Do Women Respond Less to Performance Pay? Building Evidence from Multiple Experiments

By Oriana Bandiera, Greg Fischer, Andrea Prat, and Erina Ytsma

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2021

Existing empirical work raises the hypothesis that performance pay—whatever its output gains—may widen the gender earnings gap because women may respond less to incentives. We evaluate this possibility by aggregating evidence from existing experiments...

Optimal Targeted Lockdowns in a Multigroup SIR Model

By Daron Acemoglu, Victor Chernozhukov, Iván Werning, and Michael D. Whinston

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2021

We study targeted lockdowns in a multigroup SIR model where infection, hospitalization, and fatality rates vary between groups—in particular between the "young," the "middle-aged," and the "old." Our model enables a tractable quantitative analysis of op...

Cheating with Models

By Kfir Eliaz, Ran Spiegler, and Yair Weiss

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2021

Beliefs and decisions are often based on confronting models with data. What is the largest "fake" correlation that a misspecified model can generate, even when it passes an elementary misspecification test? We study an "analyst" who fits a model, represen...

Long-Term Effects of the Targeting the Ultra Poor Program

By Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Garima Sharma

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2021

This paper studies the long-run effects of a "big-push" program providing a large asset transfer to the poorest Indian households. In a randomized controlled trial that follows these households over ten years, we find positive effects on consumption (0.6 ...

Allocation Mechanisms without Reduction

By David Dillenberger and Uzi Segal

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2021

We study a simple variant of the house allocation problem (one-sided matching). We demonstrate that agents with recursive preferences may systematically prefer one allocation mechanism to the other, even among mechanisms that are considered to be the same...

Front Matter

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2021

The Tax Elasticity of Capital Gains and Revenue-Maximizing Rates

By Ole Agersnap and Owen Zidar

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2021

This paper uses a direct-projections approach to estimate the effect of capital gains taxation on realizations at the state level and then develops a framework for determining revenue-maximizing rates at the federal level. We find that the elasticity of r...

3rd Annual Conference of the Private Sector Development Research Network

[News]

November 30, 2021

The conference will be held on December 9-10, 2021.

Patent disclosure

[Page]

Does access to patent documentation spur follow-on innovation?

Webinar: Helping Faculty Help Students get into PhD Programs in Economics

[News]

December 02, 2021

This webinar will be held on Friday, January 28, 2022 at 1:00 pm EST.

Program Recertification Costs: Evidence from SNAP

By Tatiana Homonoff and Jason Somerville

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2021

Participants in means-tested programs must periodically document eligibility through a recertification process. If all cases that fail recertification are ineligible, the exact timing of this process should be irrelevant. We find that later recertificatio...

Stopping the churn

[Research Highlight]

December 02, 2021

Many eligible participants lose SNAP benefits due to the difficulties of recertifying.

Call for Papers: Open Economies Review Special Issue on Recent Trends in International Reserves

[News]

December 03, 2021

The deadline for submission is January 31, 2022.

William T. Grant Foundation Grants on Reducing Inequality

[News]

December 03, 2021

The deadline is January 12, 2022.

Regressive innovation

[Page]

To what extent was the opioid epidemic driven by demand?

Mass Atrocities and Their Prevention

By Charles H. Anderton and Jurgen Brauer

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2021

Counting conservatively, data show about 100 million mass atrocity-related deaths since 1900. A distinct empirical phenomenon, mass atrocities are events of enormous scale, severity, and brutality, occur in wartime and in peacetime, are geographically w...