Nominal Wage Adjustments during the Pandemic Recession

By John Grigsby, Erik Hurst, Ahu Yildirmaz, and Yulia Zhestkova

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

In this paper, we show that the pandemic recession has led to frequent cuts in nominal wages. Within three months in 2020, as many wage cuts had occurred as occurred throughout the Great Recession. Unlike employment declines, wage cuts were concentrated a...

COVID-19 Shifted Patent Applications toward Technologies That Support Working from Home

By Nicholas Bloom, Steven J. Davis, and Yulia Zhestkova

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We examine the text content of US patent applications, identifying those that advance technologies in support of video conferencing, telecommuting, remote interactivity, and working from home (collectively, WFH). The share of new patent applications that ...

Across the Universe: Policy Support for Employment and Revenue in the Pandemic Recession

By Ryan A. Decker, Robert J. Kurtzman, Byron F. Lutz, and Christopher J. Nekarda

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Using data from 14 government sources, we develop comprehensive estimates of US economic activity by sector, legal form of organization, and firm size to characterize how four government direct-lending programs—the Paycheck Protection Program, Main Stre...

Friend-Based Ranking in Practice

By Francis Bloch and Matthew Olckers

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

A planner aims to target individuals who exceed a threshold in a characteristic, such as wealth or ability. The individuals can rank their friends according to the characteristic. We study a strategy-proof mechanism for the planner to use the rankings for...

Urban Networks and Targeting: Evidence from Liberia

By Lori Beaman, Niall Keleher, Jeremy Magruder, and Carly Trachtman

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

To solicit information from a social network in urban Monrovia, Liberia, we ask community members to assess their neighbors' poverty and assist in targeting a cash transfer. We find little evidence that local leaders, randomly selected neighbors, or neigh...

Adapting to the COVID-19 Pandemic

By Michael Droste and James H. Stock

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

From early in the COVID-19 pandemic, economists have stressed the importance of individuals endogenously changing their behavior to reduce their risk of infection. This paper quantifies time variation in the endogenous behavioral response of economic acti...

Behavior and the Transmission of COVID-19

By Andrew G. Atkeson, Karen Kopecky, and Tao Zha

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

A simple model of COVID-19 that incorporates feedback from disease prevalence to disease transmission through an endogenous response of human behavior does a remarkable job fitting the main features of the data on the growth rates of daily deaths observed...

Implied Dividend Volatility and Expected Growth

By Niels J. Gormsen, Ralph S. J. Koijen, and Ian W. R. Martin

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We study the behavior of implied dividend volatility, constructed from the prices of options on index-level dividends, during the COVID-19 pandemic. We use these data to construct a lower bound on expected excess returns on dividend claims and find that t...

COVID-19 and the Costs of Deadly Disasters

By Sydney C. Ludvigson, Sai Ma, and Serena Ng

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Using monthly data on costly natural disasters affecting the United States over the last 40 years, we estimate 2 time series models and use them to generate predictions about the impact of COVID-19. We find that while our models yield reasonable estimates...

Confederate Streets and Black-White Labor Market Differentials

By Jhacova A. Williams

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Using a unique dataset, this paper examines the extent to which streets named after prominent Confederate generals are related to Black-White labor market differentials. Examining individual-level data shows that Blacks who reside in areas that have a rel...

Homefront: Black Veterans and Black Voters in the Civil Rights Era

By Thomas Koch, Trevon D. Logan, and John M. Parman

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

While the role of World War II veterans in the civil rights movement has been well documented, debate about the causal effect of military service remains. Combining detailed information on World War II enlistments and Civil Rights Commission data on voter...

Carbon-Trading Pilot Programs in China and Local Air Quality

By Douglas Almond and Shuang Zhang

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

China emits twice as much CO2 as the United States. Launched in seven regions in 2013–2014, China's pilot carbon-trading programs cover roughly 7 percent of China's CO2 emissions. These market-based policies offer the best existing...

Industrial Energy Regulation: The Role of Business Conglomerates in China

By Qiaoyi Chen, Zhao Chen, Zhikuo Liu, Juan Carlos Suárez Serrato, and Daniel Yi Xu

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

This paper characterizes the importance of ownership networks of firms that are subject to a prominent energy regulation in China: the Top 1000 Enterprises Energy-Saving Program. We use data on the activities of regulated and unregulated firms that are pa...

Border Carbon Adjustments When Carbon Intensity Varies across Producers: Evidence from California

By Meredith Fowlie, Claire Petersen, and Mar Reguant

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Governments taxing carbon emissions within their jurisdiction can impose a commensurate tax on emissions embodied in imports in order to mitigate emissions leakage. California offers a rare opportunity to investigate how such a border carbon adjustment (B...

Changing Population Exposure to Pollution in China's Special Economic Zones

By Leslie A. Martin and Katie Zhang

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Martin and Zhang (2020) show that the increase in manufacturing output in China's special economic zones significantly increased air pollution. In this complementary paper, we document that widespread migration into these industrial clusters between 2000 ...

Trends in US Spatial Inequality: Concentrating Affluence and a Democratization of Poverty

By Cecile Gaubert, Patrick Kline, Damián Vergara, and Danny Yagan

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We use Bureau of Economic Analysis, census, and Current Population Survey data to study trends in income inequality across US states and counties from 1960–2019. Both states and counties have diverged in terms of per capita pretax incomes since the late...

Local Industrial Policy and Sectoral Hubs

By Esteban Rossi-Hansberg, Pierre-Daniel Sarte, and Felipe Schwartzman

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We study the desirability of industrial policies that generate sectoral hubs using a quantitative spatial model with cognitive nonroutine and other occupations. The productivity of each occupation in an industry depends on sector-specific production exter...

Could Gentrification Stop the Poor from Benefiting from Urban Improvements?

By Clare Balboni, Gharad Bryan, Melanie Morten, and Bilal Siddiqi

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

When policymakers invest in urban infrastructure, there are concerns that poor residents living near the infrastructure will be displaced. This paper investigates mechanisms that may lead to such infrastructure-induced gentrification using a general equil...

On the Inequity of Predicting A While Hoping for B

By Sendhil Mullainathan and Ziad Obermeyer

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Algorithms trained to predict mismeasured proxy variables can reproduce and scale up racial bias. This mechanism of algorithmic bias is distinct from others in the literature and harder to detect. We show this using examples from health care, but the forc...

Adaptive Correspondence Experiments

By Hadar Avivi, Patrick Kline, Evan Rose, and Christopher Walters

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Correspondence experiments probe for discrimination by manipulating employer perceptions of applicant characteristics. We consider the gains from dynamically adapting the number and quality of fictitious applications each employer receives to their prior ...