American Economic Association 2020–2021 Universal Academic Questionnaire Summary Statistics

By Charles E. Scott and John J. Siegfried

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Report of the AEA Ombudsperson

By Leto Copeley

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Impacts of Private Prison Contracting on Inmate Time Served and Recidivism

By Anita Mukherjee

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2021

This paper examines the impact of private prison contracting by exploiting staggered prison capacity shocks in Mississippi. Motivated by a model based on the typical private prison contract that pays a per diem for each occupied bed, the empirical analysi...

Well-Being, Poverty, and Labor Income Taxation: Theory and Application to Europe and the United States

By François Maniquet and Dirk Neumann

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2021

In a model where agents differ in wages and preferences over labor time–consumption bundles, we study labor income tax schemes that alleviate poverty. To avoid conflict with individual well-being, we require redistribution to take place between agents o...

Call for Papers: Twenty-Second International BIOECON Conference

[News]

May 07, 2021

The deadline for submissions is May 15, 2021.

Nondisclosures and naive consumers

[Research Highlight]

May 17, 2021

When do markets force companies to reveal the quality of their products?

Building a family dynasty

[Page]

How much do extended family members impact the growth of human capital for future generations?

American capitalism and incarceration

[Research Highlight]

May 10, 2021

Anita Mukherjee discusses the consequences of private prisons for inmates in the United States.

The pros and cons of collaboration

[Research Highlight]

May 18, 2021

Benjamin Jones discusses the rise of team research and implications for professional advancement.

Report of Independent Auditor

American Economic Review, June 2021

Front Matter

American Economic Review, June 2021

Feedbacks: Financial Markets and Economic Activity

By Markus Brunnermeier, Darius Palia, Karthik A. Sastry, and Christopher A. Sims

American Economic Review, June 2021

Is credit expansion a sign of desirable financial deepening or the prelude to an inevitable bust? We study this question in modern US data using a structural VAR model of 10 monthly frequency variables, identified by heteroskedasticity. Negative reduced-f...

Discrete Choice under Risk with Limited Consideration

By Levon Barseghyan, Francesca Molinari, and Matthew Thirkettle

American Economic Review, June 2021

This paper is concerned with learning decision-makers' preferences using data on observed choices from a finite set of risky alternatives. We propose a discrete choice model with unobserved heterogeneity in consideration sets and in standard risk aversion...

The Selection of Talent: Experimental and Structural Evidence from Ethiopia

By Girum Abebe, A. Stefano Caria, and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina

American Economic Review, June 2021

We study how search frictions in the labor market affect firms' ability to recruit talented workers. In a field experiment in Ethiopia, we show that an employer can attract more talented applicants by offering a small monetary incentive for making a job a...

Can Network Theory-Based Targeting Increase Technology Adoption?

By Lori Beaman, Ariel BenYishay, Jeremy Magruder, and Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak

American Economic Review, June 2021

Can targeting information to network-central farmers induce more adoption of a new agricultural technology? By combining social network data and a field experiment in 200 villages in Malawi, we find that targeting central farmers is important to spur the ...

Closing the Gap: The Effect of Reducing Complexity and Uncertainty in College Pricing on the Choices of Low-Income Students

By Susan Dynarski, CJ Libassi, Katherine Michelmore, and Stephanie Owen

American Economic Review, June 2021

High-achieving, low-income students attend selective colleges at far lower rates than upper-income students with similar achievement. Behavioral biases, intensified by complexity and uncertainty in the admissions and aid process, may explain this gap. In ...

Digital Dystopia

By Jean Tirole

American Economic Review, June 2021

Autocratic regimes, democratic majorities, private platforms, and religious or professional organizations can achieve social control by managing the flow of information about individuals' behavior. Bundling the agents' political, organizational, or religi...

Submissions open for the 2021 TIAA Paul A. Samuelson Award

[News]

May 28, 2021

The submission deadline is September 10, 2021.

News Uncertainty in Brexit United Kingdom

By Renato Faccini and Edoardo Palombo

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2021

After the Brexit referendum, the behavior of the UK economy defied widespread expectations, as it did not exhibit a V-shaped recession but a slow decline in production. We show that this pattern of propagation arises when uncertainty is about future, rath...

Information Validates the Prior: A Theorem on Bayesian Updating and Applications

By Navin Kartik, Frances Xu Lee, and Wing Suen

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2021

We develop a result on expected posteriors for Bayesians with heterogenous priors, dubbed information validates the prior (IVP). Under familiar ordering requirements, Anne expects a (Blackwell) more informative experiment to bring Bob's posterior mean clo...