Measuring Racial Discrimination in Algorithms

By David Arnold, Will Dobbie, and Peter Hull

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Algorithmic decision-making can lead to discrimination against legally protected groups, but measuring such discrimination is often hampered by a fundamental selection challenge. We develop new quasi-experimental tools to overcome this challenge and measu...

Product Proliferation under Rational Inattention: Application to Health Insurance

By Zach Y. Brown and Jihye Jeon

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

In markets with complicated products such as insurance, why do firms offer many products even when consumers appear to receive little benefit? We show that when consumers face information acquisition costs, firms may have an incentive to introduce many un...

Can Automatic Retention Improve Health Insurance Market Outcomes?

By Adrianna McIntyre, Mark Shepard, and Myles Wagner

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

There is growing interest in market design using default rules and other "choice architecture" principles to steer consumers toward desirable outcomes. Using data from Massachusetts's health insurance exchange, we study an "automatic retention" policy int...

Diversity in Economics Seminars: Who Gives Invited Talks?

By Jennifer L. Doleac, Erin Hengel, and Elizabeth Pancotti

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Invited seminar talks are a primary way that economists get feedback on their work, disseminate their research, and build their professional networks. In this paper, we present descriptive evidence on who gave invited seminar talks in economics. We use a ...

Gendered Citations at Top Economic Journals

By Marlène Koffi

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

This paper investigates how women's works are perceived among their peers. I construct a dataset using bibliographic data from articles published in top journals in economics and granular information on the articles that cite them. I find that female-auth...

Confidence Men? Evidence on Confidence and Gender among Top Economists

By Heather Sarsons and Guo Xu

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Using data from economists working in top US universities, we find that women are less confident than men along three margins. When asked about their level of agreement on survey questions about the economy, women are less likely to provide a judgment tha...

Using Longitudinal Data to Explore the Gender Gap for Academic Economists

By Kelly Bedard, Maxine Lee, and Heather Royer

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

There are widespread gender inequities within the economics discipline. In this paper, we collect and analyze new longitudinal salary and personnel data from top economics departments at public institutions. A panel spanning 2005 to 2018 allows us to foll...

Low Energy: Estimating Electric Vehicle Electricity Use

By Fiona Burlig, James Bushnell, David Rapson, and Catherine Wolfram

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We provide the first at-scale estimate of electric vehicle (EV) home charging. Previous estimates are based on conflicting surveys or are extrapolated from a small, unrepresentative sample of households with dedicated EV meters. We combine billions of hou...

Making Clean Firms Cleaner: Targeting Environmental Regulation to Maximize Returns

By Paige Weber

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Many environmental regulations are designed to clean up the dirtiest firms. However, if pollution intensity is negatively correlated with market share, this approach may not be the most cost-effective way to reduce pollution. This paper illustrates the th...

Machine Learning about Treatment Effect Heterogeneity: The Case of Household Energy Use

By Christopher R. Knittel and Samuel Stolper

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We use causal forests to evaluate the heterogeneous treatment effects (TEs) of repeated behavioral nudges toward household energy conservation. The average response to treatment is a monthly electricity reduction of 9 kilowatt-hours (kWh), but the full di...

Long-Term Employment Effects from Job Losses during the COVID-19 Crisis? A Comparison to the Great Recession and Its Slow Recovery

By Till von Wachter

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

This paper compares predictions for the long-term reductions in the employment-to-population (EPOP) ratio based on estimates of the overall job-loss rate and the long-term effects of job loss with the actual evolution of the EPOP ratio. It took about ten ...

Disability Insurance in the Great Recession: Ease of Access, Program Enrollment, and Local Hysteresis

By Melissa S. Kearney, Brendan M. Price, and Riley Wilson

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We examine the interaction between Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) access and economic shocks during the Great Recession by exploiting exogenous variation in SSDI appeals processing time—a measure of hassle or access—between neighboring zi...

Wage Insurance and Labor Market Trajectories

By Benjamin G. Hyman, Brian K. Kovak, Adam Leive, and Theodore Naff

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Wage insurance provides income support to displaced workers who find reemployment at a lower wage. We study the effects of the wage insurance provisions of the US Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program using administrative data from the state of Virgin...

Working for Your Bread: The Labor Supply Effects of SNAP

By Marianne Bitler, Jason Cook, and Jonathan Rothbaum

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the only universal US means-tested safety net program, has a low benefit-reduction rate. Thus, many SNAP recipients are working. We apply recent methods to study whether there is evidence of moral haza...

Jackson, the Bank War, and the Legacy of the Second Bank of the United States

By Peter L. Rousseau

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

President Jackson vetoed the bill to recharter the Second Bank of the United States on July 10, 1832. I describe events leading to the veto and through the bank's dissolution in 1836 using private correspondence and official government documents. These ...

Off the Rails: The Real Effects of Railroad Bond Defaults following the Panic of 1873

By Christopher Cotter

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Although corporate default crises are often quite severe, previous work has found little impact on real macroeconomic variables. This article investigates the relationship between railroad defaults and the balance sheets of local banks following the Panic...

How Contagious Was the Panic of 1907? New Evidence from Trust Company Stocks

By Caroline Fohlin and Zhikun Lu

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Using a new dataset of all NYC trust company stocks, we study the impact of the Panic of 1907 and the ensuing cash infusion by JP Morgan and the Treasury. Using synthetic controls, we find that three "troubled" trusts performed far worse than the other tr...

Public Economics and Inequality: Uncovering Our Social Nature

By Emmanuel Saez

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

This paper argues that the social nature of humans, absent from the standard economic model, is crucial for understanding our large modern social states and why concerns about inequality are so pervasive. A social solution arises when a situation is resol...

Indigenous Self-Governance and Development on American Indian Reservations

By Dustin Frye and Dominic P. Parker

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People promotes self-governance as a matter of justice rather than economics. How will self-governance affect the incomes of indigenous people? To gain insight, we compare long-run income growth on American I...

Custom Elections and Local Policies: The Case of Canada's First Nations

By Fernando M. Aragón and Anke S. Kessler

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We examine the effect of community-designed electoral codes on Canadian First Nation communities. Adopting a custom code for local elections allows for changes such as increasing term duration, creating appeal and supervisory bodies, and incorporating tra...