Bad Investments and Missed Opportunities? Postwar Capital Flows to Asia and Latin America

By Lee E. Ohanian, Paulina Restrepo-Echavarria, and Mark L. J. Wright

American Economic Review, December 2018

After World War II, international capital flowed into slow-growing Latin America rather than fast-growing Asia. This is surprising as, everything else equal, fast growth should imply high capital returns. This paper develops a capital flow accounting fram...

Aging, Output Per Capita, and Secular Stagnation

By Gauti B. Eggertsson, Manuel Lancastre, and Lawrence H. Summers

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2019

This paper re-examines the relationship between population aging and economic growth. We confirm previous research such as Cutler et al. (1990) and Acemoglu and Restrepo (2017) that show positive correlation between population aging and per capita output ...

Central Bank Communications and the General Public

By Andrew Haldane and Michael McMahon

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Despite the recent revolution in central bank communication, it is unclear the general public have benefitted from these enhanced central bank communications. We first analyze the growth of communication and some reasons that the public may have missed th...

Capital Flows and Foreign Exchange Intervention

By Paolo Cavallino

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2019

I consider a small open economy model where international financial markets are imperfect and the exchange rate is determined by capital flows. I use this framework to study the effects of portfolio flow shocks, derive the optimal foreign exchange interve...

Does Environmental Policy Affect Income Inequality? Evidence from the Clean Air Act

By Akshaya Jha, Peter H. Matthews, and Nicholas Z. Muller

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

This paper quantifies the impact of environmental policy on income inequality. We focus on the Clean Air act and the National Ambient Air Quality standards for fine particulate matter and ozone. Using a matched difference-in-differences estimator, we find...

Time to adjust

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Do immigrants to the US assimilate more slowly than they used to?

Underemployment and the Trickle-Down of Unemployment

By Regis Barnichon and Yanos Zylberberg

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2019

A substantial fraction of workers are underemployed, i.e., employed in jobs for which they are overqualified, and that fraction—the underemployment rate—is higher in recessions. To explain these facts, we build a search model with an endogenous "ran...

Gender Equality and Positive Action: Evidence from UK Universities

By Danula K. Gamage and Almudena Sevilla

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

This paper examines the impact of the Athena Scientific Women's Academic Network (SWAN) Charter on the wages and employment trajectories of female faculty. The Athena SWAN Charter is a gender equality initiative that formally recognizes good practice to...

Nondogmatic Social Discounting

By Antony Millner

American Economic Review, March 2020

The long-run social discount rate has an enormous effect on the value of climate mitigation, infrastructure projects, and other long-term public policies. Its value is however highly contested, in part because of normative disagreements about social time ...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2019

Marking to Market versus Taking to Market

By Guillaume Plantin and Jean Tirole

American Economic Review, August 2018

Building on the idea that accounting matters for corporate governance, this paper studies the equilibrium interaction between the measurement rules that firms find privately optimal, firms' governance, and the liquidity in the secondary market for their a...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2018

How Punishment Severity Affects Jury Verdicts: Evidence from Two Natural Experiments

By Anna Bindler and Randi Hjalmarsson

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2018

This paper studies the effect of punishment severity on jury decision-making using archival data from London's Old Bailey Criminal Court from 1772 to 1871. We exploit two natural experiments in English history, resulting in sharp decreases in punishment s...

Snapping Back: Food Stamp Bans and Criminal Recidivism

By Cody Tuttle

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2019

I estimate the effect of access to food stamps on criminal recidivism. In 1996, a federal welfare reform imposed a lifetime ban from food stamps on convicted drug felons. Florida modified this ban, restricting it to drug traffickers who commit their offen...

The Twin Ds: Optimal Default and Devaluation

By Seunghoon Na, Stephanie Schmitt-Grohé, Martín Uribe, and Vivian Yue

American Economic Review, July 2018

A salient characteristic of sovereign defaults is that they are typically accompanied by large devaluations. This paper presents new evidence of this empirical regularity known as the Twin Ds and proposes a model that rationalizes it as an optimal policy ...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, October 2018

Estimating Risk Preferences in the Field

By Levon Barseghyan, Francesca Molinari, Ted O'Donoghue, and Joshua C. Teitelbaum

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2018

We survey the literature on estimating risk preferences using field data. We concentrate our attention on studies in which risk preferences are the focal object and estimating their structure is the core enterprise. We review a number of models of risk ...

Mutually Consistent Revealed Preference Demand Predictions

By Abi Adams

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2020

Revealed preference restrictions are increasingly used to predict demand behavior at new budgets of interest and as shape restrictions in nonparametric estimation exercises. However, the restrictions imposed are not sufficient for rationality when predict...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2020

The Price of Growth: Consumption Insurance in China 1989–2009

By Raül Santaeulàlia-Llopis and Yu Zheng

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2018

We exploit a novel and unique opportunity to document the transmission of income risk to consumption in a growing economy. Our laboratory is China, an economy that has witnessed enormous and sustained growth. We build a long panel of household-level consu...