Optimal Information Design for Search Goods

By Michael Choi, Kyungmin Kim, and Marilyn Pease

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We consider a monopoly pricing problem in which a consumer with an uncertain valuation of a search good receives a signal of value before deciding whether to visit the seller. She discovers her true value upon visiting and before purchase. We characterize...

The Impact of Big Data on Firm Performance: An Empirical Investigation

By Patrick Bajari, Victor Chernozhukov, Ali Hortaçsu, and Junichi Suzuki

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We examine the impact of "big data" on firm performance in the context of forecast accuracy using proprietary retail sales data obtained from Amazon. We measure the accuracy of forecasts in two relevant dimensions: the number of products (N), and the numb...

Women's Empowerment, the Gender Gap in Desired Fertility, and Fertility Outcomes in Developing Countries

By Matthias Doepke and Michèle Tertilt

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

We document evidence on preferences for childbearing in developing countries. Across countries, men usually desire larger families than women do. Within countries, we find wide dispersion in spouses' desired fertility: there are many couples whose ideal f...

A Reason to Wait: The Effect of Legal Status on Teen Pregnancy

By Elira Kuka, Na'ama Shenhav, and Kevin Shih

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Although teen pregnancy has been on the decline in the United States, it remains among the highest within developed countries. Hispanics, who are more likely to be undocumented immigrants, lead this trend, yet the role of legal status has yet to be consid...

Trade and Income—Exploiting Time Series in Geography

By James Feyrer

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2019

Establishing a robust causal relationship between trade and income has been difficult. Frankel and Romer (1999) uses a geographic instrument to identify a positive effect of trade on income. Rodriguez and Rodrik (2001) shows that these results are not r...

Minimum Wages, Morality, and Efficiency: A Choice Experiment

By Conor Lennon, Jose Fernandez, Stephan Gohmann, and Keith Teltser

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We use a choice experiment to examine public support for minimum wages. We first elicit respondents' moral assessment of two labor market systems: one with a minimum wage and one without. Then, we present four pairs of hypothetical employment outcomes and...

Narrative Sign Restrictions for SVARs

By Juan Antolín-Díaz and Juan F. Rubio-Ramírez

American Economic Review, October 2018

We identify structural vector autoregressions using narrative sign restrictions. Narrative sign restrictions constrain the structural shocks and/or the historical decomposition around key historical events, ensuring that they agree with the established na...

Efficient Child Care Subsidies

By Christine Ho and Nicola Pavoni

American Economic Review, January 2020

We study the design of child care subsidies in an optimal welfare problem with heterogeneous private market productivities. The optimal subsidy schedule is qualitatively similar to the existing US scheme. Efficiency mandates a subsidy on formal child care...

The Evolution of Work in the United States

By Enghin Atalay, Phai Phongthiengtham, Sebastian Sotelo, and Daniel Tannenbaum

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2020

Using the text from job ads, we introduce a new dataset to describe the evolution of work from 1950 to 2000. We show that the transformation of the US labor market away from routine cognitive and manual tasks and toward nonroutine interactive and analytic...

Competition and Strategic Incentives in the Market for Credit Ratings: Empirics of the Financial Crisis of 2007

By Chenghuan Sean Chu and Marc Rysman

American Economic Review, October 2019

We study the market for ratings agencies in the commercial mortgage backed securities sector leading up to and including the financial crisis of 2007–2008. Using a structural model adapted from the auctions literature, we characterize the incentives of ...

Forward Guidance and Heterogeneous Beliefs

By Philippe Andrade, Gaetano Gaballo, Eric Mengus, and Benoît Mojon

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2019

Central banks' announcements that rates are expected to remain low could signal either a weak macroeconomic outlook, which would slow expenditures, or a more accommodative stance, which may stimulate economic activity. We use the Survey of Professional Fo...

Ethnolinguistic Favoritism in African Politics

By Andrew Dickens

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2018

African political leaders have a tendency to favor members of their own ethnic group. Yet for all other ethnic groups in a country, it is unclear whether having a similar ethnicity to the leader is beneficial. To shed light on this issue, I use a continuo...

Doctoral Dissertations in Economics

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2018

Learning to Coordinate: A Study in Retail Gasoline

By David P. Byrne and Nicolas de Roos

American Economic Review, February 2019

This paper studies equilibrium selection in the retail gasoline industry. We exploit a unique dataset that contains the universe of station-level prices for an urban market for 15 years, and that encompasses a coordinated equilibrium transition mid-sample...

Immigration, Employment Opportunities, and Criminal Behavior

By Matthew Freedman, Emily Owens, and Sarah Bohn

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2018

We take advantage of provisions of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), which granted legal resident status to long-time unauthorized residents but created new obstacles to employment for more recent immigrants, to explore how employment...

The Rise of Robots in China

[Symposium: Automation and Employment]

By Hong Cheng, Ruixue Jia, Dandan Li, and Hongbin Li

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2019

China is the world's largest user of industrial robots. In 2016, sales of industrial robots in China reached 87,000 units, accounting for around 30 percent of the global market. To put this number in perspective, robot sales in all of Europe and the Ame...

The Relative Importance of Aggregate and Sectoral Shocks and the Changing Nature of Economic Fluctuations

By Julio Garin, Michael J. Pries, and Eric R. Sims

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2018

A principal components decomposition of sectoral IP data reveals that the contribution of aggregate shocks to the variance of aggregate output declined from about 70 percent in the period 1967–1983 to about 30 percent after 1983. We develop an "isla...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2018

Morality, Policy, and the Brain

By Aldo Rustichini

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2018

The book Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap between Us and Them, by Joshua Greene, invites the reader to give a new look at the foundation of ethics and, by implication, to policy. Its specific strength is the systematic integration of new ...

Drilling Like There's No Tomorrow: Bankruptcy, Insurance, and Environmental Risk

By Judson Boomhower

American Economic Review, February 2019

This paper measures the effects of bankruptcy protection on industry structure and environmental outcomes in oil and gas extraction. Using administrative data from Texas, I exploit variation in an insurance requirement that reduced firms' ability to avoid...