Sovereign Debt and Structural Reforms

By Andreas Müller, Kjetil Storesletten, and Fabrizio Zilibotti

American Economic Review, December 2019

We construct a dynamic theory of sovereign debt and structural reforms with limited enforcement and moral hazard. A sovereign country in recession wishes to smooth consumption. It can also undertake costly reforms to speed up recovery. The sovereign can r...

An Event Long-Short Index: Theory and Applications

By Raymond Fisman and Eric Zitzewitz

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2019

We propose a stock market-based measure to capture initial beliefs about an event's effect on firm profits, which may be used to measure whether initial expectations are subsequently realized. Our "Event Long-Short Index" is the difference in market-capit...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2019

Should We Treat Data as Labor? Moving beyond "Free"

By Imanol Arrieta-Ibarra, Leonard Goff, Diego Jiménez-Hernández, Jaron Lanier, and E. Glen Weyl

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

In the digital economy, user data is typically treated as capital created by corporations observing willing individuals. This neglects users' roles in creating data, reducing incentives for users, distributing the gains from the data economy unequally, an...

Does Strategic Ability Affect Efficiency? Evidence from Electricity Markets

By Ali Hortaçsu, Fernando Luco, Steven L. Puller, and Dongni Zhu

American Economic Review, December 2019

Oligopoly models of price competition predict that strategic firms exercise market power and generate inefficiencies. However, heterogeneity in firms' strategic ability also generates inefficiencies. We study the Texas electricity market where firms exhib...

Government Old-Age Support and Labor Supply: Evidence from the Old Age Assistance Program

By Daniel K. Fetter and Lee M. Lockwood

American Economic Review, August 2018

Many government programs transfer resources to older people and implicitly or explicitly tax their labor. We shed new light on the labor supply and welfare effects of such programs by investigating the Old Age Assistance Program (OAA). Exploiting the larg...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, October 2019

A Single-Judge Solution to Beauty Contests

By Zhen Huo and Marcelo Pedroni

American Economic Review, February 2020

We show that the equilibrium policy rule in beauty contest models is equivalent to that of a single agent's forecast of the economic fundamental. This forecast is conditional on a modified information process, which simply discounts the precision of idios...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2018

Monopsony in Online Labor Markets

By Arindrajit Dube, Jeff Jacobs, Suresh Naidu, and Siddharth Suri

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2020

Despite the seemingly low switching and search costs of on-demand labor markets like Amazon Mechanical Turk, we find substantial monopsony power, as measured by the elasticity of labor supply facing the requester (employer). We isolate plausibly exogenous...

The Race to the Base

By Dan Bernhardt, Peter Buisseret, and Sinem Hidir

American Economic Review, March 2020

We study multi-district legislative elections between two office-seeking parties when one party has an initial valence advantage that may shift and even reverse during the campaign; and, each party cares not only about winning a majority, but also about i...

What Matters for the Productivity of Kidney Exchange?

By Nikhil Agarwal, Itai Ashlagi, Eduardo Azevedo, Clayton Featherstone, and Ömer Karaduman

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Kidney exchange platforms serve patients who need a kidney transplant and who have a willing, but incompatible, donor. These platforms match patients and donors to produce transplants. This paper documents operational details of the three largest platform...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2019

Front Matter

American Economic Review, March 2020

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2018

Implications of Labor Market Frictions for Risk Aversion and Risk Premia

By Eric T. Swanson

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2020

A flexible labor margin allows households to absorb asset value shocks with changes in hours worked, altering the households' attitudes toward risk (Swanson 2012). This paper analyzes how frictional labor markets affect that analysis. Risk aversion is hig...

Big Data and Firm Dynamics

By Maryam Farboodi, Roxana Mihet, Thomas Philippon, and Laura Veldkamp

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We study a model where firms accumulate data as a valuable intangible asset. Data accumulation affects firms' dynamics. It increases the skewness of the firm size distribution as large firms generate more data and invest more in active experimentation. On...

Common Ownership and the Secular Stagnation Hypothesis

By José Azar and Xavier Vives

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We extend the model in Azar and Vives (2018) to allow for investment and show that higher effective market concentration (augmented by common ownership) leads to lower equilibrium wages, real interest rates, lower output, lower labor share, and lower capi...

Age and High-Growth Entrepreneurship

By Pierre Azoulay, Benjamin F. Jones, J. Daniel Kim, and Javier Miranda

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2020

Many observers, and many investors, believe that young people are especially likely to produce the most successful new firms. Integrating administrative data on firms, workers, and owners, we study start-ups systematically in the United States and find th...

Inside Job or Deep Impact? Extramural Citations and the Influence of Economic Scholarship

By Josh Angrist, Pierre Azoulay, Glenn Ellison, Ryan Hill, and Susan Feng Lu

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2020

Does academic economic research produce material of general scientific value, or do academic economists write only for peers? Is economics scholarship uniquely insular? We address these questions by quantifying interactions between economics and other d...