Research and the Approval Process: The Organization of Persuasion

By Emeric Henry and Marco Ottaviani

American Economic Review, March 2019

An informer sequentially collects and disseminates information through costly research to persuade an evaluator to approve an activity. Payoffs and control rights are split between informer and evaluator depending on the organizational rules governing the...

Quality Overprovision in Cable Television Markets

By Gregory S. Crawford, Oleksandr Shcherbakov, and Matthew Shum

American Economic Review, March 2019

We measure the welfare distortions from endogenous quality choice in imperfectly competitive markets. For US cable television markets between 1997–2006, prices are 33 percent to 74 percent higher and qualities 23 percent to 55 percent higher than social...

Persuasion: The Art of Changing Worldviews

By Simone Galperti

American Economic Review, March 2019

Persuaders often face the task of changing their listeners' worldview, which may involve conveying evidence that disconfirms that view. It has been shown, however, that people are often reluctant to change their worldviews. These aspects of persuasion can...

The Arrival of Fast Internet and Employment in Africa

By Jonas Hjort and Jonas Poulsen

American Economic Review, March 2019

To show how fast Internet affects employment in Africa, we exploit the gradual arrival of submarine Internet cables on the coast and maps of the terrestrial cable network. Robust difference-in-differences estimates from 3 datasets, covering 12 countries, ...

Does Helping John Help Sue? Evidence of Spillovers in Education

By Isaac M. Opper

American Economic Review, March 2019

Does the impact of teachers extend beyond the students in their classroom? Using the natural transitions of students from multiple elementary schools into a single middle school, this paper provides a new method for isolating and quantifying peer spillove...

Does Household Finance Matter? Small Financial Errors with Large Social Costs

By Harjoat S. Bhamra and Raman Uppal

American Economic Review, March 2019

Households with familiarity biases tilt their portfolios toward a few risky assets. The resulting mean-variance loss from portfolio underdiversification is equivalent to only a modest reduction of about 1 percent per year in a household's portfolio return...

The Human Capital Stock: A Generalized Approach: Comment

By Francesco Caselli and Antonio Ciccone

American Economic Review, March 2019

Jones (2014) examines development accounting with imperfect substitutability between different types of skills in the production of output. He finds that human capital variation can account for the totality of the variation in income across countries. We ...

The Human Capital Stock: A Generalized Approach: Reply

By Benjamin F. Jones

American Economic Review, March 2019

Human capital differences across countries can appear large or small depending on measurement methods. This Reply clarifies key assumptions and conceptual distinctions across accounting approaches. Accounting-based arguments for small human capital differ...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2019

Digital Economics

By Avi Goldfarb and Catherine Tucker

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2019

Digital technology is the representation of information in bits. This technology has reduced the cost of storage, computation, and transmission of data. Research on digital economics examines whether and how digital technology changes economic activity. I...

Information Design: A Unified Perspective

By Dirk Bergemann and Stephen Morris

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2019

Given a game with uncertain payoffs, information design analyzes the extent to which the provision of information alone can influence the behavior of the players. Information design has a literal interpretation, under which there is a real information des...

Review Essay on Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-Heritage Societies by Claire Adida, David Laitin and Marie-Anne Valfort

By Thierry Verdier

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2019

This paper reviews the book Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-Heritage Societies by Claire Adida, David Laitin and Marie-Anne Valfort (hereafter, ALV), providing an analytical perspective on the issues related to minority discrimination a...

Gorbachev versus Deng: A Review of Chris Miller's The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy

By Sergei Guriev

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2019

Chris Miller's book is a historian's account of Mikhail Gorbachev's efforts to save the Soviet economy. Miller focuses on the question of why Gorbachev did not follow Deng Xiaoping and did not manage to reform the economy. Miller argues that it was not ...

The Devil Is in the Details: Implications of Samuel Bowles's The Moral Economy for Economics and Policy Research

By Rachel Kranton

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2019

All economists should buy and read The Moral Economy by Samuel Bowles. The book challenges basic premises of economic theory and questions policies based on monetary incentives. Incentives not only crowd out intrinsic motivations, they erode the ...

Environmentalism with Chinese Characteristics—A Review of Matthew E. Kahn and Siqi Zheng's Blue Skies over Beijing: Economic Growth and the Environment in China

By Ian Coxhead

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2019

China's dramatic rise from poverty to global economic prominence has been accompanied by an equally dramatic increase in environmental damages. The book under review presents an exploration of economic and political economy factors that might bring abou...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2019

Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2019

JEL Classification System

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2019

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2019

Adverse Selection in ACA Exchange Markets: Evidence from Colorado

By Matthew Panhans

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2019

This study tests for adverse selection in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) health insurance exchanges established in 2014 and quantifies the welfare consequences. Using a new statewide dataset of medical claims from Colorado, I use plausibly exogenous premiu...