Structural Vector Autoregressions with Imperfect Identifying Information

By Christiane Baumeister and James D. Hamilton

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

The problem of identification is often the core challenge of empirical economic research. The traditional approach to identification is to bring in additional information in the form of identifying assumptions, such as restrictions that certain magnitudes...

What Can We Learn from Sign-Restricted VARs?

By Christian K. Wolf

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

I use a simple business cycle model to illustrate the workings and limitations of sign restrictions in structural vector autoregressions. Three lessons emerge. First, such sign-based identification is vulnerable to "shock masquerading": linear combination...

Signing Out Confounding Shocks in Variance-Maximizing Identification Methods

By Neville Francis and Gene Kindberg-Hanlon

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Recent papers have examined the dominant drivers of business cycles using variance-maximizing techniques for identification. However, identification is poor when shocks other than the target of interest play large roles in driving volatility at the target...

SVAR Identification from Higher Moments: Has the Simultaneous Causality Problem Been Solved?

By José Luis Montiel Olea, Mikkel Plagborg-Møller, and Eric Qian

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Two recent strands of the structural vector autoregression literature use higher moments for identification, exploiting either non-Gaussianity or heteroskedasticity. These approaches achieve point identification without exclusion or sign restrictions. We ...

The Trade Reform Wave of 1985−1995

By Douglas A. Irwin

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

The decade from 1985 to 1995 will go down in history as an unprecedented period in which global trade barriers were reduced. Some trade agreements (the North American Free Trade Agreement, the European Single Market, the Uruguay Round) were prominent late...

The Dismantling of Capital Controls after Bretton Woods and Latin American Productivity

By Diana Van Patten

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

The recent economic history of global integration has been characterized by a dismantling of capital controls and increased foreign direct investment (FDI). This paper explores the role of impediments to international capital mobility, foreign direct inve...

Migration on the Rise, a Paradigm in Decline: The Last Half-Century of Global Mobility

By Michael A. Clemens

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

The past several decades have witnessed a rebirth of global labor mobility. Workers are moving between countries at rates not seen since before World War I. During the same period, economists' study of international migration has been framed by a particul...

Women's Employment and Empowerment: Descriptive Evidence

By Madeline McKelway

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

It is widely believed that female employment and empowerment are intimately related. This paper presents relationships between women's employment and various measures of their empowerment, using data from rural India. The measures capture several dimensio...

Empowering Women to Engage in Commercial Agriculture

By Kate Ambler, Kelly M. Jones, and Michael O'Sullivan

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Despite women's large contributions to agricultural production in developing countries, they are often excluded from market-facing activities. There is little evidence on how to increase their participation in commercial agriculture. We designed a private...

Improving Willingness-to-Pay Elicitation by Including a Benchmark Good

By Rebecca Dizon-Ross and Seema Jayachandran

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

We propose and validate a simple way to augment the standard Becker-DeGroot-Marschak method that researchers use to elicit willingness to pay (WTP) for a good. The augmentation is to measure WTP for another good ("benchmark good"), one unrelated to both t...

Measuring Women's Empowerment in Collective Households

By Rossella Calvi, Jacob Penglase, and Denni Tommasi

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Measuring women's empowerment within families is challenging. Social scientists often rely on close-ended survey questions on women's participation in household decisions, domestic abuse, and autonomy to measure women's power and agency. Recent advances i...

Wealth Taxation: Lessons from History and Recent Developments

By Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

This paper describes the historical experience of wealth taxation in Europe and draws lessons from this history for wealth taxation in the twenty-first century. We show that the wealth tax base was narrow in European countries, due to large exemptions, ta...

Saving Effects of a Real-Life Imperfectly Implemented Wealth Tax: Evidence from Norwegian Micro Data

By Annette Alstadsæter, Marie Bjørneby, Wojciech Kopczuk, Simen Markussen, and Knut Røed

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Countries that implement wealth taxes make many practical compromises regarding relative treatment and approach to valuation of different categories of assets in order to ease assessment and liquidity difficulties with this form of taxation. Relying on No...

Gender and Inheritances

By Sandra E. Black, Paul J. Devereux, Fanny Landaud, and Kjell G. Salvanes

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Using administrative data from Norway, we document that gifts and inheritances are a more important component of total income for women than for men. This is particularly true at the very top of the distributions of total lifetime income and net wealth. T...

The Correlation of Net and Gross Wealth across Generations: The Role of Parent Income and Child Age

By N. Meltem Daysal, Michael F. Lovenheim, and David N. Wasser

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

We use Danish register data to examine intergenerational rank-rank correlations in net wealth and gross housing wealth by child age and parental income. Our results indicate that gross housing wealth correlations are more stable by child age than are net ...

Artificial Intelligence, Algorithm Design, and Pricing

By John Asker, Chaim Fershtman, and Ariel Pakes

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

We calculate the time path of prices generated by algorithmic pricing games that differ in their learning protocols. Asynchronous learning occurs when the algorithm only learns about the return from the action it actually took. Synchronous learning occurs...

Identifying Algorithmic Pricing Technology Adoption in Retail Gasoline Markets

By Stephanie Assad, Robert Clark, Daniel Ershov, and Lei Xu

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

While recent theoretical literature shows that algorithmic pricing (AP) may increase retail prices by facilitating collusive behavior, there has been no empirical evidence relating the adoption of AP technology to higher prices and/or collusion. One key r...

Smart Meters and Retail Competition: Trends and Challenges

By Jacint Enrich, Ruoyi Li, Alejandro Mizrahi, and Mar Reguant

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Retail electricity competition has been introduced for over a decade in many markets, but challenges in having an active retail market remain. Universal smart meters have also emerged as a trend. What is the interaction between competition and smart meter...

Ranking and Selection from Pairwise Comparisons: Empirical Bayes Methods for Citation Analysis

By Jiaying Gu and Roger Koenker

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

In this paper, Stigler's (1994) model of citation flows among journals adapted to the pairwise comparison model of Bradley and Terry (1952) is employed to do ranking and selection of journal influence based on nonparametric empirical Bayes methods. Compar...

Statistical Uncertainty in the Ranking of Journals and Universities

By Magne Mogstad, Joseph Romano, Azeem Shaikh, and Daniel Wilhelm

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Economists are obsessed with rankings of institutions, journals, or scholars according to the value of some feature of interest. These rankings are invariably computed using estimates rather than the true values of such features. As a result, there may be...