Explaining Charter School Effectiveness

By Joshua D. Angrist, Parag A. Pathak, and Christopher R. Walters

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2013

Lottery estimates suggest Massachusetts' urban charter schools boost achievement well beyond that of traditional urban public schools students, while nonurban charters reduce achievement from a higher baseline. The fact that urban charters are most eff...

Getting beneath the Veil of Effective Schools: Evidence from New York City

By Will Dobbie and Roland G. Fryer Jr.

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2013

In this paper, we collect data on the inner-workings of 39 charter schools and correlate these data with school effectiveness. We find that traditionally collected input measures -- class size, per-pupil expenditure, teacher certification, and teacher ...

Risk Protection, Service Use, and Health Outcomes under Colombia's Health Insurance Program for the Poor

By Grant Miller, Diana Pinto, and Marcos Vera-Hernández

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2013

Unexpected medical care spending imposes considerable financial risk on developing country households. Based on managed care models of health insurance in wealthy countries, Colombia's Régimen Subsidiado is a publicly financed insurance program target...

Deterrence and Geographical Externalities in Auto Theft

By Marco Gonzalez-Navarro

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2013

Understanding the degree of geographical crime displacement is crucial for the design of crime prevention policies. This paper documents changes in automobile theft risk that were generated by the plausibly exogenous introduction of Lojack, a highly ef...

Employment, Wages, and Voter Turnout

By Kerwin Kofi Charles and Melvin Stephens Jr.

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2013

Using county-level data across several decades, and various OLS and TSLS models, we find that higher local wages and employment lower turnout in elections for governor, senator, US Congress and state House of Representatives, but have no effect on pres...

Immigrants' Labor Supply and Exchange Rate Volatility

By Arash Nekoei

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2013

Are an immigrant's decisions affected in real time by her home country's economy? I examine this question by exploiting exchange rate variations as exogenous price shocks to immigrants' budget constraints. I find that in response to a 10 percent dollar...

Asymmetric Information between Employers

By Lisa B. Kahn

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2013

This study explores whether potential employers have the same information about worker ability as the incumbent firm. I develop a model of asymmetric learning that nests the symmetric learning case and allows the degree of asymmetry to vary. I then sho...

The Impact of Intergovernmental Transfers on Education Outcomes and Poverty Reduction

By Stephan Litschig and Kevin M. Morrison

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2013

This paper provides regression discontinuity evidence on development impacts of intergovernmental transfers. Extra transfers in Brazil increased local government spending per capita by about 20 percent over a 4 year period with no evidence of crowding ...

Can Informed Public Deliberation Overcome Clientelism? Experimental Evidence from Benin

By Thomas Fujiwara and Leonard Wantchekon

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2013

This paper studies the electoral effects of town hall meetings based on programmatic, nonclientelist platforms. The experiment involves the cooperation of leading candidates in a presidential election in Benin. A campaign strategy based solely on these...

Information Asymmetries in Consumer Credit Markets: Evidence from Payday Lending

By Will Dobbie and Paige Marta Skiba

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2013

Information asymmetries are prominent in theory but difficult to estimate. This paper exploits discontinuities in loan eligibility to test for moral hazard and adverse selection in the payday loan market. Regression discontinuity and regression kink ap...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2013

Front Matter

American Economic Review, October 2013

Including: Neil Wallace: Distinguished Fellow 2012

Understanding the Mechanisms through Which an Influential Early Childhood Program Boosted Adult Outcomes

By James Heckman, Rodrigo Pinto, and Peter Savelyev

American Economic Review, October 2013

A growing literature establishes that high quality early childhood interventions targeted toward disadvantaged children have substantial impacts on later life outcomes. Little is known about the mechanisms producing these impacts. This paper uses longi...

The Effect of Education on Adult Mortality and Health: Evidence from Britain

By Damon Clark and Heather Royer

American Economic Review, October 2013

There is a strong, positive, and well-documented correlation between education and health outcomes. In this paper, we attempt to understand to what extent this relationship is causal. Our approach exploits two changes to British compulsory schooling la...

The China Syndrome: Local Labor Market Effects of Import Competition in the United States

By David H. Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon H. Hanson

American Economic Review, October 2013

We analyze the effect of rising Chinese import competition between 1990 and 2007 on US local labor markets, exploiting cross- market variation in import exposure stemming from initial differences in industry specialization and instrumenting for US imp...

Trade Liberalization and Embedded Institutional Reform: Evidence from Chinese Exporters

By Amit K. Khandelwal, Peter K. Schott, and Shang-Jin Wei

American Economic Review, October 2013

If trade barriers are managed by inefficient institutions, trade liberalization can lead to greater-than-expected gains. We examine Chinese textile and clothing exports before and after the elimination of externally imposed export quotas. Both the surg...

Does the Classic Microfinance Model Discourage Entrepreneurship among the Poor? Experimental Evidence from India

By Erica Field, Rohini Pande, John Papp, and Natalia Rigol

American Economic Review, October 2013

Do the repayment requirements of the classic microfinance contract inhibit investment in high-return but illiquid business opportunities among the poor? Using a field experiment, we compare the classic contract which requires that repayment begin immed...

How the West "Invented" Fertility Restriction

By Nico Voigtländer and Hans-Joachim Voth

American Economic Review, October 2013

We analyze the emergence of the first socioeconomic institution in history limiting fertility: west of a line from St. Petersburg to Trieste, the European Marriage Pattern (EMP) reduced childbirths by approximately one-third between the fourteenth and ...

Identifying Supply and Demand Elasticities of Agricultural Commodities: Implications for the US Ethanol Mandate

By Michael J. Roberts and Wolfram Schlenker

American Economic Review, October 2013

We present a new framework to identify supply elasticities of storable commodities where past shocks are used as exogenous price shifters. In the agricultural context, past yield shocks change inventory levels and futures prices of agricultural commodi...

Urban Accounting and Welfare

By Klaus Desmet and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg

American Economic Review, October 2013

We use a simple theory of a system of cities to decompose the determinants of the city size distribution into three main components: efficiency, amenities, and frictions. Higher efficiency and better amenities lead to larger cities but also to greater ...