Gini and Optimal Income Taxation by Rank

By Laurent Simula and Alain Trannoy

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2022

We solve the nonlinear income tax program for rank-dependent social welfare functions, expressing the trade-off between size and inequality using the Gini and related families of positional indices. Absent bunching, ranks in the actual and optimal allocat...

The Long-Run Effects of R&D Place-Based Policies: Evidence from Russian Science Cities

By Helena Schweiger, Alexander Stepanov, and Paolo Zacchia

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2022

We study the long-run effects of historical place-based R&D policies: the creation of Science Cities in Soviet Russia. We compare current demographic and economic characteristics of Science Cities with those of localities that were similar to them at the ...

Adaptation and Adverse Selection in Markets for Natural Disaster Insurance

By Katherine R. H. Wagner

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2022

This paper quantifies frictions in uptake, tests for adverse selection, and analyzes welfare effects of proposed reforms in natural disaster insurance markets. I find that willingness to pay is remarkably low. In high-risk flood zones, fewer than 60 perce...

Depreciating Licenses

By E. Glen Weyl and Anthony Lee Zhang

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2022

Many governments assign use licenses for natural resources, such as radio spectrum, fishing rights, and mineral extraction rights, through auctions or other market-like mechanisms. License design affects resource users' investment incentives as well as th...

The Long-Run Effects of Sports Club Vouchers for Primary School Children

By Jan Marcus, Thomas Siedler, and Nicolas R. Ziebarth

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2022

Childhood obesity is one of the most serious public health challenges of the twenty-first century. While small-scale experiments change behaviors among adults in the short run, we know little about the effectiveness of large-scale policies or the longer...

Does Virtual Advising Increase College Enrollment? Evidence from a Random-Assignment College Access Field Experiment

By Meredith Phillips and Sarah Reber

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2022

Although in-person college access programs can be effective, less is known about whether low-cost and scalable virtual interventions can achieve the same benefits. We evaluate two variants of a virtual college counseling program. Students randomly assigne...

How Much Are Public School Teachers Willing to Pay for Their Retirement Benefits? Comment

By Shawn Ni, Michael Podgursky, and Fangda Wang

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2022

In a widely cited study, Fitzpatrick (2015) found that more than one quarter of Illinois teachers were unwilling to pay 19 cents for pension enhancements worth one dollar in present value. We revisit this finding by tracking the same cohort of teachers to...

Checking and Sharing Alt-Facts

By Emeric Henry ⓡ Ekaterina Zhuravskaya ⓡ Sergei Guriev

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2022

During the 2019 European elections campaign, we exposed a random sample of French voting-age Facebook users to false statements by a far-right populist party. A randomly selected subgroup was also presented with fact-checking of these statements; another ...

Political Parties Do Matter in US Cities . . . for Their Unfunded Pensions

By Christian Dippel

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2022

This paper studies public sector pension obligations, the biggest fiscal challenge currently facing many US cities. Employing a regression discontinuity design around close elections, benefit payments out of a city's public sector pensions are shown to gr...

Childhood Housing and Adult Outcomes: A Between-Siblings Analysis of Housing Vouchers and Public Housing

By Henry O. Pollakowski ⓡ Daniel H. Weinberg ⓡ Fredrik Andersson ⓡ John C. Haltiwanger ⓡ Giordano Palloni ⓡ Mark J. Kutzbach

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2022

We create a national-level longitudinal dataset to analyze how children's participation in public and voucher-assisted housing affects age-26 earnings and adult incarceration. Naïve OLS estimates suggest that returns to subsidized housing participation a...

The far-reaching legacy of lynchings

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Does historical racial animus continue to influence the voting behavior of Blacks today?

AEA Member Announcements: AEJ: Microeconomics Editor search -- request for suggestions

[News]

July 29, 2022

Occupational Matching and Cities

By Theodore Papageorgiou

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2022

In this paper, I document that workers in larger cities have significantly more occupational options than workers in smaller ones. They are able to form better occupational matches and earn higher wages. I also note differences in occupation reallocation ...

The urban wage premium

[Research Highlight]

August 04, 2022

Why do workers in larger cities make more money than their peers in smaller cities?

CSMGEP Profile: Adela de la Torre

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Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2022

Measuring Human Capital

[Symposium: Human Capital]

By Katharine G. Abraham and Justine Mallatt

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2022

We review the existing literature on the measurement of human capital. Broadly speaking, economists have proposed three approaches to constructing human capital measures—the indicator approach, the cost approach, and the income approach. Studies emplo...

Expected and Realized Inflation in Historical Perspective

[Symposium: Inflation Expectations]

By Carola Binder and Rupal Kamdar

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2022

This paper provides historical context for the relationship between expected and realized inflation. We begin with a discussion of early theoretical thought about how inflation expectations are formed. Then, we discuss survey- and asset-based measures o...

The Subjective Inflation Expectations of Households and Firms: Measurement, Determinants, and Implications

[Symposium: Inflation Expectations]

By Michael Weber, Francesco D'Acunto, Yuriy Gorodnichenko, and Olivier Coibion

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2022

Households' and firms' subjective inflation expectations play a central role in macroeconomic and intertemporal microeconomic models. We discuss how subjective inflation expectations are measured, the patterns they display, their determinants, and how the...

Blending Theory and Data: A Space Odyssey

[Symposium: Methods in Applied Micro]

By Dave Donaldson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2022

This article describes methods used in the field of spatial economics that combine insights from economic theory and evidence from data in order to answer counterfactual questions. I outline a general framework that emphasizes three elements: a specific...