The Persistent Power of Behavioral Change: Long-Run Impacts of Temporary Savings Subsidies for the Poor

By Simone Schaner

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2018

I use a field experiment in rural Kenya to study how temporary incentives to save impact long-run economic outcomes. Study participants randomly selected to receive large temporary interest rates on an individual bank account had significantly more income...

Corporate Income Tax, Legal Form of Organization, and Employment

By Daphne Chen, Shi Qi, and Don Schlagenhauf

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2018

A dynamic stochastic occupational choice model with heterogeneous agents is developed to evaluate the impact of a corporate income tax reduction on employment. In this framework, the key margin is the endogenous entrepreneurial choice of legal form of org...

Digital Economics

By Avi Goldfarb and Catherine Tucker

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2019

Digital technology is the representation of information in bits. This technology has reduced the cost of storage, computation, and transmission of data. Research on digital economics examines whether and how digital technology changes economic activity. I...

Fleeing a Lame Duck: Policy Uncertainty and Manufacturing Investment in US States

By Nathan Falk and Cameron A. Shelton

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2018

It is found that electorally-induced policy uncertainty decreases manufacturing investment in US states. In a state with average partisan polarization, the elasticity of election-year investment to a specific measure of policy uncertainty is -0.027. When ...

Caste and the Indian Economy

By Kaivan Munshi

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2019

Caste plays a role at every stage of an Indian's economic life, in school, university, the labor market, and into old age. The influence of caste extends beyond private economic activity into the public sphere, where caste politics determine access to p...

Partners in Crime

By Stephen B. Billings, David J. Deming, and Stephen L. Ross

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2019

Social interactions may explain the large variance in criminal activity across neighborhoods and time. We present direct evidence of social spillovers in crime using random variation in neighborhood residence along opposite sides of a newly drawn school b...

The Local Economic and Welfare Consequences of Hydraulic Fracturing

By Alexander W. Bartik, Janet Currie, Michael Greenstone, and Christopher R. Knittel

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2019

Exploiting geological variation and timing in the initiation of hydraulic fracturing, we find that fracking leads to sharp increases in oil and gas recovery and improvements in a wide set of economic indicators. There is also evidence of deterioration in ...

Multimarket Contact in the Hospital Industry

By Matt Schmitt

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2018

Hospitals in the United States increasingly belong to multihospital systems that operate in numerous geographic markets. A large literature in management and economics suggests that competition between firms may be softened as a result of multimarket cont...

The Neighborhood Impacts of Local Infrastructure Investment: Evidence from Urban Mexico

By Craig McIntosh, Tito Alegría, Gerardo Ordóñez, and René Zenteno

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2018

This paper reports on the results of a large infrastructure investment experiment in which $68 million in spending was randomly allocated across a set of low-income urban neighborhoods in Mexico. We show that the program resulted in substantial improvemen...

Medical Care Spending and Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from Workers' Compensation Reforms

By David Powell and Seth Seabury

American Economic Review, October 2018

Medical care represents an important component of workers' compensation benefits with the potential to improve health and post- injury labor outcomes, but little is known about the relationship between medical care spending and the labor outcomes of injur...

Carbon Taxes and CO₂ Emissions: Sweden as a Case Study

By Julius J. Andersson

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2019

This quasi-experimental study is the first to find a significant causal effect of carbon taxes on emissions, empirically analyzing the implementation of a carbon tax and a value-added tax on transport fuel in Sweden. After implementation, carbon dioxide e...

Independent Auditor's Report

American Economic Review, June 2018

Ending Rent Control Reduced Crime in Cambridge

By David H. Autor, Christopher J. Palmer, and Parag A. Pathak

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Using detailed location-specific criminal incident-level data, we find that sudden rent decontrol in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1995 caused overall crime to fall by 16 percent—approximately 1,200 crimes annually. We estimate that this annual direct ben...

Media Bias in China

By Bei Qin, David Strömberg, and Yanhui Wu

American Economic Review, September 2018

This paper examines whether and how market competition affected the political bias of government-owned newspapers in China from 1981 to 2011. We measure media bias based on coverage of government mouthpiece content (propaganda) relative to commercial cont...

Does Electoral Competition Curb Party Favoritism?

By Marta Curto-Grau, Albert Solé-Ollé, and Pilar Sorribas-Navarro

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2018

We study whether incumbents facing uncontested elections channel public spending towards co-partisan officials more than is the case of incumbents that are worried about reelection. We draw on data on capital transfers allocated by Spanish regions to loca...

Cash-Flow Taxes in an International Setting

By Alan J. Auerbach and Michael P. Devereux

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2018

We model the effects of cash-flow taxes, differing according to the location of the tax, on the behavior of a multinational producing and selling in two countries with three sources of economic rent: a fixed basic-production factor (located with initial p...

How Efficient Is Dynamic Competition? The Case of Price as Investment

By David Besanko, Ulrich Doraszelski, and Yaroslav Kryukov

American Economic Review, September 2019

We study industries where the price that a firm sets serves as an investment into lower cost or higher demand. We assess the welfare implications of the ensuing competition for the market using analytical and numerical approaches to compare the equilibria...

Bank Networks and Systemic Risk: Evidence from the National Banking Acts

By Haelim Anderson, Mark Paddrik, and Jessie Jiaxu Wang

American Economic Review, September 2019

The National Banking Acts (NBAs) of 1863–1864 established rules governing the amounts and locations of interbank deposits, thereby reshaping the bank networks. Using unique data on bank balance sheets and detailed interbank deposits in 1862 and 1867 in ...

In Search of Labor Demand

By Paul Beaudry, David A. Green, and Ben M. Sand

American Economic Review, September 2018

We propose and estimate a novel specification of labor demand which encompasses search frictions and the role of entrepreneurs in new firm creation. Using city-industry variation over four decades, we estimate the wage elasticity of employment demand to b...

Employment Adjustment and Part-Time Work: Lessons from the United States and the United Kingdom

By Daniel Borowczyk-Martins and Etienne Lalé

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2019

We document that fluctuations in part-time employment play a major role in movements in hours per worker during cyclical swings in the labor market. Building on this result, we develop a stock-flow framework to describe the dynamics of part-time employmen...