Minutes of the Meeting of the Executive Committee, Atlanta, GA, January 4, 2019

By Peter L. Rousseau

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Financial Education versus Costly Counseling: How to Dissuade Borrowers from Choosing Risky Mortgages?

By Sumit Agarwal, Gene Amromin, Itzhak Ben-David, Souphala Chomsisengphet, and Douglas D. Evanoff

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2020

This paper explores the effects of mandatory third-party review of mortgage contracts on consumer choice. The study is based on a legislative pilot carried out in Illinois in 2006, under which mortgage counseling was triggered by applicant credit scores o...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, December 2018

Changing How Literacy Is Taught: Evidence on Synthetic Phonics

By Stephen Machin, Sandra McNally, and Martina Viarengo

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2018

A significant number of people have very low levels of literacy in many OECD countries. This paper studies a national change in policy and practice in England that refocused the teaching of reading around "synthetic phonics." This was a low-cost intervent...

What Do Economists Have to Say about the Clean Air Act 50 Years after the Establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency?

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

By Janet Currie and Reed Walker

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2019

Air quality in the United States has improved dramatically over the past 50 years in large part due to the introduction of the Clean Air Act and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency to enforce it. This article is a reflection on the 50-year...

Evolving Measurement for an Evolving Economy: Thoughts on 21st Century US Economic Statistics

[Symposium: Public Provision of Economic Data]

By Ron S. Jarmin

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2019

The system of federal economic statistics developed in the 20th century has served the country well, but the current methods for collecting and disseminating these data products are unsustainable. These statistics are heavily reliant on sample surveys. ...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2018

Satisfaction Guaranteed: When Moral Hazard Meets Moral Preferences

By James Andreoni

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2018

The fear of moral hazard—especially in the age of Internet commerce—can depress or prevent profitable trades. Experiments show, however, that many people prefer honesty to deceit and would not succumb to moral hazard. This paper asks a whether we can ...

Using Linked Survey and Administrative Data to Better Measure Income: Implications for Poverty, Program Effectiveness, and Holes in the Safety Net

By Bruce D. Meyer and Nikolas Mittag

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2019

We examine the consequences of survey underreporting of transfer programs for prototypical analyses of low-income populations. We link administrative data for four transfer programs to the CPS to correct its severe understatement of transfer dollars recei...

JEL Classification System

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2018

Mismatch of Talent: Evidence on Match Quality, Entry Wages, and Job Mobility

By Peter Fredriksson, Lena Hensvik, and Oskar Nordström Skans

American Economic Review, November 2018

We examine the impact of mismatch on entry wages, separations, and wage growth using unique data on worker talents. We show that workers are sorted on comparative advantage across jobs within occupations. The starting wages of inexperienced workers are un...

Positive Long-Run Capital Taxation: Chamley-Judd Revisited

By Ludwig Straub and Iván Werning

American Economic Review, January 2020

According to the Chamley-Judd result, capital should not be taxed in the long run. In this paper, we overturn this conclusion, showing that it does not follow from the very models used to derive it. For the main model in Judd (1985), we prove that the l...

A Macroeconomic Framework for Quantifying Systemic Risk

By Zhiguo He and Arvind Krishnamurthy

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2019

Systemic risk arises when shocks lead to states where a disruption in financial intermediation adversely affects the economy and feeds back into further disrupting financial intermediation. We present a macroeconomic model with a financial intermediary se...

Report: Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession (CSWEP)

By Shelly Lundberg

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Fixing the Leaky Pipeline: Strategies for Making Economics Work for Women at Every Stage

[Symposium: Women in Economics]

By Kasey Buckles

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2019

While women comprise over half of all undergraduate students in the United States, they account for less than one-third of economics majors. From there, the proportion of women at each stage of the academic tenure track continues to decrease, creating a...

Homeownership and the American Dream

[Symposium: Housing]

By Laurie S. Goodman and Christopher Mayer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2018

For decades, it was taken as a given that an increased homeownership rate was a desirable goal. But after the financial crises and Great Recession, in which roughly eight million homes were foreclosed on and about $7 trillion in home equity was erased, ...

Divest, Disregard, or Double Down? Philanthropic Endowment Investments in Objectionable Firms

By Brigitte Roth Tran

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2019

How much, if at all, should an endowment invest in a firm whose activities run counter to the charitable missions the endowment funds? I offer the first model characterizing this type of investment decision. I introduce a strategy called "mission hedging,...

Identification of and Correction for Publication Bias

By Isaiah Andrews and Maximilian Kasy

American Economic Review, August 2019

Some empirical results are more likely to be published than others. Selective publication leads to biased estimates and distorted inference. We propose two approaches for identifying the conditional probability of publication as a function of a study's re...

Failure to Launch: Housing, Debt Overhang, and the Inflation Option

By Aaron Hedlund

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2019

Can inflating away nominal mortgage liabilities effectively combat recessions? I address this question using a model of illiquid housing, endogenous credit supply, and equilibrium default. I show that, in an ordinary recession, temporarily raising the inf...

The Economic Implications of Housing Supply

[Symposium: Housing]

By Edward Glaeser and Joseph Gyourko

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2018

In this essay, we review the basic economics of housing supply and the functioning of US housing markets to better understand the distribution of home prices, household wealth, and the spatial distribution of people across markets. We employ a cost-base...