Search Committee for American Economic Review Editor

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The long-run benefits of Medicaid

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Health insurance for minority children leads to better health and higher levels of employment.

AEACGR: Briefings, Presentations, and AEA Statements

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Slipping into a Kafkaesque state

[Research Highlight]

September 17, 2021

To what extent is poorly written legislation causing bureaucratic nightmares?

From Weber to Kafka: Political Instability and the Overproduction of Laws

By Gabriele Gratton, Luigi Guiso, Claudio Michelacci, and Massimo Morelli

American Economic Review, September 2021

With inefficient bureaucratic institutions, the effects of laws are hard to assess and incompetent politicians may pass laws to build a reputation as skillful reformers. Since too many laws curtail bureaucratic efficiency, this mechanism can generate a st...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2021

Gender Identity, Coworking Spouses, and Relative Income within Households

By Natalia Zinovyeva and Maryna Tverdostup

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2021

Bertrand, Kamenica, and Pan (2015) document that in the United States there is a discontinuity to the right of 0.5 in the distribution of households according to the female share of total earnings, which they attribute to the existence of a gender identit...

Using Nonlinear Budget Sets to Estimate Extensive Margin Responses: Method and Evidence from the Earnings Test

By Alexander M. Gelber, Damon Jones, Daniel W. Sacks, and Jae Song

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2021

We estimate the impact of the Social Security Annual Earnings Test (AET) on older workers' employment. The AET reduces social security claimants' current benefits in proportion to their earnings in excess of an exempt amount. Using a regression kink desig...

Air Pollution and Criminal Activity: Microgeographic Evidence from Chicago

By Evan Herrnstadt, Anthony Heyes, Erich Muehlegger, and Soodeh Saberian

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2021

A growing literature documents that air pollution adversely impacts health, productivity, and cognition. This paper provides the first evidence of a causal link between air pollution and aggressive behavior, as documented by violent crime. Using the geolo...

Different Strokes for Different Folks? Experimental Evidence on the Effectiveness of Input and Output Incentive Contracts for Health Care Providers with Varying Skills

By Manoj Mohanan, Katherine Donato, Grant Miller, Yulya Truskinovsky, and Marcos Vera-Hernández

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2021

A central issue in designing incentive contracts is the decision to reward agents' input use versus outputs. The trade-off between risk and return to innovation in production can also lead agents with varying skill levels to perform differentially under d...

Temperature, Labor Reallocation, and Industrial Production: Evidence from India

By Jonathan Colmer

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2021

To what degree can labor reallocation mitigate the economic consequences of weather-driven agricultural productivity shocks? I estimate that temperature-driven reductions in the demand for agricultural labor in India are associated with increases in nonag...

Teaching Labor Laws: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial in South Africa

By Marianne Bertrand and Bruno Crépon

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2021

We assess whether imperfect knowledge of labor regulation hinders job creation at small and medium-sized firms. We partner with a labor law expert organization that provides information about labor regulation via newsletters and access to a specialized we...

"Too Young to Die": Deprivation Measures Combining Poverty and Premature Mortality

By Jean-Marie Baland, Guilhem Cassan, and Benoit Decerf

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2021

Most measures of deprivation concentrate on deprivation among the living population and, thus, ignore premature mortality. This omission leads to a severe bias in the evaluation of deprivation. We propose two different measures that combine information on...

Neoliberalism and Latin America

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Did Washington Consensus policies help developing economies emerge from crisis?

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2021

The Extensive Margin of Exporting Products: A Firm-Level Analysis

By Costas Arkolakis, Sharat Ganapati, and Marc-Andreas Muendler

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2021

To quantify trade frictions, we examine multiproduct exporters. We build a flexible general-equilibrium model and estimate market entry costs using Brazilian firm-product-destination data under rich demand and market access cost shocks. Our estimates show...

Micro-level Misallocation and Selection

By Mu-Jeung Yang

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2021

How large are the aggregate productivity losses from the misallocation of resources across firms? With endogenous selection, microfrictions can induce extensive margin misallocation among firms: too many unproductive firms are active (Zombies), and too ma...

Financial Risk Capacity

By Saki Bigio and Adrien d'Avernas

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2021

Financial crises are particularly severe and lengthy when banks fail to recapitalize after bearing large losses. We present a model that explains the slow recovery of bank capital and economic activity. Banks provide intermediation in markets with informa...

Why Are Banks Exposed to Monetary Policy?

By Sebastian Di Tella and Pablo Kurlat

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2021

We propose a model of banks' exposure to movements in interest rates and their role in the transmission of monetary shocks. Since bank deposits provide liquidity, higher interest rates allow banks to earn larger spreads on deposits. Therefore, if risk ave...

Agglomeration, Misallocation, and (the Lack of) Competition

By Wyatt J. Brooks, Joseph P. Kaboski, and Yao Amber Li

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2021

Industrial agglomeration policies may limit competition. We develop, validate, and apply a novel approach for measuring competition based on the comovement of markups and market shares among firms in the same location and industry. Then we develop a model...