Revealing Naïveté and Sophistication from Procrastination and Preproperation

By David J. Freeman

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2021

This paper proposes a novel way of distinguishing whether a person is naive or sophisticated about her own dynamic inconsistency using only her task-completion behavior. It shows that adding an unused extra opportunity to complete a task can lead a naïve...

Exit, Tweets, and Loyalty

By Joshua S. Gans, Avi Goldfarb, and Mara Lederman

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2021

Hirschman's Exit, Voice, and Loyalty highlights the role of "voice" when individuals confront an unexpected deterioration in quality. Yet, voice has received little attention. To motivate our empirical analysis, we develop a simple model of voice...

Fees, Reputation, and Information Production in the Credit Rating Industry

By Jacopo Bizzotto and Adrien Vigier

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2021

We compare a credit rating agency's incentives to acquire costly information when it is only paid for giving favorable ratings to the corresponding incentives when the agency is paid up-front, i.e., irrespective of the ratings assigned. We show that, in t...

The Competitive Effects of Transmission Infrastructure in the Indian Electricity Market

By Nicholas Ryan

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2021

The integration of markets may improve efficiency by lowering costs or reducing local market power. India, seeking to reduce electricity shortages, set up a new power market, in which transmission constraints sharply limit trade between regions. During co...

Learning from Unrealized versus Realized Prices

By M. Kathleen Ngangoué and Georg Weizsäcker

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2021

Our experiments investigate the extent to which traders learn from the price, differentiating between situations where orders are submitted before versus after the price has realized. In simultaneous markets with bids that are conditional on the price, tr...

Coordinating Public Good Provision by Mediated Communication

By Maija Halonen-Akatwijuka and In-Uck Park

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2021

We examine a setup where two agents allocate a fixed budget between public goods in two areas. The agents may be biased to one area, which is their private information. Without communication, the funds are allocated inefficiently, resulting in gaps and du...

Common-Value Public Goods and Informational Social Dilemmas

By Caleb A. Cox and Brock Stoddard

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2021

We experimentally examine private information and communication in a public goods environment with uncertain returns. We consider a common-value public goods game in which the return to contribution is either high or low. Before contributing, three player...

Exponential Satisficing

By Christopher J. Tyson

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2021

We propose the exponential satisficing model of boundedly rational decision-making, a general-purpose tool designed for use in typical microeconomic applications. The model posits that the preferences perceived and acted upon by the agent are a stochastic...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2021

Creating Africa’s own Green Revolution

[Research Highlight]

April 21, 2021

Dean Yang discusses how temporary farming subsidies in Mozambique are giving a massive boost to food production and economic well-being.

Subsidies and the African Green Revolution: Direct Effects and Social Network Spillovers of Randomized Input Subsidies in Mozambique

By Michael Carter, Rachid Laajaj, and Dean Yang

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2021

The Green Revolution, which bolstered agricultural yields and economic well-being in Asia and Latin America beginning in the 1960s, largely bypassed sub-Saharan Africa. We study the first randomized controlled trial of a government-implemented input subsi...

Auction Research Evolving: Theorems and Market Designs

By Paul Milgrom

American Economic Review, May 2021

Front Matter

American Economic Review, May 2021

Cross-Region Transfer Multipliers in a Monetary Union: Evidence from Social Security and Stimulus Payments

By Steven Pennings

American Economic Review, May 2021

US federal transfers to individuals are large, countercyclical, vary geographically, and are often credited with helping to stabilize regional economies. This paper estimates the short-run effects of these transfers using plausibly exogenous regional vari...

Dynastic Human Capital, Inequality, and Intergenerational Mobility

By Adrian Adermon, Mikael Lindahl, and Mårten Palme

American Economic Review, May 2021

We estimate long-run intergenerational persistence in human capital using information on outcomes for the extended family: the dynasty. A dataset including the entire Swedish population, linking four generations, allows us to identify parents' siblings an...

How Research Affects Policy: Experimental Evidence from 2,150 Brazilian Municipalities

By Jonas Hjort, Diana Moreira, Gautam Rao, and Juan Francisco Santini

American Economic Review, May 2021

Can research findings change political leaders' beliefs and policies? We use experiments with 2,150 Brazilian municipalities to measure mayors' demand for and response to research information. In one experiment, we find that mayors are willing to pay to l...

Stock Market Wealth and the Real Economy: A Local Labor Market Approach

By Gabriel Chodorow-Reich, Plamen T. Nenov, and Alp Simsek

American Economic Review, May 2021

We provide evidence of the stock market consumption wealth effect by using a local labor market analysis. An increase in local stock wealth driven by aggregate stock prices increases local employment and payroll in nontradable industries and in total, wit...

Five Facts about Beliefs and Portfolios

By Stefano Giglio, Matteo Maggiori, Johannes Stroebel, and Stephen Utkus

American Economic Review, May 2021

We study a newly designed survey administered to a large panel of wealthy retail investors. The survey elicits beliefs that are important for macroeconomics and finance, and matches respondents with administrative data on their portfolio composition, th...

Efficiency and Equity Impacts of Energy Subsidies

By Robert W. Hahn and Robert D. Metcalfe

American Economic Review, May 2021

Economic theory suggests that energy subsidies can lead to excessive consumption and environmental degradation. However, the precise impact of energy subsidies is not well understood. We analyze a large energy subsidy: the California Alternate Rates for E...

The Role of Behavioral Frictions in Health Insurance Marketplace Enrollment and Risk: Evidence from a Field Experiment

By Richard Domurat, Isaac Menashe, and Wesley Yin

American Economic Review, May 2021

We experimentally varied information mailed to 87,000 households in California's health insurance marketplace to study the role of frictions in insurance take-up. Reminders about the enrollment deadline raised enrollment by 1.3 pp (16 percent) in this t...