Local Responses to Federal Grants: Evidence from the Introduction of Title I in the South

By Elizabeth U. Cascio, Nora Gordon, and Sarah Reber

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2013

We analyze the effects of the introduction of Title I of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, a large federal grants program designed to increase poor students' educational services and achievement. We focus on the South, the poorest region of...

The Effect of a Universal Child Benefit on Conceptions, Abortions, and Early Maternal Labor Supply

By Libertad González

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2013

I study the impact of a universal child benefit on fertility and maternal labor supply. I exploit the unanticipated introduction of a sizable child benefit in Spain in 2007. Following a regression discontinuity-type design, I find that the benefit signifi...

Persistent Antimarket Culture: A Legacy of the Pale of Settlement after the Holocaust

By Irena Grosfeld, Alexander Rodnyansky, and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2013

We estimate long-term effects of Jewish presence in Europe before World War II, using discontinuity at the border of the "Pale of Settlement" area where Jews were allowed to live in the Russian Empire. Current residents of the Pale have lower support for ...

Substitution and Stigma: Evidence on Religious Markets from the Catholic Sex Abuse Scandal

By Daniel M. Hungerman

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2013

This paper considers substitution between charitable activities in the context of religious practice by examining the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal's impact on both Catholic and non-Catholic religiosity. I find a fall in the Catholic population compen...

Incentive Schemes for Local Government: Theory and Evidence from Comprehensive Performance Assessment in England

By Ben Lockwood and Francesco Porcelli

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2013

This paper studies Comprehensive Performance Assessment, an explicit incentive scheme for local government in England. Motivated by a theoretical political agency model, we predict that CPA should increase service quality and local taxation, but have an a...

The Sky Is Not Flat: How Discriminatory Is the Access to International Air Services?

By Roberta Piermartini and Linda Rousová

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2013

Using information on 2,300 Air Services Agreements covering 184 countries, we investigate the impact of air services liberalization on passenger flows. We find that a certain level of liberalization is required to have a positive effect on passenger traff...

Corrigendum: Measuring the Output Responses to Fiscal Policy

By Alan J. Auerbach and Yuriy Gorodnichenko

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2013

The published version of our paper had an accounting mistake in the construction of one time series. This note describes the mistake and presents results based on corrected data. The revised results are very similar to those originally reported.

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2013

The Growth of Low-Skill Service Jobs and the Polarization of the US Labor Market

By David H. Autor and David Dorn

American Economic Review, August 2013

We offer a unified analysis of the growth of low-skill service occupations between 1980 and 2005 and the concurrent polarization of US employment and wages. We hypothesize that polarization stems from the interaction between consumer preferences, which...

Ownership Consolidation and Product Characteristics: A Study of the US Daily Newspaper Market

By Ying Fan

American Economic Review, August 2013

This paper develops a structural model of newspaper markets to analyze the effects of ownership consolidation, taking into account not only firms' price adjustments but also the adjustments in newspaper characteristics. A new dataset on newspaper price...

Trade, Tastes, and Nutrition in India

By David Atkin

American Economic Review, August 2013

This paper explores the causes and consequences of regional taste differences. I introduce habit formation into a standard general equilibrium model. Household tastes evolve over time to favor foods consumed as a child. Thus, locally abundant foods are...

Time Use during the Great Recession

By Mark Aguiar, Erik Hurst, and Loukas Karabarbounis

American Economic Review, August 2013

Using data from the American Time Use Survey between 2003 and 2010, we document that home production absorbs roughly 30 percent of foregone market work hours at business cycle frequencies. Leisure absorbs roughly 50 percent of foregone market work ho...

The Great Diversification and Its Undoing

By Vasco Carvalho and Xavier Gabaix

American Economic Review, August 2013

We investigate the hypothesis that macroeconomic fluctuations are primitively the results of many microeconomic shocks. We define fundamental volatility as the volatility that would arise from an economy made entirely of idiosyncratic sectoral or firm-lev...

Asset Prices and Institutional Investors

By Suleyman Basak and Anna Pavlova

American Economic Review, August 2013

We consider an economy populated by institutional investors alongside standard retail investors. Institutions care about their performance relative to a certain index. Our framework is tractable, admitting exact closed-form expressions, and produces th...

The Political Resource Curse

By Fernanda Brollo, Tommaso Nannicini, Roberto Perotti, and Guido Tabellini

American Economic Review, August 2013

This paper studies the effect of additional government revenues on political corruption and on the quality of politicians, both with theory and data. The theory is based on a political agency model with career concerns and endogenous entry of candidate...

Does Disability Insurance Receipt Discourage Work? Using Examiner Assignment to Estimate Causal Effects of SSDI Receipt

By Nicole Maestas, Kathleen J. Mullen, and Alexander Strand

American Economic Review, August 2013

We present the first causal estimates of the effect of Social Security Disability Insurance benefit receipt on labor supply using all program applicants. We use administrative data to match applications to disability examiners and exploit variation in ...

When Should Sellers Use Auctions?

By James W. Roberts and Andrew Sweeting

American Economic Review, August 2013

A bidding process can be organized so that offers are submitted simultaneously or sequentially. In the latter case, potential buyers can condition their behavior on previous entrants' decisions. The relative performance of these mechanisms is investiga...

Early Life Health Interventions and Academic Achievement

By Prashant Bharadwaj, Katrine Vellesen Løken, and Christopher Neilson

American Economic Review, August 2013

This paper studies the effect of improved early life health care on mortality and long-run academic achievement in school. We use the idea that medical treatments often follow rules of thumb for assigning care to patients, such as the classification of...

Taxation and International Migration of Superstars: Evidence from the European Football Market

By Henrik Jacobsen Kleven, Camille Landais, and Emmanuel Saez

American Economic Review, August 2013

We analyze the effects of top tax rates on international migration of football players in 14 European countries since 1985. Both country case studies and multinomial regressions show evidence of strong mobility responses to tax rates, with an elasticit...

Immigration, Offshoring, and American Jobs

By Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano, Giovanni Peri, and Greg C. Wright

American Economic Review, August 2013

Following Grossman and Rossi-Hansberg (2008) we present a model in which tasks of varying complexity are matched to workers of varying skill in order to develop and test predictions regarding the effects of immigration and offshoring on US native-born wor...