The Evolution of the Online Platform Economy: Evidence from Five Years of Banking Data

By Diana Farrell, Fiona Greig, and Amar Hamoudi

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Measuring the gig economy has been challenging. Drawing on anonymized administrative banking data, we measure supply-side participation in the online platform economy between 2013 and 2018. We find 2.3 million account holders who received payments from 12...

Unemployment Cycles

By Jan Eeckhout and Ilse Lindenlaub

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2019

The labor market by itself can create cyclical outcomes, even in the absence of exogenous shocks. We propose a theory in which the search behavior of the employed has profound aggregate implications for the unemployed. There is a strategic complementarity...

Income Volatility and the PSID: Past Research and New Results

By Robert Moffitt and Sisi Zhang

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

The PSID has major advantages for studying income volatility and, because of this, research using it has been responsible for major improvements in the methodology of studying income volatility. Its research on calendar trends finds a reasonably consisten...

Cognitive Abilities and Inflation Expectations

By Francesco D'Acunto, Daniel Hoang, Maritta Paloviita, and Michael Weber

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Cognitive abilities help explain the large cross-sectional variation in inflation expectations at the household level. But which type of cognitive abilities are important? We find that not only quantitative abilities but also logical and verbal abilities ...

Matching with Stochastic Arrival

By Neil Thakral

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

This paper examines efficiency and fairness properties in a dynamic allocation problem. The model applies to situations in which objects of different types arrive stochastically over time and must be assigned to agents in a queue, such as the allocation o...

The Price of Labor: Evaluating the Impact of Eliminating User Fees on Maternal and Infant Health Outcomes

By Anne Fitzpatrick

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Since 2001, several sub-Saharan African countries have eliminated user fees for childbirth. Although intended to improve maternal and infant health outcomes, service quality also fell as facilities became overburdened. In this paper I combine DHS surveys ...

Product versus Process: Innovation Strategies of Multiproduct Firms

By Lisandra Flach and Michael Irlacher

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2018

We investigate the effects of better access to foreign markets on innovation strategies of multiproduct firms in industries with different scope for product differentiation. Industry-specific demand and cost linkages induce a distinction between the retur...

The Language of Discrimination: Using Experimental versus Observational Data

By Aislinn Bohren, Alex Imas, and Michael Rosenberg

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

We use experimental and observational data to examine whether people respond differently to questions posed by females versus males. We document significant differences in the language of responses, both in terms of the distribution of language utilized, ...

How Trade Sensitive Are Energy-Intensive Sectors?

By Carolyn Fischer and Alan K. Fox

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

For most governments looking to implement climate policy—and for interest groups looking to influence it—the effect of unilateral greenhouse gas regulation on employment, production, and emissions represents an overarching concern. Critical to improvi...

Improving the Measure of the Distribution of Personal Income

By Dennis Fixler, Marina Gindelsky, and David Johnson

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Developing a national account-based measure of the distribution of income from the commonly used census-based concept of money income has been the subject of earlier research. We use publicly available survey and administrative data to construct a distrib...

Disability Saliency and Discrimination in Hiring

By Philip Armour, Patrick Button, and Simon Hollands

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Theory suggests that disability discrimination protections may adversely affect the hiring of individuals with disabilities by making them more expensive. Using SIPP data, we explore how the ADA Amendments Act (ADAAA), which expanded disability discrimina...

Reverse Bayesianism: A Comment

By Christopher P. Chambers and Takashi Hayashi

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2018

Karni and Vierø (2013) present an interesting theory of decisions in the presence of new actions and consequences. We establish results on the observable implications of the model. When introducing new consequences, arbitrary preference reversals over fe...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2019

Innovation, Reallocation, and Growth

By Daron Acemoglu, Ufuk Akcigit, Harun Alp, Nicholas Bloom, and William Kerr

American Economic Review, November 2018

We build a model of firm-level innovation, productivity growth, and reallocation featuring endogenous entry and exit. A new and central economic force is the selection between high- and low-type firms, which differ in terms of their innovative capacity. W...

Backward Induction in the Wild? Evidence from Sequential Voting in the US Senate

By Jörg L. Spenkuch, B. Pablo Montagnes, and Daniel B. Magleby

American Economic Review, July 2018

In the US Senate, roll calls are held in alphabetical order. We document that senators early in the order are less likely to vote with the majority of their own party than those whose last name places them at the end of the alphabet. To speak to the mecha...

Exports and Invoicing: Evidence from the 2015 Swiss Franc Appreciation

By Raphael Auer, Ariel Burstein, Katharina Erhardt, and Sarah M. Lein

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Do differences in border price adjustment by currency of invoicing carry over to allocations? We document the cross-industry variation in the response of Swiss export prices and export values by currency of invoicing of border prices in the aftermath of t...

Loss in the Time of Cholera: Long-Run Impact of a Disease Epidemic on the Urban Landscape

By Attila Ambrus, Erica Field, and Robert Gonzalez

American Economic Review, February 2020

How do geographically concentrated income shocks influence the long-run spatial distribution of poverty within a city? We examine the impact on housing prices of a cholera epidemic in one neighborhood of nineteenth century London. Ten years after the epid...

The Problem of Bigness: From Standard Oil to Google

[Symposium: Issues in Antitrust]

By Naomi R. Lamoreaux

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2019

This article sets recent expressions of alarm about the monopoly power of technology giants such as Google and Amazon in the long history of Americans' response to big business. I argue that we cannot understand that history unless we realize that Ameri...

Digital Financial Services Go a Long Way: Transaction Costs and Financial Inclusion

By Pierre Bachas, Paul Gertler, Sean Higgins, and Enrique Seira

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Debit cards reduce the travel distance to access bank accounts and can increase financial inclusion. We show that in Mexico, cash transfer beneficiaries who already received their transfers in bank accounts and subsequently received debit cards reduce the...

Extreme Inequality: Evidence from Brazil, India, the Middle East, and South Africa

By Lydia Assouad, Lucas Chancel, and Marc Morgan

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

This paper presents new findings about inequality dynamics in Brazil, India, the Middle East, and South Africa from the World Inequality Database (WID.world). We combine tax data, household surveys, and national accounts in a systematic manner to produce ...