Intrahousehold Consumption Allocation and Demand for Agency: A Triple Experimental Investigation

By Uzma Afzal, Giovanna d'Adda, Marcel Fafchamps, and Farah Said

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2022

We conduct lab experiments to investigate demand for consumption agency in married couples from Pakistan. Most subjects are no better at guessing their spouse's preferences than those of a stranger, suggesting that individual executive agency has instrume...

And Yet It Moves: Intergenerational Mobility in Italy

By Paolo Acciari, Alberto Polo, and Giovanni L. Violante

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2022

We estimate intergenerational income mobility in Italy using administrative data from tax returns. Our estimates of mobility are higher than prior work using survey data and indirect methods. The rank-rank slope of parent-child income is 0.22, compared to...

Adam Smith: Critical Theorist?

By Keith Tribe

Journal of Economic Literature, June 1999

The bicentenary of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations in 1976 was marked by the publication of a new complete edition of his works and correspondence, bringing together for the first time all extant published and unpublished writings. A basis was thereby prov...

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American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2010

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American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2010

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American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2010

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American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2010

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American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2011

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American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2009

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American Economic Review, July 2022

Productivity Shocks, Long-Term Contracts, and Earnings Dynamics

By Neele Balke and Thibaut Lamadon

American Economic Review, July 2022

This paper examines how employer- and worker-specific productivity shocks transmit to earnings and employment. We develop an equilibrium search model and characterize the optimal contract offered by firms. Risk-neutral firms provide partial insurance agai...

Heterogeneous Global Booms and Busts

By Maryam Farboodi and Péter Kondor

American Economic Review, July 2022

We investigate the heterogeneous boom and bust patterns across countries that emerge as a result of global shocks. Our analysis sheds light on the emergence of core and periphery countries, and the joint determination of the depth of recessions and tightn...

Using the Retail Distribution of Sellers to Impute Expenditure Shares

By Alexis Antoniades, Robert C. Feenstra, and Mingzhi (Jimmy) Xu

American Economic Review, July 2022

Many price indices must be constructed without quantity data at the elementary level. The paper shows that for some consumer goods in the United States and other countries, one can approximate expenditure shares using weights derived from the retail distr...

Monopsony in the US Labor Market

By Chen Yeh, Claudia Macaluso, and Brad Hershbein

American Economic Review, July 2022

This paper quantifies employer market power in US manufacturing and how it has changed over time. Using administrative data, we estimate plant-level markdowns—the ratio between a plant's marginal revenue product of labor and its wage. We find most manuf...

When Choices Are Mistakes

By Kirby Nielsen and John Rehbeck

American Economic Review, July 2022

Using a laboratory experiment, we identify whether decision-makers consider it a mistake to violate canonical choice axioms. To do this, we incentivize subjects to report axioms they want their decisions to satisfy. Then, subjects make lottery choices whi...

Belief Distortions and Macroeconomic Fluctuations

By Francesco Bianchi, Sydney C. Ludvigson, and Sai Ma

American Economic Review, July 2022

This paper combines a data-rich environment with a machine learning algorithm to provide new estimates of time-varying systematic expectational errors ("belief distortions") embedded in survey responses. We find sizable distortions even for professional f...

Factor Market Failures and the Adoption of Irrigation in Rwanda

By Maria Jones, Florence Kondylis, John Loeser, and Jeremy Magruder

American Economic Review, July 2022

Factor market failures can limit adoption of profitable technologies. We leverage a plot-level spatial regression discontinuity design in the context of irrigation use by farmers provided free access to water. Using irrigation boosts profits by 43–62 pe...

Monetary Policy with Opinionated Markets

By Ricardo J. Caballero and Alp Simsek

American Economic Review, July 2022

We build a model in which the Fed and the market disagree about future aggregate demand. The market anticipates monetary policy "mistakes," which affect current demand and induce the Fed to partially accommodate the market's view. The Fed expects to imple...

Estimating Spillovers from Publicly Funded R&D: Evidence from the US Department of Energy

By Kyle R. Myers and Lauren Lanahan

American Economic Review, July 2022

We quantify the magnitude of R&D spillovers created by grants to small firms from the US Department of Energy. Our empirical strategy leverages variation due to state-specific matching policies, and we develop a new approach to measuring both geographic a...

Digital Addiction

By Hunt Allcott, Matthew Gentzkow, and Lena Song

American Economic Review, July 2022

Many have argued that digital technologies such as smartphones and social media are addictive. We develop an economic model of digital addiction and estimate it using a randomized experiment. Temporary incentives to reduce social media use have persistent...