Disguising Lies—Image Concerns and Partial Lying in Cheating Games

By Kiryl Khalmetski and Dirk Sliwka

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2019

We study equilibrium reporting behavior in cheating games when agents have a fixed cost of lying and image concerns not to be perceived as a liar. We show that equilibria naturally arise in which agents with low costs of lying randomize among a set of the...

Sand Castles before the Tide? Affordable Housing in Expensive Cities

[Symposium: Housing]

By Gabriel Metcalf

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2018

This article focuses on cities with unprecedented economic success and a seemingly permanent crisis of affordable housing. In the expensive cities, policymakers expend great amounts of energy trying to bring down housing costs with subsidies for afforda...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, April 2019

Energy Cost Pass-Through in US Manufacturing: Estimates and Implications for Carbon Taxes

By Sharat Ganapati, Joseph S. Shapiro, and Reed Walker

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2020

We study how changes in energy input costs for US manufacturers affect the relative welfare of manufacturing producers and consumers (i.e., incidence). We also develop a methodology to estimate the incidence of input taxes that accounts for incomplete pas...

Public Debt and Low Interest Rates

By Olivier Blanchard

American Economic Review, April 2019

This lecture focuses on the costs of public debt when safe interest rates are low. I develop four main arguments. First, I show that the current US situation, in which safe interest rates are expected to remain below growth rates for a long time, is mor...

Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2019

Adverse Selection in ACA Exchange Markets: Evidence from Colorado

By Matthew Panhans

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2019

This study tests for adverse selection in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) health insurance exchanges established in 2014 and quantifies the welfare consequences. Using a new statewide dataset of medical claims from Colorado, I use plausibly exogenous premiu...

Estimating Group Effects Using Averages of Observables to Control for Sorting on Unobservables: School and Neighborhood Effects

By Joseph G. Altonji and Richard K. Mansfield

American Economic Review, October 2018

We consider the classic problem of estimating group treatment effects when individuals sort based on observed and unobserved characteristics. Using a standard choice model, we show that controlling for group averages of observed individual characteristics...

Minutes of the Meeting of the Executive Committee: Philadelphia, PA, January 4, 2018

By Peter L. Rousseau

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Front Matter

American Economic Review, April 2020

Quality Overprovision in Cable Television Markets

By Gregory S. Crawford, Oleksandr Shcherbakov, and Matthew Shum

American Economic Review, March 2019

We measure the welfare distortions from endogenous quality choice in imperfectly competitive markets. For US cable television markets between 1997–2006, prices are 33 percent to 74 percent higher and qualities 23 percent to 55 percent higher than social...

Uninsured Unemployment Risk and Optimal Monetary Policy in a Zero-Liquidity Economy

By Edouard Challe

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2020

I study optimal monetary policy in a sticky-price economy wherein households precautionary-save against uninsured, endogenous unemployment risk. In this economy greater unemployment risk raises desired savings, causing aggregate demand to fall and feed ...

JEL Classification System

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2019

The Devil Is in the Details: Implications of Samuel Bowles's The Moral Economy for Economics and Policy Research

By Rachel Kranton

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2019

All economists should buy and read The Moral Economy by Samuel Bowles. The book challenges basic premises of economic theory and questions policies based on monetary incentives. Incentives not only crowd out intrinsic motivations, they erode the ...

Automation and New Tasks: How Technology Displaces and Reinstates Labor

[Symposium: Automation and Employment]

By Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2019

We present a framework for understanding the effects of automation and other types of technological changes on labor demand, and use it to interpret changes in US employment over the recent past. At the center of our framework is the allocation of tasks...

Auctions with Limited Commitment

By Qingmin Liu, Konrad Mierendorff, Xianwen Shi, and Weijie Zhong

American Economic Review, March 2019

We study the role of limited commitment in a standard auction environment. In each period, the seller can commit to an auction with a reserve price but not to future reserve prices. We characterize the set of equilibrium profits attainable for the seller ...

Learning Theory and Heterogeneous Play in a Signaling-Game Experiment

By Drew Fudenberg and Emanuel Vespa

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2019

We study the effect of how types are assigned to participants in a signaling-game experiment. The sender has two actions, In and Out, and two types. In one treatment, types are i.i.d. in every period, and senders gather experience with both types. In the ...

The Marginal Propensity to Consume over the Business Cycle

By Tal Gross, Matthew J. Notowidigdo, and Jialan Wang

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2020

We estimate how the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) out of liquidity varies over the business cycle. Ten years after a Chapter 7 bankruptcy, the bankruptcy flag is removed from the filer's credit report, generating an increase in credit score. In the...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2019

Clearing the Fog: The Predictive Power of Weather for Employment Reports and Their Asset Price Responses

By Daniel J. Wilson

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2019

This paper exploits vast granular data—with over one million county-month observations—to estimate a dynamic panel data model of weather's local employment effects. The fitted county model is then aggregated and used to generate in-sample and rolling ...