A New Look at Lake Wobegone: Who's in Your Canoe?

By Chris Bollinger, Tisha L. N. Emerson, Linda English, and Gail M. Hoyt

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

We re-examine the Lake Wobegon effect for reported GPA using data from students enrolled in principles of economics courses. Students are well known to over-report their GPA on surveys. In addition to standard measures of the mean difference, we extend th...

Gender Peer Effects in a Predominantly Male Environment: Evidence from West Point

By Nick Huntington-Klein and Elaina Rose

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

There is considerable interest in the success of women in overwhelmingly male environments. One hypothesized determinant of success is the increased presence of other women. However, the theoretical direction of this effect is uncertain. Previous studies ...

Training and Effort Dynamics in Apprenticeship

By Drew Fudenberg and Luis Rayo

American Economic Review, November 2019

A principal specifies time paths of effort provision, task allocation, and knowledge transfer for a cash-constrained apprentice, who is free to walk away at any time. In the optimal contract the apprentice pays for training by working for low or no wages ...

Report of the Secretary

By Peter L. Rousseau

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Algorithmic Fairness

By Jon Kleinberg, Jens Ludwig, Sendhil Mullainathan, and Ashesh Rambachan

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Concerns that algorithms may discriminate against certain groups have led to numerous efforts to 'blind' the algorithm to race. We argue that this intuitive perspective is misleading and may do harm. Our primary result is exceedingly simple, yet often ove...

Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2018

The Identification Zoo: Meanings of Identification in Econometrics

By Arthur Lewbel

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2019

Over two dozen different terms for identification appear in the econometrics literature, including set identification, causal identification, local identification, generic identification, weak identification, identification at infinity, and many more. Thi...

Two-Sided Matching with (Almost) One-Sided Preferences

By Guillaume Haeringer and Vincent Iehlé

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2019

In a two-sided matching context we show how we can predict stable matchings by considering only one side's preferences and the mutually acceptable pairs of agents. Our methodology consists of identifying impossible matches, i.e., pairs of agents that can ...

Rationalizations and Mistakes: Optimal Policy with Normative Ambiguity

By Jacob Goldin and Daniel Reck

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Behavior that appears to violate neoclassical assumptions can often be rationalized by incorporating an optimization cost into decision-makers' utility functions. Depending on the setting, these costs may reflect either an actual welfare loss for the deci...

Local Violence, Academic Performance, and School Accountability

By Marcus Casey, Jeffrey C. Schiman, and Maciej Wachala

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Standardized test scores and value-added measures largely determine "grades" assigned to teachers and schools. Poor evaluations have severe implications: in some cases, entire schools may be closed or replaced by a charter. Although evaluation depends on ...

The Potential of Digital Credit to Bank the Poor

By Daniel Björkegren and Darrell Grissen

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Many households in developing countries lack access to credit: physically providing small loans to poor and remote populations is costly. However, the digitization of developing countries enables a new model: digital credit delivered directly via mobile p...

Trade Invoicing, Bank Funding, and Central Bank Reserve Holdings

By Gita Gopinath and Jeremy C. Stein

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

We develop a model that shows how the currency denomination of a country's imports influences the funding structure of its banking system, and in turn, the currency composition of its central bank's reserve holdings. The link between the dollar's role in ...

Cousin Marriage Is Not Choice: Muslim Marriage and Underdevelopment

By Lena Edlund

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

According to classical Muslim marriage law, a woman needs her guardian's (viz. father's) consent to marry. However, the resulting marriage payment, the mahr, is hers. This split bill may lie behind the high rates of consanguineous marriage in the Muslim w...

Review of Global Tax Fairness, Thomas Pogge and Krishen Mehta, Editors

By Matthew Weinzierl

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2018

This timely volume (Global Tax Fairness, edited by Thomas Pogge and Krishen Mehta) on the proper taxation of multinational enterprises argues that several feasible, near-term reforms could substantially narrow the scope for tax avoidance by closi...

Intangibles, Investment, and Efficiency

By Nicolas Crouzet and Janice Eberly

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Recent work on macroeconomic trends has emphasized slowing capital investment, but strong business profits and valuations. The retail sector is a microcosm of these trends, and accounts for a large share of the increase in aggregate business concentration...

Police Use of Force as an Extension of Arrests: Examining Disparities across Civilian and Officer Race

By Emily K. Weisburst

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

The United States is embroiled in an important debate about police use of force tactics. I find that black civilians are disproportionately likely to be involved in a use of force incident during an arrest, examining data from Dallas, Texas. However, this...

Intergenerational Human Capital Spillovers: Indonesia's School Construction and Its Effects on the Next Generation

By Bhashkar Mazumder, Maria Rosales-Rueda, and Margaret Triyana

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We analyze the effects of increased access to education in one generation on human capital outcomes in the next generation. Using longitudinal data, we exploit the geographical and cohort variations in exposure to a massive primary school construction pro...

A Practical Method to Reduce Privacy Loss When Disclosing Statistics Based on Small Samples

By Raj Chetty and John N. Friedman

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Building on insights from the differential privacy literature, we develop a simple noise-infusion method to reduce privacy loss when disclosing statistics such as OLS regression estimates based on small samples. Although our method does not offer a formal...

Time and Money: Social Security Benefits and Intergenerational Transfers

By Anita Mukherjee

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

I examine the relationship between Social Security benefits, a major component of income in older age, and intergenerational transfers of financial help and caregiving. I find that the net pass-through rate of Social Security benefits from parents to chil...

Dollar Invoicing and the Heterogeneity of Exchange Rate Pass-Through

By Emine Boz, Gita Gopinath, and Mikkel Plagborg-Møller

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We show empirically that the variation across country pairs in exchange rate pass-through and trade elasticity is meaningfully explained by the dollar's dominance as invoicing currency. We use a hierarchical Bayesian approach to directly and flexibly mode...