After Midnight: A Regression Discontinuity Design in Length of Postpartum Hospital Stays

By Douglas Almond and Joseph J. Doyle

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2011

Estimates of moral hazard in health insurance markets can be confounded by adverse selection. This paper considers a plausibly exogenous source of variation in insurance coverage for childbirth in California. We find that additional health insurance cover...

Public-Place Smoking Laws and Exposure to Environmental Tobacco Smoke (ETS)

By Christopher Carpenter, Sabina Postolek, and Casey Warman

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2011

Public-place smoking restrictions are the most important non-price tobacco control measures worldwide, yet surprisingly little is known about their effects on exposure to environmental tobacco smoke (ETS). We study these laws in Canada using data with que...

A's from Zzzz's? The Causal Effect of School Start Time on the Academic Achievement of Adolescents

By Scott E. Carrell, Teny Maghakian, and James E. West

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2011

Recent sleep research finds that many adolescents are sleep-deprived because of both early school start times and changing sleep patterns during the teen years. This study identifies the causal effect of school start time on academic achievement by using ...

Government Form and Public Spending: Theory and Evidence from US Municipalities

By Stephen Coate and Brian Knight

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2011

There are two main forms of government in US cities: council-manager and mayor-council. This paper develops a theory of fiscal policy determination under these two forms. The theory predicts that expected public spending will be lower under mayor-council ...

The Trade Effects of Endogenous Preferential Trade Agreements

By Peter Egger, Mario Larch, Kevin E. Staub, and Rainer Winkelmann

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2011

Structural new trade theory models have never been used to evaluate and quantify the role of preferential trade agreement (PTA) membership for trade in a way which is consistent with general equilibrium. Apart from filling this gap, the present paper aims...

Electoral Rules and Politicians' Behavior: A Micro Test

By Stefano Gagliarducci, Tommaso Nannicini, and Paolo Naticchioni

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2011

Theory predicts that the majoritarian electoral system should produce more targeted redistribution and lower rents than proportional representation. We test these predictions using data on the Italian House of Representatives, and address the nonrandom se...

Do Child Tax Benefits Affect the Well-Being of Children? Evidence from Canadian Child Benefit Expansions

By Kevin Milligan and Mark Stabile

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2011

We exploit changes in child benefits in Canada to study the impact of family income on child and family well-being. Using variation in child benefits across province, time, and family type, we study outcomes spanning test scores, mental health, physical h...

Implementing Anti-discrimination Policies in Statistical Profiling Models

By Devin G. Pope and Justin R. Sydnor

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2011

How should statistical models used for assigning prices or eligibility be implemented when there is concern about discrimination? In many settings, factors such as race, gender, and age are prohibited. However, the use of variables that correlate with the...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, August 2011

Includes: David M. Kreps: Distinguished Fellow 2011

Environmental Accounting for Pollution in the United States Economy

By Nicholas Z. Muller, Robert Mendelsohn, and William Nordhaus

American Economic Review, August 2011

This study presents a framework to include environmental externalities into a system of national accounts. The paper estimates the air pollution damages for each industry in the United States. An integrated-assessment model quantifies the marginal damages...

From Financial Crash to Debt Crisis

By Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff

American Economic Review, August 2011

Newly developed historical time series on public debt, along with data on external debts, allow a deeper analysis of the debt cycles underlying serial debt and banking crises. We test three related hypotheses at both "world" aggregate levels and on an ind...

An Experimental Component Index for the CPI: From Annual Computer Data to Monthly Data on Other Goods

By Tim Erickson and Ariel Pakes

American Economic Review, August 2011

The CPI component indices are obtained from comparing price quotes at a given store in different periods. If we omit comparisons from goods in the store in the initial, but not in the comparison, period we generate a selection bias: goods that exit are di...

Peer Effects, Teacher Incentives, and the Impact of Tracking: Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation in Kenya

By Esther Duflo, Pascaline Dupas, and Michael Kremer

American Economic Review, August 2011

To the extent that students benefit from high-achieving peers, tracking will help strong students and hurt weak ones. However, all students may benefit if tracking allows teachers to better tailor their instruction level. Lower-achieving pupils are partic...

The Impact of Regulations on the Supply and Quality of Care in Child Care Markets

By V. Joseph Hotz and Mo Xiao

American Economic Review, August 2011

We examine the impact of state child care regulations on the supply and quality of care in child care markets. We exploit panel data on both individual establishments and local markets to control for state, time, and, where possible, establishment-specifi...

Competition among Sellers in Securities Auctions

By Alexander S. Gorbenko and Andrey Malenko

American Economic Review, August 2011

We study simultaneous security-bid second-price auctions with competition among sellers for potential bidders. The sellers compete by designing ordered sets of securities that the bidders can offer as payment for the assets. Upon observing auction design...

Unhealthy Insurance Markets: Search Frictions and the Cost and Quality of Health Insurance

By Randall D. Cebul, James B. Rebitzer, Lowell J. Taylor, and Mark E. Votruba

American Economic Review, August 2011

We analyze the effect of search frictions in the market for commercial health insurance. Frictions increase insurance premiums (enough to transfer 13.2 percent of consumer surplus from fully insured employer groups to insurers—approximately $34.4 b...

Segregation and the Quality of Government in a Cross Section of Countries

By Alberto Alesina and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya

American Economic Review, August 2011

We provide a new compilation of data on ethnic, linguistic, and religious composition at the subnational level for a large number of countries. Using these data, we measure segregation of groups within the country. To overcome the endogeneity problem that...

New York City Cab Drivers' Labor Supply Revisited: Reference-Dependent Preferences with Rational-Expectations Targets for Hours and Income

By Vincent P. Crawford and Juanjuan Meng

American Economic Review, August 2011

This paper proposes a model of cab drivers' labor supply, building on Henry S. Farber's (2005, 2008) empirical analyses and Botond Koszegi and Matthew Rabin's (2006; henceforth "KR") theory of reference-dependent preferences. Following KR, our model has t...

Climbing atop the Shoulders of Giants: The Impact of Institutions on Cumulative Research

By Jeffrey L. Furman and Scott Stern

American Economic Review, August 2011

While cumulative knowledge production is central to growth, little empirical research investigates how institutions shape whether existing knowledge can be exploited to create new knowledge. This paper assesses the impact of a specific institution, a biol...

Finance and Development: A Tale of Two Sectors

By Francisco J. Buera, Joseph P. Kaboski, and Yongseok Shin

American Economic Review, August 2011

We develop a quantitative framework to explain the relationship between aggregate/sector-level total factor productivity (TFP) and financial development across countries. Financial frictions distort the allocation of capital and entrepreneurial talent acr...