Federal Coal Program Reform, the Clean Power Plan, and the Interaction of Upstream and Downstream Climate Policies

By Todd D. Gerarden, W. Spencer Reeder, and James H. Stock

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2020

Can supply-side environmental policies that limit the extraction of fossil fuels reduce CO2 emissions? This paper studies interactions between a specific supply-side policy—a carbon surcharge on federal coal royalties—and regulation of emis...

Coercive Trade Policy

By Vincent Anesi and Giovanni Facchini

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2019

Coercion is used by one government (the "sender") to influence the trade practices of another (the "target"). We build a two-country trade model in which coercion can be exercised unilaterally or channeled through a "weak" international organization witho...

Quantifying Information and Uncertainty

By Alexander Frankel and Emir Kamenica

American Economic Review, October 2019

We examine ways to measure the amount of information generated by a piece of news and the amount of uncertainty implicit in a given belief. Say a measure of information is valid if it corresponds to the value of news in some decision problem. Say a measur...

Heterogeneity, Inattention, and Bayesian Updates

By Raffaella Giacomini, Vasiliki Skreta, and Javier Turen

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2020

We formulate a theory of expectations updating that fits the dynamics of accuracy and disagreement in a new survey of professional forecasters. We document new stylized facts, including the puzzling persistence of disagreement as uncertainty resolves. Our...

Credibility of Crime Allegations

By Frances Xu Lee and Wing Suen

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2020

The lack of hard evidence in allegations about sexual misconduct makes it difficult to separate true allegations from false ones. We provide a model in which victims and potential libelers face the same costs and benefits from making an allegation, but th...

Time Discounting and Wealth Inequality

By Thomas Epper, Ernst Fehr, Helga Fehr-Duda, Claus Thustrup Kreiner, David Dreyer Lassen, Søren Leth-Petersen, and Gregers Nytoft Rasmussen

American Economic Review, April 2020

This paper documents a large association between individuals' time discounting in incentivized experiments and their positions in the real-life wealth distribution derived from Danish high-quality administrative data for a large sample of middle-aged indi...

Nowcasting Gentrification: Using Yelp Data to Quantify Neighborhood Change

By Edward L. Glaeser, Hyunjin Kim, and Michael Luca

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Data from digital platforms have the potential to improve our understanding of gentrification, both by predicting gentrification and by characterizing the local economy of gentrifying neighborhoods. To explore, we identify gentrifying neighborhoods using ...

Environmental Justice: The Economics of Race, Place, and Pollution

By Spencer Banzhaf, Lala Ma, and Christopher Timmins

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2019

The grassroots movement that placed environmental justice issues on the national stage around 1980 was soon followed up by research documenting the correlation between pollution and race and poverty. This work has established inequitable exposure to nui...

What Is the Impact of Food Stamps on Prices and Products Variety? The Importance of the Supply Response

By Xavier Jaravel

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Comparing US states that implemented policies generating state-specific variation in the take-up rate for food stamps, I find that food stamp eligible households experienced lower inflation and a faster increase in product variety in states with a larger ...

WTO Accession and Performance of Chinese Manufacturing Firms: Corrigendum

By Loren Brandt, Johannes Van Biesebroeck, Luhang Wang, and Yifan Zhang

American Economic Review, April 2019

A Method to Link Advances in Artificial Intelligence to Occupational Abilities

By Edward W. Felten, Manav Raj, and Robert Seamans

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Prior episodes of automation have led to economic growth and also to many changes in the workplace. We expect the same from artificial intelligence (AI). The link between AI and labor is complex, however. To assist researchers and policymakers, we provide...

On the Relationship between Cognitive Ability and Risk Preference

[Symposium: Risk in Economics and Psychology]

By Thomas Dohmen, Armin Falk, David Huffman, and Uwe Sunde

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2018

This paper will focus on the relationship between cognitive ability and decision-making under risk and uncertainty. Taken as a whole, this research indicates that cognitive ability is associated with risk-taking behavior in various contexts and life dom...

Voter Response to Peak and End Transfers: Evidence from a Conditional Cash Transfer Experiment

By Sebastian Galiani, Nadya Hajj, Patrick J. McEwan, Pablo Ibarrarán, and Nandita Krishnaswamy

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2019

In a Honduran field experiment, sequences of cash transfers to poor households varied in amount of the largest (peak) and last (end) transfers. Larger peak-end transfers increased voter turnout and the incumbent party's vote share in the 2013 presidential...

The road to the Industrial Revolution

[Research Highlight]

April 14, 2020

How did infrastructure accelerate economic growth in the UK?

Endogenous Infrastructure Development and Spatial Takeoff in the First Industrial Revolution

By Alex Trew

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2020

This paper develops a model in which the evolution of the transport sector occurs alongside the growth in trade and output of agricultural and manufacturing firms. Simulation output captures aspects of the historical record of England and Wales over 1710�...

Optimal Taxation with Risky Human Capital

By Marek Kapička and Julian Neira

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2019

We study optimal tax policies in a life-cycle economy with permanent ability differences and risky human capital investments that have both an unobservable component, learning effort, and an observable component, schooling. The optimal policies balance re...

Is Personal Initiative Training a Substitute or Complement to the Existing Human Capital of Women? Results from a Randomized Trial in Togo

By Francisco Campos, Michael Frese, Markus Goldstein, Leonardo Iacovone, Hillary C. Johnson, David McKenzie, and Mona Mensmann

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Personal initiative training—a psychology-based mindset training program—delivers lasting improvements for female business owners in Togo. Which types of women benefit most? Theories of dynamic complementarity would suggest training should work better...

Debt Traps? Market Vendors and Moneylender Debt in India and the Philippines

By Dean Karlan, Sendhil Mullainathan, and Benjamin N. Roth

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2019

A debt trap occurs when someone takes on a high-interest-rate loan and is barely able to pay back the interest, and thus perpetually finds themselves in debt (often by refinancing). Studying such practices is important for understanding financial decision...

Democratic Values and Institutions

By Timothy Besley and Torsten Persson

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2019

This paper builds a model of the two-way interaction between democratic values and institutions to bridge sociological research, focusing on values, with economics research, which studies strategic decisions. Some citizens hold values that make them prote...

Applying Generalized Pareto Curves to Inequality Analysis

By Thomas Blanchet, Bertrand Garbinti, Jonathan Goupille-Lebret, and Clara Martínez-Toledano

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

A generalized Pareto curve is defined as the curve of inverted Pareto coefficients b(p), where b(p) is the ratio between average income or wealth above rank p and the p-th quantile. We present this concept and show how it can be used to better estimate di...