Just Starting Out: Learning and Equilibrium in a New Market

By Ulrich Doraszelski, Gregory Lewis, and Ariel Pakes

American Economic Review, March 2018

We document the evolution of the new market for frequency response within the UK electricity system over a six-year period. Firms competed in price while facing considerable initial uncertainty about demand and rival behavior. We show that prices stabiliz...

Exchange Rates and the Working Capital Channel of Trade Fluctuations

By Valentina Bruno, Se-Jik Kim, and Hyun Shin

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Exchange rates affect the economy not only through the competitiveness of exports but also through a financial channel. The financial channel goes in the opposite direction to the competitiveness channel in that a stronger currency goes hand-in-hand with ...

Does Maternal Education Decrease Female Genital Cutting?

By Elisabetta De Cao and Giulia La Mattina

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Female genital cutting (FGC) affects more than 200 million women globally. Education is often depicted as an effective instrument for abandoning the practice, but causal evidence is scant. This paper uses the introduction of the Universal Primary Educatio...

Wealth Redistribution after Exchange Rate Devaluations

By Andres Drenik, Gustavo Pereira, and Diego J. Perez

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

We document that the likelihood of having assets in foreign currency is increasing in households' income within many emerging economies. This pattern leads to heterogeneous exposures of wealth to exchange rate movements. We analyze the redistribution of l...

The Effect of Parental Education on Children's Drug and Alcohol Use

By Aaron Chalfin and Monica Deza

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

This research is the first to uncover evidence of an intergenerational effect of education on substance use in the United States. Using data from the NLSY79 and variation in education induced by changes in compulsory schooling laws, we study the effect of...

Ensemble Methods for Causal Effects in Panel Data Settings

By Susan Athey, Mohsen Bayati, Guido Imbens, and Zhaonan Qu

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

In many prediction problems researchers have found that combinations of prediction methods ("ensembles") perform better than individual methods. In this paper we apply these ideas to synthetic control type problems in panel data. Here a number of conceptu...

Unequal Rewards to Firms: Stock Market Responses to the Trump Election and the 2017 Corporate Tax Reform

By Alexander F. Wagner, Richard J. Zeckhauser, and Alexandre Ziegler

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Massive dollars shuttled back and forth among firms on the twisted path to and passage of the 2017 tax reform. Prices of individual stocks responded to the difference between initial and revised expectations. From the bill's initiation in the House to fin...

Escaping Malthus: Economic Growth and Fertility Change in the Developing World

By Shoumitro Chatterjee and Tom Vogl

American Economic Review, June 2018

Following mid-twentieth century predictions of Malthusian catastrophe, fertility in the developing world more than halved, while living standards more than doubled. We analyze how fertility change related to economic growth during this episode, using data...

Differentiated Durable Goods Monopoly: A Robust Coase Conjecture

By Francesco Nava and Pasquale Schiraldi

American Economic Review, May 2019

The paper analyzes a durable goods monopoly problem in which multiple varieties can be sold. A robust Coase conjecture establishes that the market eventually clears, with profits exceeding static optimal market-clearing profits and converging to this lowe...

Does Elite Capture Matter? Local Elites and Targeted Welfare Programs in Indonesia

By Vivi Alatas, Abhijit Banerjee, Rema Hanna, Benjamin A. Olken, Ririn Purnamasari, and Matthew Wai-Poi

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

This paper investigates how elite capture affects the welfare gains from targeted government transfer programs in Indonesia, using both a high-stakes field experiment that varied the extent of elite influence and nonexperimental data on a variety of exist...

Cream Skimming and Information Design in Matching Markets

By Gleb Romanyuk and Alex Smolin

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2019

Short-lived buyers arrive to a platform over time and randomly match with sellers. The sellers stay at the platform and decide whether to accept incoming requests. The platform designs what buyer information the sellers observe before deciding to form a m...

Beyond the Flipped Class: The Impact of Research-Based Teaching Methods in a Macroeconomics Principles Class

By Austin Boyle and William L. Goffe

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Cognitive scientists have identified fundamental principles influencing learning: deliberate practice, interleaving, retrieval practice, spacing, metacognition, desirable difficulties, limited working memory, curse of knowledge, schema generation, and con...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2018

Price Theory

By E. Glen Weyl

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2019

I argue that there exists a coherent and relevant tradition in economic thought that I label "price theory." I define it as neoclassical microeconomic analysis that reduces rich and often incompletely specified models into "prices" (approximately) suffi...

A Precinct Too Far: Turnout and Voting Costs

By Enrico Cantoni

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2020

I study the effects of voting costs—specifically, distance to polling location—using geographic discontinuities. Opposite sides of boundaries between voting precincts are observationally identical, except for their assigned polling locations. This dis...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2019

Tax Evasion and Inequality

By Annette Alstadsæter, Niels Johannesen, and Gabriel Zucman

American Economic Review, June 2019

Drawing on a unique dataset of leaked customer lists from offshore financial institutions matched to administrative wealth records in Scandinavia, we show that offshore tax evasion is highly concentrated among the rich. The skewed distribution of offshore...

Job Search Periods for Welfare Applicants: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment

By Jonneke Bolhaar, Nadine Ketel, and Bas van der Klaauw

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2019

We combine a randomized experiment with administrative data to study the effects of mandatory job search periods in the Dutch welfare system. Job search periods postpone the first welfare benefits payment and encourage applicants to start searching for jo...

Corrigendum: Particulate Pollution and the Productivity of Pear Packers

By Tom Chang, Joshua S. Graff Zivin, Tal Gross, and Matthew J. Neidell

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2019

Top 1 Percent Income Shares: Comparing Estimates Using Tax Data

By Gerald Auten and David Splinter

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Many studies have used tax data to measure the U.S. income distribution, but their results vary widely. For example, in 2014 the top 1 percent share of income is 21.5 percent in Piketty and Saez (2003 and updates), 16.7 percent in the Congressional Budget...