The Electric Vehicle Transition and the Economics of Banning Gasoline Vehicles

By Stephen P. Holland, Erin T. Mansur, and Andrew J. Yates

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2021

Electric vehicles have a unique potential to transform personal transportation. We analyze this transition with a dynamic model capturing falling costs of electric vehicles, decreasing pollution from electricity, and increasing vehicle substitutability. O...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, October 2021

Assortative Matching or Exclusionary Hiring? The Impact of Employment and Pay Policies on Racial Wage Differences in Brazil

By François Gerard, Lorenzo Lagos, Edson Severnini, and David Card

American Economic Review, October 2021

We measure the effects of firm policies on racial pay differences in Brazil. Non-Whites are less likely to be hired by high-wage firms, explaining about 20 percent of the racial wage gap for both genders. Firm-specific pay premiums for non-Whites are also...

Oligopolistic Price Leadership and Mergers: The United States Beer Industry

By Nathan H. Miller, Gloria Sheu, and Matthew C. Weinberg

American Economic Review, October 2021

We study a repeated game of price leadership in which a firm proposes supermarkups over Bertrand prices to a coalition of rivals. Supermarkups and marginal costs are recoverable from data on prices and quantities using the model's structure. In an applica...

Mistakes, Overconfidence, and the Effect of Sharing on Detecting Lies

By Marta Serra-Garcia and Uri Gneezy

American Economic Review, October 2021

Mistakes and overconfidence in detecting lies could help lies spread. Participants in our experiments observe videos in which senders either tell the truth or lie, and are incentivized to distinguish between them. We find that participants fail to detect ...

Neighborhood-Based Information Costs

By Benjamin Hébert and Michael Woodford

American Economic Review, October 2021

We derive a new cost of information in rational inattention problems, the neighborhood-based cost functions, starting from the observation that many settings involve exogenous states with a topological structure. These cost functions are uniformly posteri...

Projection of Private Values in Auctions

By Tristan Gagnon-Bartsch, Marco Pagnozzi, and Antonio Rosato

American Economic Review, October 2021

We explore how taste projection—the tendency to overestimate how similar others' tastes are to one's own—affects bidding in auctions. In first-price auctions with private values, taste projection leads bidders to exaggerate the intensity of competitio...

Jobs for Sale: Corruption and Misallocation in Hiring

By Jeffrey Weaver

American Economic Review, October 2021

Corrupt government hiring is common in developing countries. This paper uses original data to document the operation and consequences of corrupt hiring in a health bureaucracy. Hires pay bribes averaging 17 months of salary, but contrary to conventional w...

Labor Rationing

By Emily Breza, Supreet Kaur, and Yogita Shamdasani

American Economic Review, October 2021

This paper measures excess labor supply in equilibrium. We induce hiring shocks—which employ 24 percent of the labor force in external month-long jobs—in Indian local labor markets. In peak months, wages increase instantaneously and local aggregate em...

The Political Premium of Television Celebrity

By Heyu Xiong

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2021

This paper studies the electoral consequences of television stardom through the career of Ronald Reagan. I utilize quasi-experimental variation in television reception to estimate the causal effect of celebrity exposure on political support. I find that...

Celebrity politics

[Research Highlight]

September 27, 2021

The impact of television stardom on elections.

2022 John Bates Clark Medal Nominations

[News]

September 27, 2021

Economics Departments invited to submit nominations for the 2022 John Bates Clark Medal.

Expanding broadband access

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How does high-speed internet affect the employment prospects of low-income Americans?

Letter from Director of the AEA Summer Training Program

[News]

October 06, 2021

Read the letter from Omari Swinton, Director of the AEA Summer Training Program, October 7, 2021.

Barriers to expanding coverage

[Research Highlight]

October 06, 2021

How can developing countries mitigate the challenges to universal health insurance?

The Challenges of Universal Health Insurance in Developing Countries: Experimental Evidence from Indonesia's National Health Insurance

By Abhijit Banerjee, Amy Finkelstein, Rema Hanna, Benjamin A. Olken, Arianna Ornaghi, and Sudarno Sumarto

American Economic Review, September 2021

To investigate barriers to universal health insurance in developing countries, we designed a randomized experiment involving about 6,000 households in Indonesia who are subject to a government health insurance program with a weakly enforced mandate. Time-...

Pollution feeds aggression

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Areas downwind from major Chicago highways experienced more violent criminal activity than those upwind.