Recessions, Mortality, and Migration Bias: Evidence from the Lancashire Cotton Famine

By Vellore Arthi, Brian Beach, and W. Walker Hanlon

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2022

We examine the health effects of the Lancashire Cotton Famine, a sharp downturn in Britain's cotton textile manufacturing regions that was induced by the US Civil War. Migration was an important response to this downturn, but as we document, migration als...

The Rising Return to Noncognitive Skill

By Per-Anders Edin, Peter Fredriksson, Martin Nybom, and Björn Öckert

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2022

This paper uses administrative data from Sweden to document trends in the labor market returns to skills. Between 1992 and 2013, the economic return to noncognitive skill⁠—a psychologist-assessed measure of teamwork and leadership skill⁠—roughly d...

LinkedIn(to) Job Opportunities: Experimental Evidence from Job Readiness Training

By Laurel Wheeler, Robert Garlick, Eric Johnson, Patrick Shaw, and Marissa Gargano

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2022

Online professional networking platforms are widely used and may help workers to search for and obtain jobs. We run the first randomized evaluation of training work seekers to join and use one of the largest platforms, LinkedIn. Training increases the end...

Political Fragmentation and Government Stability: Evidence from Local Governments in Spain

By Felipe Carozzi, Davide Cipullo, and Luca Repetto

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2022

This paper studies how political fragmentation affects government stability. Using a regression discontinuity design, we show that each additional party with representation in the local parliament increases the probability that the incumbent government is...

Health Insurance Design Meets Saving Incentives: Consumer Responses to Complex Contracts

By Adam Leive

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2022

To lower health care costs, Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) offer tax incentives encouraging people to trade off current consumption against future consumption. This paper tests whether consumers use HSAs as self-insurance over the life cycle. Using admini...

Temporary Stays and Persistent Gains: The Causal Effects of Foster Care

By Max Gross and E. Jason Baron

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2022

Six percent of children in the United States enter foster care by age 18. We estimate the effects of foster care on children's outcomes by exploiting the quasi-random assignment of child welfare investigators in Michigan. We find that foster care improved...

Missing Women, Integration Costs, and Big Push Policies in the Saudi Labor Market

By Conrad Miller, Jennifer Peck, and Mehmet Seflek

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2022

In settings where social norms promote gender segregation, firms may find it costly to employ both men and women. These integration costs may hinder women's employment. We develop a methodology to test for the presence of fixed integration costs and estim...

Formative Experiences and the Price of Gasoline

By Christopher Severen and Arthur A. van Benthem

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2022

Formative experiences shape behavior for decades. We document a striking feature about those who came of driving age during the oil crises of the 1970s⁠—they drive less in the year 2000. The effect is not specific to these cohorts; price variation ove...

Unemployment Insurance as a Worker Indiscipline Device? Evidence from Scanner Data

By Lester Lusher, Geoffrey C. Schnorr, and Rebecca L.C. Taylor

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2022

We provide causal evidence of an ex ante moral hazard effect of unemployment insurance (UI) by matching plausibly exogenous changes in UI benefit duration across state-weeks during the Great Recession to high-frequency productivity measures from individua...

Who Set Your Wage?

By David Card

American Economic Review, April 2022

I discuss the recent literature that has led to new interest in the idea of monopsonistic wage setting. Building on advances in search theory and in models of differentiated products, researchers have used a number of different strategies to identify the ...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, April 2022

Understanding the Scarring Effect of Recessions

By Christopher Huckfeldt

American Economic Review, April 2022

This paper documents that the earnings cost of job loss is concentrated among workers who find reemployment in lower-skill occupations, and that the cost and incidence of such occupation displacement is higher for workers who lose their job during a reces...

Labor Market Power

By David Berger, Kyle Herkenhoff, and Simon Mongey

American Economic Review, April 2022

We develop, estimate, and test a tractable general equilibrium model of oligopsony with differentiated jobs and concentrated labor markets. We estimate key model parameters by matching new evidence on the relationship between firms' local labor market sha...

Measuring Geopolitical Risk

By Dario Caldara and Matteo Iacoviello

American Economic Review, April 2022

We present a news-based measure of adverse geopolitical events and associated risks. The geopolitical risk (GPR) index spikes around the two world wars, at the beginning of the Korean War, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and after 9/11. Higher geopolitic...

Self-Persuasion: Evidence from Field Experiments at International Debating Competitions

By Peter Schwardmann, Egon Tripodi, and Joël J. van der Weele

American Economic Review, April 2022

Laboratory evidence shows that when people have to argue for a given position, they persuade themselves about the position's factual and moral superiority. Such self-persuasion limits the potential of communication to resolve conflict and reduce polarizat...

Public Procurement in Law and Practice

By Erica Bosio, Simeon Djankov, Edward Glaeser, and Andrei Shleifer

American Economic Review, April 2022

We examine a new dataset of public procurement laws, practice, and outcomes in 187 countries. We measure regulation as restrictions on the discretion of the procuring entities. We find that laws and practice are highly correlated with each other across co...

Does Context Outweigh Individual Characteristics in Driving Voting Behavior? Evidence from Relocations within the United States

By Enrico Cantoni and Vincent Pons

American Economic Review, April 2022

We measure the overall influence of contextual versus individual factors (e.g., voting rules and media as opposed to race and education) on voter behavior, and explore underlying mechanisms. Using a US-wide voter-level panel, 2008–2018, we examine voter...

Dynamic Price Competition, Learning-by-Doing, and Strategic Buyers

By Andrew Sweeting, Dun Jia, Shen Hui, and Xinlu Yao

American Economic Review, April 2022

We examine how strategic buyer behavior affects equilibrium outcomes in a model of dynamic price competition where sellers benefit from learning-by-doing by allowing each buyer to expect to capture a share of future buyer surplus. Many equilibria that exi...

Wetlands, Flooding, and the Clean Water Act

By Charles A. Taylor and Hannah Druckenmiller

American Economic Review, April 2022

In 2020 the Environmental Protection Agency narrowed the definition of "waters of the United States," significantly limiting wetland protection under the Clean Water Act. Current policy debates center on the uncertainty around wetland benefits. We estimat...

Selling Consumer Data for Profit: Optimal Market-Segmentation Design and Its Consequences

By Kai Hao Yang

American Economic Review, April 2022

A data broker sells market segmentations to a producer with private cost who sells a product to a unit mass of consumers. This paper characterizes the revenue-maximizing mechanisms for the data broker. Every optimal mechanism induces quasi-perfect price d...