A Model of Competing Narratives

By Kfir Eliaz and Ran Spiegler

American Economic Review, December 2020

We formalize the argument that political disagreements can be traced to a "clash of narratives." Drawing on the "Bayesian Networks" literature, we represent a narrative by a causal model that maps actions into consequences, weaving a selection of other ra...

Screening and Selection: The Case of Mammograms

By Liran Einav, Amy Finkelstein, Tamar Oostrom, Abigail Ostriker, and Heidi Williams

American Economic Review, December 2020

We analyze selection into screening in the context of recommendations that breast cancer screening start at age 40. Combining medical claims with a clinical oncology model, we document that compliers with the recommendation are less likely to have cancer ...

What Makes a Rule Complex?

By Ryan Oprea

American Economic Review, December 2020

We study the complexity of rules by paying experimental subjects to implement a series of algorithms and then eliciting their willingness-to-pay to avoid implementing them again in the future. The design allows us to examine hypotheses from the theoretica...

A Few Bad Apples Spoil the Barrel: An Anti-folk Theorem for Anonymous Repeated Games with Incomplete Information

By Takuo Sugaya and Alexander Wolitzky

American Economic Review, December 2020

We study anonymous repeated games where players may be "commitment types" who always take the same action. We establish a stark anti-folk theorem: if the distribution of the number of commitment types satisfies a smoothness condition and the game has a "p...

Front Matter

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2020

What Do Survey Data Tell Us about US Businesses?

By Anmol Bhandari, Serdar Birinci, Ellen R. McGrattan, and Kurt See

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2020

This paper examines the reliability of survey data on business incomes, valuations, and rates of return, which are key inputs for studies of wealth inequality and entrepreneurial choice. We compare survey responses of business owners with available data f...

Efficiency, Justified Envy, and Incentives in Priority-Based Matching

By Atila Abdulkadiroğlu, Yeon-Koo Che, Parag A. Pathak, Alvin E. Roth, and Olivier Tercieux

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2020

Top trading cycles (TTC ) is Pareto efficient and strategy-proof in priority-based matching, but so are other mechanisms including serial dictatorship. We show that TTC minimizes justified envy among all Pareto-efficient and strategy-proof mechanisms in o...

Invisible Geniuses: Could the Knowledge Frontier Advance Faster?

By Ruchir Agarwal and Patrick Gaule

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2020

A better understanding of the determinants of idea/knowledge production remains critical for long-run growth. Toward this end, this paper establishes two results using data from the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO). First, individuals who excelle...

The Welfare Magnet Hypothesis: Evidence from an Immigrant Welfare Scheme in Denmark

By Ole Agersnap, Amalie Jensen, and Henrik Kleven

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2020

We study the effects of welfare generosity on international migration using reforms of immigrant welfare benefits in Denmark. The first reform, implemented in 2002, lowered benefits for non-EU immigrants by about 50 percent, with no changes for natives or...

After the Panic: Are Financial Crises Demand or Supply Shocks? Evidence from International Trade

By Felipe Benguria and Alan M. Taylor

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2020

Are financial crises a negative shock to aggregate demand or supply? This is a fundamental question for research and policy making. Arguments for stimulus usually presume demand-side shortfalls; arguments for tax cuts or structural reform look to the supp...

Strategy-Proofness, Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives, and Majority Rule

By Partha Dasgupta and Eric Maskin

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2020

We show that strategy-proofness, the Pareto principle, anonymity, neutrality, independence of irrelevant alternatives, and decisiveness uniquely characterize majority rule on any domain of preferences for which there exists a voting rule satisfying these ...

Moving to a healthier place

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Hurricane Katrina forced New Orleanians to uproot and live somewhere else. What effect did that have on their health?

Elite education and affirmative action

[Research Highlight]

December 03, 2020

Do selective high schools help students with disadvantaged backgrounds get into better colleges?

Increasing Access to Selective High Schools through Place-Based Affirmative Action: Unintended Consequences

By Lisa Barrow, Lauren Sartain, and Marisa de la Torre

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2020

We investigate whether elite Chicago public high schools differentially benefit high-achieving students from more and less affluent neighborhoods. Chicago's place-based affirmative action policy allocates seats based on achievement and neighborhood socioe...

Lifting the resource curse

[News]

December 04, 2020

Better information helped stop political violence over natural gas in Mozambique.

CSMGEP Profiles: Nada Eissa

[Page]

Gendered laws

[Research Highlight]

December 02, 2020

Penny Goldberg discusses how legal gender discrimination affects women’s economic opportunities around the globe.

Gendered Laws and Women in the Workforce

By Marie Hyland, Simeon Djankov, and Pinelopi Koujianou Goldberg

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2020

This paper offers for the first time a global picture of gender discrimination by the law as it affects women's economic opportunity and charts the evolution of legal inequalities over five decades. Using the World Bank's newly constructed Women, Business...