurers' use of prescription drug formularies to screen consumers in the ACA Health Insurance exchanges. We begin by showing that exchange risk adjustment and reinsurance succeed in neutralizing selection incentives for most, but not all, consum...

Some Causal Effects of an Industrial Policy

By Chiara Criscuolo, Ralf Martin, Henry G. Overman, and John Van Reenen

American Economic Review, January 2019

We exploit changes in the area-specific eligibility criteria for a program to support jobs through investment subsidies. European rules determine whether an area is eligible for subsidies, and we construct instrumental variables for area eligibility based...

Soft Commitments, Reminders, and Academic Performance

By Oliver Himmler, Robert Jäckle, and Philipp Weinschenk

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2019

We provide first evidence that a soft commitment device enhances progress in education and, more generally, improves the completion of complex tasks—such as passing exams. In our field experiment, students can sign a nonbinding agreement and commit to s...

US Criminal Deportations and Human Capital in Central America

By Maria Micaela Sviatschi

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

In this paper I ask whether peer effects generate changes in education investments in the areas where deported criminals are located in Central America using administrative data in El Salvador. I exploit the increase in criminal deportations from the Unit...

The Gender Socialization of Children Growing Up in Nontraditional Families

By Marianne Bertrand

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We study how childhood exposure to a nontraditional family (a working married mother, a married mother that is the primary breadwinner, or a non-married mother) affects gender role attitudes in young adulthood. Boys and girls develop more liberal gender a...

Predation, Protection, and Productivity: A Firm-Level Perspective

By Timothy Besley and Hannes Mueller

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2018

This paper studies the consequences of predation when firms deploy guard labor as a means of protecting themselves. We build a simple model and combine it with data for 144 countries from the World Bank enterprise surveys, which ask about firm-level exper...

The Burgeoning Health Care Needs of Aging Prisoners

By Hessam Bavafa and Anita Mukherjee

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We estimate the increasing health care needs of American inmates by combining data on inmate demographics and national health trends. Decades of harsh punishment combined with demographic shifts have led to a "greying" prison population that is a source o...

Older Workers and the Gig Economy

By Cody Cook, Rebecca Diamond, and Paul Oyer

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

As the workforce ages, how will the work lives of older people evolve? One way to ease into retirement is to move to the gig economy where workers choose hours and intensity of work that fit their needs and capabilities. However, older workers are often r...

A Review Essay on Social Neuroscience: Can Research on the Social Brain and Economics Inform Each Other?

By Carlos Alós-Ferrer

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2018

Social neuroscience studies the "social brain," conceived as the set of brain structures and functions supporting the perception and evaluation of the social environment. This article provides an overview of the field, using the book Social Neuroscienc...

Work of the Past, Work of the Future

By David H. Autor

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

US cities today are vastly more educated and skill-intensive than they were five decades ago. Yet, urban non-college workers perform substantially less skilled jobs than decades earlier. This deskilling reflects the joint effects of automation and, seco...

Race to the Bottom? Local Tax Break Competition and Business Location

By Evan Mast

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2020

I analyze how competition between localities affects tax breaks and business location decisions. I first use a geographic instrument to show that spatial competition substantially increases firm-specific property tax breaks. I then use this pattern to est...

Older Americans Would Work Longer If Jobs Were Flexible

By John Ameriks, Joseph Briggs, Andrew Caplin, Minjoon Lee, Matthew D. Shapiro, and Christopher Tonetti

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2020

Older Americans, even those who are long retired, have strong willingness to work, especially in jobs with flexible schedules. For many, labor force participation near or after normal retirement age is limited more by a lack of acceptable job opportunitie...

Consumer Spending during Unemployment: Positive and Normative Implications

By Peter Ganong and Pascal Noel

American Economic Review, July 2019

Using de-identified bank account data, we show that spending drops sharply at the large and predictable decrease in income arising from the exhaustion of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits. We use the high-frequency response to a predictable income decl...

The Out-of-State Tuition Distortion

By Brian Knight and Nathan Schiff

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2019

Public universities typically charge much higher tuition to nonresidents. We first investigate the welfare implications of this tuition gap in a simple model. While the social planner does not distinguish between residents and nonresidents, state governme...