Front Matter

American Economic Review, March 2018

Family Ruptures, Stress, and the Mental Health of the Next Generation: Reply

By Petra Persson and Maya Rossin-Slater

American Economic Review, April 2018

Persson and Rossin-Slater (2018) find that prenatal exposure to family ruptures affects childhood and adult mental health, as well as infant physical health. We compare children whose relatives die within 280 days post-conception to children whose relativ...

Equilibrium Provider Networks: Bargaining and Exclusion in Health Care Markets

By Kate Ho and Robin S. Lee

American Economic Review, February 2019

We evaluate the consequences of narrow hospital networks in commercial health care markets. We develop a bargaining solution, "Nash-in-Nash with Threat of Replacement," that captures insurers' incentives to exclude, and combine it with California data and...

Tax Policy and Local Labor Market Behavior

By Daniel G. Garrett, Eric Ohrn, and Juan Carlos Suárez Serrato

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2020

Since 2002, the US government has encouraged business investment using accelerated depreciation policies that significantly reduce investment costs. We provide the first in-depth analysis of this stimulus on employment and earnings. Our local labor market...

Place, Peers, and the Teenage Years: Long-Run Neighborhood Effects in Australia

By Nathan Deutscher

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2020

I use variation in the age at which children move to show that where an Australian child grows up has a causal effect on their adult income, education, marriage, and fertility. In doing so, I replicate the findings of Chetty and Hendren (2018a) in a count...

Relational Contracts with Private Information on the Future Value of the Relationship: The Upside of Implicit Downsizing Costs

By Matthias Fahn and Nicolas Klein

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2019

We analyze a relational-contracting problem, in which the principal has private information about the future value of the relationship. In order to reduce bonus payments, the principal is tempted to claim that the value of the future relationship is lower...

Optimal Dynamic Allocation of Attention

By Yeon-Koo Che and Konrad Mierendorff

American Economic Review, August 2019

We consider a decision maker (DM) who, before taking an action, seeks information by allocating her limited attention dynamically over different news sources that are biased toward alternative actions. Endogenous choice of information generates rich dynam...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, June 2018

Front Matter includes James Heckman: Distinguished Fellow 2017.

Gorbachev versus Deng: A Review of Chris Miller's The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy

By Sergei Guriev

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2019

Chris Miller's book is a historian's account of Mikhail Gorbachev's efforts to save the Soviet economy. Miller focuses on the question of why Gorbachev did not follow Deng Xiaoping and did not manage to reform the economy. Miller argues that it was not ...

Borrowing Trouble? Human Capital Investment with Opt-In Costs and Implications for the Effectiveness of Grant Aid

By Benjamin M. Marx and Lesley J. Turner

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2018

We estimate the effect of grant aid on City University of New York (CUNY) students' borrowing and attainment using a regression discontinuity/kink design based on the federal Pell Grant formula. Each dollar of grant aid reduces loans by $1.80 among borrow...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2018

Trade-Induced Structural Change and the Skill Premium

By Javier Cravino and Sebastian Sotelo

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2019

We study how international trade affects manufacturing employment and the relative wage of unskilled workers when goods and services are traded with different intensities. Manufacturing trade reduces manufacturing prices worldwide, which reduces manufactu...

Family Health Behaviors

By Itzik Fadlon and Torben Heien Nielsen

American Economic Review, September 2019

We study how health behaviors are shaped through family spillovers. We leverage administrative data to identify the effects of health shocks on family members' consumption of preventive care and health-related behaviors, constructing counterfactuals for a...

Paternalism against Veblen: Optimal Taxation and Non-respected Preferences for Social Comparisons

By Thomas Aronsson and Olof Johansson-Stenman

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2018

This paper compares optimal nonlinear income tax policies of welfarist and paternalist governments, where the latter does not respect individual preferences regarding relative consumption. Consistent with previous findings, relative consumption concerns t...

Ten Years after the Financial Crisis: What Have We Learned from the Renaissance in Fiscal Research?

[Symposium: Fiscal Policy]

By Valerie A. Ramey

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2019

This paper takes stock of what we have learned from the "Renaissance" in fiscal research in the ten years since the financial crisis. I first discuss the new innovations in methodology and various strengths and weaknesses of the main approaches to estimat...

Compensation and Incentives in the Workplace

[Symposium: Incentives in the Workplace]

By Edward P. Lazear

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2018

Labor is supplied because most of us must work to live. Indeed, it is called "work" in part because without compensation, the overwhelming majority of workers would not otherwise perform the tasks. The theme of this essay is that incentives affect behavio...

Policy Evolution under the Clean Air Act

[Symposium: Fiftieth Anniversary of the Clean Air and Water Acts]

By Richard Schmalensee and Robert N. Stavins

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2019

The US Clean Air Act, passed in 1970 with strong bipartisan support, was the first environmental law to give the federal government a serious regulatory role, established the architecture of the US air pollution control system, and became a model for su...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2018

The Effects of Rent Control Expansion on Tenants, Landlords, and Inequality: Evidence from San Francisco

By Rebecca Diamond, Tim McQuade, and Franklin Qian

American Economic Review, September 2019

Using a 1994 law change, we exploit quasi-experimental variation in the assignment of rent control in San Francisco to study its impacts on tenants and landlords. Leveraging new data tracking individuals' migration, we find rent control limits renters' mo...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, February 2018