Inference for Losers

By Isaiah Andrews, Dillon Bowen, Toru Kitagawa, and Adam McCloskey

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Researchers frequently report league tables ranking units (neighborhoods or firms, for instance) based on estimated coefficients. Since the rankings are formed based on estimates, however, the coefficients reported in league tables suffer from selection b...

Estimating the Effects of Milk Inspections on Infant and Child Mortality, 1880−1910

By D. Mark Anderson, Kerwin Kofi Charles, Michael McKelligott, and Daniel I. Rees

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

In the mid-nineteenth century, the urban milk supply in the United States was regularly skimmed or diluted with water, reducing its nutritional value. At the urging of public health experts, cities across the country hired milk inspectors, who were tasked...

Segregation and the Initial Provision of Water in the United States

By Brian Beach, John Parman, and Martin Saavedra

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

US cities invested heavily in water and sewer infrastructure throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These investments improved public health and quality of life by helping US cities control typhoid fever and other waterborne disease...

1918 Every Year: Racial Inequality in Infectious Mortality, 1906−1942

By James J. Feigenbaum, Lauren Hoehn-Velasco, Christopher Muller, and Elizabeth Wrigley-Field

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

In the first half of the twentieth century, racial inequality in the rate of death from infectious disease was immense. In every year from 1906 to 1920, Black Americans in cities died from infectious diseases at a rate higher than that of urban White Amer...

Scapegoating during Crises

By Leonardo Bursztyn, Georgy Egorov, Ingar Haaland, Aakaash Rao, and Christopher Roth

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Economic crises are often accompanied by waves of antiminority behavior. We build on the framework developed in Bursztyn et al. (2022) to propose that crises, in addition to shifting people's attitudes toward minorities, can provide intolerant people with...

Is the Partisan Divide Real? Polarization in Preferences for Redistribution

By Brad Nathan, Ricardo Perez-Truglia, and Alejandro Zentner

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

There is a widespread belief that Republicans and Democrats are worlds apart with respect to their preferences for redistribution. However, is that partisan divide real? In this paper, we discuss evidence from the General Social Survey and a tailored surv...

Eliciting People's First-Order Concerns: Text Analysis of Open-Ended Survey Questions

By Beatrice Ferrario and Stefanie Stantcheva

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

We illustrate the design and use of open-ended survey questions to elicit people's first-order concerns on policies. Closed-ended questions are the backbone of surveys but may prime respondents to select some answers and may omit relevant options. Open-en...

Unemployment Insurance Financing as a Uniform Payroll Tax

By Sebastian Graves, Jonathon Hazell, Walker F. Lewis, and Christina Patterson

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

In the United States, unemployment insurance (UI) is financed by taxes levied on employers. We develop a model to decompose UI taxes into a firing tax component levied on firms that lay off workers, and a uniform payroll tax component levied on all firms ...

Poor Performance as a Predictable Outcome: Financing the Administration of Unemployment Insurance

By Marta Lachowska, Alexandre Mas, and Stephen A. Woodbury

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Effective administration of unemployment insurance (UI) is central to its ability to smooth consumption and act as an automatic stabilizer. The federal government's method of allocating funds to administer UI gives the states no incentive to provide quali...

Would Broadening the UI Tax Base Help Low-Income Workers?

By Mark Duggan, Audrey Guo, and Andrew C. Johnston

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Unemployment insurance (UI) tax bases vary significantly in the United States, from a low of $7,000 annually in California to a high of $52,700 in Washington. Previous research has provided surprisingly little guidance regarding the consequences of this v...

Should We Have Automatic Triggers for Unemployment Benefit Duration and How Costly Would They Be?

By Gabriel Chodorow-Reich, Peter Ganong, and Jonathan Gruber

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

We model automatic trigger policies for unemployment insurance by simulating a weekly panel of individual labor market histories, grouped by state. We reach three conclusions: (i) policies designed to trigger immediately at the onset of a recession result...

Global Life Insurers during a Low Interest Rate Environment

By Ralph S. J. Koijen and Motohiro Yogo

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Life insurers' business model has changed with the growth of insurance products with minimum return guarantees that are exposed to market and interest risks. The interest risk exposure of US and European insurers increased in the low-rate environments aft...

Shadow Bank Distress and Household Debt Relief: Evidence from the CARES Act

By Susan Cherry, Erica Jiang, Gregor Matvos, Tomasz Piskorski, and Amit Seru

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Shadow banks service a substantial portion of household debt in the United States, including half of residential mortgages. They also funded and implemented a large portion of the CARES Act-driven debt relief. Despite uniform policy and similar borrowers,...

Weak Corporate Insolvency Rules: The Missing Driver of Zombie Lending

By Bo Becker and Victoria Ivashina

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

"Zombie lending"—lending to less-productive firms at subsidized rates—can help banks with misaligned incentives in the short run, but it prolongs economic downturns. We propose that inefficient resolution of insolvency is a significant contributor to ...

Masks and Trolleys in San Francisco during the 1918 Influenza Epidemic

By François R. Velde

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

I analyze daily data on deaths and on mobility (ridership of electric railways) in the city of San Francisco in 1918−1919, using a model that combines a standard epidemiological component, agents who choose economic activity taking infection risk into a...

Boomtowns: Local Shocks and Inequality in 1920s California

By Sarah Quincy and Rowena Gray

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

As the United States economy grew in the 1920s, both wealth and income inequality rose as well. California land values were especially volatile as a variety of shocks buffeted the state. This paper summarizes how these local booms affected housing inequal...

Immigration Shocks and Marriage Market Sorting

By Katherine Eriksson, Addison Lake, and Gregory T. Niemesh

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Recent work shows a puzzle in the early twentieth century United States: as intergenerational mobility decreased, assortative mating increased. We argue that these two facts are causally related by using a shock to intergenerational mobility caused by fal...

Transportation Revolution: The Car in the 1920s

By Shari Eli, Joshua K. Hausman, and Paul W. Rhode

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

In 1919, there were 6 cars for every 100 people in the United States; in 1929, there were 19. The diffusion of the car transformed daily life and had large economic effects. Data on car registrations at the state level help us to understand the correlates...

Continuous Gender Identity and Economics

By Anne Ardila Brenøe, Lea Heursen, Eva Ranehill, and Roberto A. Weber

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Economic research on gender largely focuses on biological sex, the binary classification as either a "man" or "woman." We investigate the value of incorporating a measure of continuous gender identity (CGI) into economics by exploring whether it explains ...

Integration Costs and Missing Women in Firms around the World

By Conrad Miller, Jennifer Peck, and Mehmet Seflek

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Where social norms favor gender segregation, firms may find it costly to employ both men and women. If the costs of integration are largely fixed, firms will integrate only if their expected number of female employees under integration exceeds some thresh...