Young Adults and Labor Markets in Africa

[Symposium: Economies of Africa]

By Oriana Bandiera, Ahmed Elsayed, Andrea Smurra, and Céline Zipfel

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2022

Every year, millions of young adults join the labor market in Africa. This paper harmonizes surveys and censuses from 68 low- and middle-income countries to compare their job prospects to those of their counterparts in other low-income regions. We show th...

Isaiah Andrews, 2021 John Bates Clark Medalist

By Anna Mikusheva and Jesse M. Shapiro

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2022

Isaiah Andrews is an exceptionally warm and caring person, a remarkable teacher, collaborator, and mentor, an exemplary contributor to his department and profession, and a brilliant econometrician. In this article, we review Isaiah's contributions to econ...

Can You Move to Opportunity? Evidence from the Great Migration

By Ellora Derenoncourt

American Economic Review, February 2022

This paper shows that racial composition shocks during the Great Migration (1940–1970) reduced the gains from growing up in the northern United States for Black families and can explain 27 percent of the region's racial upward mobility gap today. I iden...

Which Findings Should Be Published?

By Alexander Frankel and Maximilian Kasy

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2022

Given a scarcity of journal space, what is the optimal rule for whether an empirical finding should be published? Suppose publications inform the public about a policy-relevant state. Then journals should publish extreme results, meaning ones that move be...

School Spending and Student Outcomes: Evidence from Revenue Limit Elections in Wisconsin

By E. Jason Baron

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2022

This study examines the impacts of two distinct types of school spending on student outcomes. State-imposed revenue limits cap the total amount of revenue that a school district in Wisconsin can raise unless the district holds a referendum asking voters t...

Recessions and educational attainment

[Page]

How does an economic downturn affect the likelihood that a child will go to college?

Publishing the most valuable findings

[Research Highlight]

January 28, 2022

What are the tradeoffs journal editors must weigh when choosing which papers to accept?

Pandemic bottlenecks, dementia, and big tech

[News]

January 28, 2022

Reading recommendations from Timothy Taylor, managing editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives.

Political turnover and education quality in Brazil

[Page]

How does political turnover affect the government bureaucracy and its performance?

NIPE's 18th Summer School on the Econometrics of Big Data

[News]

February 17, 2022

The Summer School will run from June 27-20, 2022.

Money well spent

[Research Highlight]

February 15, 2022

Jason Baron discusses the effects of different types of school spending on student outcomes.

Quarters vs. semesters

[Research Highlight]

February 09, 2022

How does switching to a different academic calendar impact students?

Semesters or Quarters? The Effect of the Academic Calendar on Postsecondary Student Outcomes

By Valerie Bostwick, Stefanie Fischer, and Matthew Lang

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2022

There exists a long-standing debate in higher education on which academic calendar is optimal. Using panel data on the near universe of four-year nonprofit institutions and leveraging quasi-experimental variation in calendars across institutions and years...

The impact of the Affordable Care Act on hospital revenue

[Page]

How did the Medicaid expansion affect the finances of health care facilities in California?

Immigration and Entrepreneurship in the United States

By Pierre Azoulay, Benjamin F. Jones, J. Daniel Kim, and Javier Miranda

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2022

Immigrants can expand labor supply and compete for jobs with native-born workers. But immigrants may also start new firms, expanding labor demand. This paper uses US administrative data and other data sources to study the role of immigrants in entrepreneu...

Risk Exposure and Acquisition of Macroeconomic Information

By Christopher Roth, Sonja Settele, and Johannes Wohlfart

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2022

We conduct an experiment with a representative sample from the United States to study households' demand for macroeconomic information. Respondents who learn of a higher personal exposure to unemployment risk during recessions increase their demand for an...

Gotta Have Money to Make Money? Bargaining Behavior and Financial Need of Microentrepreneurs

By Morgan Hardy, Gisella Kagy, and Lena Song

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2022

Bargaining over real prices with microenterprise owners in Ghana, we show that sellers with less per capita household liquidity agree to lower sale prices. This relationship is robust across firms and within firms over time, even after controlling for a p...

Forward Guidance and Durable Goods Demand

By Alisdair McKay and Johannes F. Wieland

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2022

We study the monetary transmission mechanism in a quantitative fixed-cost model of durable goods demand. We show that aggregate demand is substantially more sensitive to contemporaneous interest rates than to forward guidance about future interest rates. ...

Motivated Beliefs and Anticipation of Uncertainty Resolution

By Christoph Drobner

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2022

Manipulating subjects' expectations about the resolution of uncertainty, I show that subjects update beliefs about ego-relevant information optimistically when they expect no resolution of uncertainty but neutrally when they expect immediate uncertainty r...