Do Kidney Exchanges Improve Patient Outcomes?

By Keith F. Teltser

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2019

In this paper, I estimate the number of additional transplants generated by kidney exchanges. To do this, I analyze substitution patterns between exchange transplants and other transplant outcomes. Exploiting variation in patients' exposure to exchange ac...

"Whatever It Takes" Is All You Need: Monetary Policy and Debt Fragility

By Antoine Camous and Russell Cooper

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2019

The valuation of government debt is subject to strategic uncertainty. Pessimistic lenders, fearing default, bid down the price of debt, leaving a government with a higher debt burden. This increases the likelihood of default, thus confirming the pessimism...

BKK the EZ Way: International Long-Run Growth News and Capital Flows

By Ric Colacito, Max Croce, Steven Ho, and Philip Howard

American Economic Review, November 2018

We study the response of international investment flows to short- and long-run growth news. Among developed G7 countries, positive long-run news for domestic productivity induces a net outflow of investments, in contrast to the effects of short-run growth...

New Evidence on Information Disclosure through Restaurant Hygiene Grading

By Daniel E. Ho, Zoe C. Ashwood, and Cassandra Handan-Nader

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2019

The case of restaurant hygiene grading occupies a central role in information disclosure scholarship. Comparing Los Angeles, which enacted grading in 1998, with California from 1995–1999, Jin and Leslie (2003) found that grading reduced foodborne illnes...

Behavioral Economics and the Atheoretical Style

By Ran Spiegler

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2019

Behavioral economics is widely perceived to be part of the profession's shift away from a culture that places abstract theory at its center. I present a critical discussion of the atheoretical style with which "behavioral" themes are often disseminated: a...

Tipping and the Effects of Segregation

By Anders Böhlmark and Alexander Willén

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2020

We analyze how neighborhood ethnic population composition affects the short- and long-run education and labor market outcomes of natives and immigrants. To overcome the problem of nonrandom sorting across neighborhoods, we borrow theoretical insights from...

Diabetes and Diet: Purchasing Behavior Change in Response to Health Information

By Emily Oster

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2018

Individuals with obesity and related conditions are often reluctant to change their diet. Evaluating the details of this reluctance is hampered by limited data. I use household scanner data to estimate food purchase response to a diagnosis of diabetes. I ...

Economic Drivers of Populism

By Sergei Guriev

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

The recent wave of populism is different from the previous ones, thus generating the demand for noneconomic explanations, such as identity politics and cultural factors. In this paper, I discuss several pieces of evidence that show that economic factors, ...

Inference in Regression Discontinuity Designs with a Discrete Running Variable

By Michal Kolesár and Christoph Rothe

American Economic Review, August 2018

We consider inference in regression discontinuity designs when the running variable only takes a moderate number of distinct values. In particular, we study the common practice of using confidence intervals (CIs) based on standard errors that are clustere...

Transparency, Reproducibility, and the Credibility of Economics Research

By Garret Christensen and Edward Miguel

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2018

There is growing interest in enhancing research transparency and reproducibility in economics and other scientific fields. We survey existing work on these topics within economics, and discuss the evidence suggesting that publication bias, inability to re...

Friedman's Presidential Address in the Evolution of Macroeconomic Thought

[Symposium: Friedman's Natural Rate Hypothesis after 50 Years]

By N. Gregory Mankiw and Ricardo Reis

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2018

Milton Friedman's presidential address, "The Role of Monetary Policy," which was delivered 50 years ago in December 1967 and published in the March 1968 issue of the American Economic Review, is unusual in the outsized role it has played. What ex...

The Impact of the 2018 Tariffs on Prices and Welfare

By Mary Amiti, Stephen J. Redding, and David E. Weinstein

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2019

We examine conventional approaches to evaluating the economic impact of protectionist trade policies. We illustrate these conventional approaches by applying them to the tariffs introduced by the Trump administration during 2018. In the wake of this i...

Why Is Pollution from US Manufacturing Declining? The Roles of Environmental Regulation, Productivity, and Trade

By Joseph S. Shapiro and Reed Walker

American Economic Review, December 2018

Between 1990 and 2008, air pollution emissions from U.S. manufacturing fell by 60 percent despite a substantial increase in manufacturing output. We show that these emissions reductions are primarily driven by within-product changes in emissions intensity...

Externalities and Taxation of Supplemental Insurance: A Study of Medicare and Medigap

By Marika Cabral and Neale Mahoney

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2019

Most health insurance uses cost-sharing to reduce excess utilization. Supplemental insurance can blunt the impact of this cost-sharing, increasing utilization and exerting a negative externality on the primary insurer. This paper estimates the effect of p...

The Optimal Timing of Unemployment Benefits: Theory and Evidence from Sweden

By Jonas Kolsrud, Camille Landais, Peter Nilsson, and Johannes Spinnewijn

American Economic Review, April 2018

This paper provides a simple, yet robust framework to evaluate the time profile of benefits paid during an unemployment spell. We derive sufficient-statistics formulae capturing the marginal insurance value and incentive costs of unemployment benefits p...

Towards the Greater Good? EU Commissioners' Nationality and Budget Allocation in the European Union

By Kai Gehring and Stephan A. Schneider

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2018

We demonstrate that the nationalities of EU Commissioners influence budget allocation decisions in favor of their country of origin. Our focus is on the Commissioners for Agriculture, who are exclusively responsible for a specific fund that accounts for t...

CSMGEP Profile: Rhonda Sharpe

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University Innovation and the Professor's Privilege

By Hans K. Hvide and Benjamin F. Jones

American Economic Review, July 2018

National policies take varied approaches to encouraging university-based innovation. This paper studies a natural experiment: the end of the "professor's privilege" in Norway, where university researchers previously enjoyed full rights to their innovation...

Life after Lead: Effects of Early Interventions for Children Exposed to Lead

By Stephen B. Billings and Kevin T. Schnepel

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2018

Lead pollution is consistently linked to cognitive and behavioral impairments, yet little is known about the benefits of public health interventions for children exposed to lead. This paper estimates the long-term impacts of early-life interventions (e.g....

The Labor Market Integration of Refugee Migrants in High-Income Countries

[Symposium: Assimilation of Refugees]

By Courtney Brell, Christian Dustmann, and Ian Preston

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2020

We provide an overview of the integration of refugees into the labor markets of a number of high-income countries. Discussing the ways in which refugees and economic migrants are differently selected and so might be expected to perform differently in a ...