Keynesian Production Networks and the COVID-19 Crisis: A Simple Benchmark

By David Baqaee and Emmanuel Farhi

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

The COVID-19 crisis is a seemingly all-encompassing shock to supply and demand. These negative shocks affected industries differently: some switched to remote work, maintaining employment and production, while others reduced capacity and shed workers. We ...

Sectoral Effects of Social Distancing

By Jean-Noël Barrot, Basile Grassi, and Julien Sauvagnat

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

The outbreak of the COVID-19 virus has led many states to take the drastic measures of social distancing. Using US executive order, occupation, and survey data, we measure the fall in labor supply due to these measures. Starting from a model of production...

COVID-19 and Small- and Medium-Sized Enterprises: A 2021 "Time Bomb"?

By Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, Şebnem Kalemli-Özcan, Veronika Penciakova, and Nick Sander

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

This paper assesses the prospects of a 2021 "time bomb" in small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME) failures triggered by the generous support policies enacted during the 2020 COVID-19 crisis. Policies implemented in 2020 do not on their own create a 2021...

COVID-19 Is a Persistent Reallocation Shock

By Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, Steven J. Davis, and Brent H. Meyer

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Drawing on data from the firm-level Survey of Business Uncertainty, we present three pieces of evidence that COVID-19 is a persistent reallocation shock. First, rates of excess job and sales reallocation over 24-month periods (looking back 12 months and a...

Civil Rights Enforcement and the Racial Wage Gap

By Jamein P. Cunningham and Jose Joaquin Lopez

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We present new evidence on three measures of civil rights enforcement—litigation, judge dismissal, and plaintiff win rates—across US district courts from 1979 to 2016. Across courts, higher shares of Republican judges are associated with higher dismis...

A Model of Occupational Licensing and Statistical Discrimination

By Peter Q. Blair and Bobby W. Chung

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We develop a model of statistical discrimination in occupational licensing with endogenous occupation selection and wage determination. We find a unique equilibrium with sharp comparative statics. Our key theoretical result is that the licensing premium i...

Intergenerational Economic Mobility and the Racial Wealth Gap

By Jermaine Toney and Cassandra L. Robertson

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

A growing body of research documents the importance of wealth and the racial wealth gap in perpetuating inequality across generations. We examine the impact of wealth on child income. Our two-stage least squares regressions reveal that grandparental wealt...

The Association between Wealth Inequality and Socioeconomic Outcomes

By Omer Ali, William A. Darity Jr., Avra Janz, and Marta Sánchez

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We investigate whether inequality in wealth distribution is broadly associated with adverse socioeconomic outcomes across countries. There are few studies that investigate these relationships, likely due to data limitations. On the other hand, a substanti...

Immigration Enforcement and the Hiring of Low-Skilled Labor

By Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes, Esther Arenas-Arroyo, and Bernhard Schmidpeter

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We examine how firms adjust their labor demand to immigration policy changes resulting from intensified interior immigration enforcement. Using the temporal and geographic variation in the adoption of such policies as a source of identification, we find t...

Hurricane Maria and La Crisis Boricua on Health-Care Supply in Puerto Rico

By Jose M. Fernandez

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Many medical professionals left Puerto Rico due to the financial crisis. Puerto Rico passed Act 14 in April 2017 to mitigate the exodus of physicians, reducing the flat tax on medical services to 4 percent. The same year, Puerto Rico was devastated by a C...

Pandemic Protocols, Native Nutrition: Grocery Store Access from American Indian Reservations during COVID-19

By Luis Quintero, Emilia Simeonova, and Randall Akee

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Native Americans have 3.5 times the COVID-19 infection rate and 1.5 times the death rate of non-Hispanic Whites. We demonstrate that social distancing policies may have unanticipated effects on behaviors. We estimate the effect of nonpharmaceutical interv...

Investor Herding and Spillovers in African Debt Markets

By Hanan Morsy, Eman Moustafa, Tiguene Nabassaga, and Mustafa Yenice

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Using high-frequency data for sovereign long-term bond yields and five-year credit default swap spreads, we estimate a regression model to identify a nonlinear link between cross-section deviation of market yield and extreme movements in African markets a...

The Effects of Prize Structures on Innovative Performance

By Joshua Graff Zivin and Elizabeth Lyons

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Successful innovation is essential for the survival and growth of organizations, but how best to incentivize innovation is poorly understood. We compare how two common incentive schemes affect innovative performance in a field experiment run in partnershi...

Common Ownership and Entrepreneurship

By Ofer Eldar and Jillian Grennan

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We complement the literature on common ownership by presenting two new observations from entrepreneurial start-ups. First, given the increase in common ownership of start-ups by venture capital investors, inclusion of high-value start-ups in standard comm...

The Life Cycle of Businesses and Their Internal Organization

By Elizabeth Weber Handwerker, Sara Moreira, and David Piccone Jr.

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We document new stylized facts on the occupational mix of businesses in the United States and how their internal organization evolves over their life cycles. Our main empirical finding is that younger businesses have fewer hierarchical layers and lower sp...

Does Advisor Gender Affect Women's Persistence in Economics?

By Serena Canaan and Pierre Mouganie

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Women persist in the field of economics at significantly lower rates than men. We show that the gender of an academic advisor is an important determinant of female undergraduates' persistence in economics. We use data from a four-year college where first-...

Who Belongs? The Determinants of Selective Membership into the National Bureau of Economic Research

By Marieke Kleemans and Rebecca L. Thornton

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We examine the determinants of membership into the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) using data from all tenured and tenure-track economists at R1 universities in the United States. We construct an annual panel of employment, research productivi...

The Family Origin of the Math Gender Gap Is a White Affluent Phenomenon

By Gaia Dossi, David Figlio, Paola Giuliano, and Paola Sapienza

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Previous research has shown that norms around the role of women in society could help explain the gender gap in mathematics and that these norms could be transmitted within the family. Using data from the Florida Department of Education combined with birt...

Can Women Teach Math (and Be Promoted)? A Meta-analysis of Gender Differences across Student Evaluations of Teaching

By Amanda J. Felkey and Cassondra Batz-Barbarich

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Academic women in economics have different experiences and outcomes than men and women in other social science fields do, including bias within their performance evaluation instruments, student teaching evaluations (STEs). Despite research citing biases i...

Gender Bias in Assessments of Teacher Performance

By Sabrin Beg, Anne Fitzpatrick, and Adrienne M. Lucas

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

To measure whether principals exhibit gender bias when assessing teacher effectiveness, we compare principals' subjective evaluations against teachers' self-evaluations and objective effectiveness in Ghanaian primary schools. Female and male teachers rate...