German Jewish Émigrés and US Invention

By Petra Moser, Alessandra Voena, and Fabian Waldinger

American Economic Review, October 2014

Historical accounts suggest that Jewish émigrés from Nazi Germany revolutionized US science. To analyze the émigrés' effects on chemical innovation in the United States, we compare changes in patenting by US inventors in research fields of émigré...

Efficiency, Equality, and Labeling: An Experimental Investigation of Focal Points in Explicit Bargaining

By Andrea Isoni, Anders Poulsen, Robert Sugden, and Kei Tsutsui

American Economic Review, October 2014

We investigate Schelling's hypothesis that payoff-irrelevant labels ("cues") can influence the outcomes of bargaining games with communication. In our experimental games, players negotiate over the division of a surplus by claiming valuable objects tha...

Efficient Entry in Competing Auctions

By James Albrecht, Pieter A. Gautier, and Susan Vroman

American Economic Review, October 2014

In this paper, we demonstrate the efficiency of seller entry in a model of competing auctions in which we allow for both buyer and seller heterogeneity. This generalizes existing efficiency results in the competitive search literature by simultaneously ...

Private Equity Premium Puzzle Revisited

By Katya Kartashova

American Economic Review, October 2014

This paper revisits the results of Moskowitz and Vissing-Jøgensen (2002) on returns to entrepreneurial investments in the United States. Following the authors' methodology and new data from the Survey of Consumer Finances, I find that the "private equ...

How Does Risk Selection Respond to Risk Adjustment? New Evidence from the Medicare Advantage Program

By Jason Brown, Mark Duggan, Ilyana Kuziemko, and William Woolston

American Economic Review, October 2014

To combat adverse selection, governments increasingly base payments to health plans and providers on enrollees' scores from risk-adjustment formulae. In 2004, Medicare began to risk-adjust capitation payments to private Medicare Advantage (MA) plans to ...

The Effect of Mergers in Search Markets: Evidence from the Canadian Mortgage Industry

By Jason Allen, Robert Clark, and Jean-François Houde

American Economic Review, October 2014

We examine the relationship between concentration and price dispersion using variation induced by a merger in the Canadian mortgage market. Since interest rates are determined through a search and negotiation process, consolidation weakens consumers' barg...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, October 2014

Should Aid Reward Performance? Evidence from a Field Experiment on Health and Education in Indonesia

By Benjamin A. Olken, Junko Onishi, and Susan Wong

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2014

We report an experiment in 3,000 villages that tested whether incentives improve aid efficacy. Villages received block grants for maternal and child health and education that incorporated relative performance incentives. Subdistricts were randomized into ...

Citizenship, Fertility, and Parental Investments

By Ciro Avitabile, Irma Clots-Figueras, and Paolo Masella

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2014

Citizenship rights are associated with better economic opportunities for immigrants. This paper studies how in a country with a large fraction of temporary migrants the fertility decisions of foreign citizens respond to a change in the rules that regul...

Price, Quality, and Variety: Measuring the Gains from Trade in Differentiated Products

By Gloria Sheu

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2014

This paper explores the gains from trade in differentiated products from three channels: decreases in price, improvements in quality, and increases in variety. Using data on Indian imports of computer printers from 1996 to 2005, a period of trade liber...

Team Incentives for Education in Developing Countries: A Randomized Field Experiment in Benin

By Moussa P. Blimpo

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2014

I examine the impact of student incentives in Benin, using three different designs that can be implemented relatively cheaply and with administrative data. The first design is a standard incentive structure where students receive monetary rewards for reac...

Moral Hazard and Claims Deterrence in Private Disability Insurance

By David Autor, Mark Duggan, and Jonathan Gruber

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2014

Exploiting within-firm, over-time variation in plan parameters for nearly 10,000 Long Term Disability (LTD) policies held by US employers, we present the first empirical analysis of the determinants of private LTD spells. We find that a shorter waiting pe...

Private and Public Provision of Counseling to Job Seekers: Evidence from a Large Controlled Experiment

By Luc Behaghel, Bruno Crépon, and Marc Gurgand

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2014

This paper reports the results of a large-scaled randomized controlled experiment comparing the public and private provision of counseling to job seekers. The intention-to-treat estimates of both programs are not statistically different, but more worke...

The Distributive Impacts of Financial Development: Evidence from Mortgage Markets during US Bank Branch Deregulation

By Ishani Tewari

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2014

Well-functioning credit markets play a key role in boosting overall economic growth, but their impact on distributional outcomes is much less clear. I use a quasi-experimental setting provided by branch banking deregulation, an important episode of US ...

Soil Endowments, Female Labor Force Participation, and the Demographic Deficit of Women in India

By Eliana Carranza

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2014

Differences in relative female employment by soil texture are used to explain the heterogeneous deficit of female children across districts within India. Soil texture varies exogenously and determines the depth of land tillage. Deep tillage, possible i...

When the Floodgates Open: "Northern" Firms' Response to Removal of Trade Quotas on Chinese Goods

By Hale Utar

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2014

Using the dismantling of the Multi-fibre Arrangement quotas on Chinese textile products in conjunction with China's accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO), within firms adjustments to intensified low-wage competition is analyzed. Employing Dan...

Merit Aid, College Quality, and College Completion: Massachusetts' Adams Scholarship as an In-Kind Subsidy

By Sarah R. Cohodes and Joshua S. Goodman

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2014

We analyze a Massachusetts merit aid program that gives highscoring students tuition waivers at in-state public colleges with lower graduation rates than available alternative colleges. A regression discontinuity design comparing students just above and...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2014

Economic Shocks and Conflict: Evidence from Commodity Prices

By Samuel Bazzi and Christopher Blattman

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2014

Higher national incomes are correlated with political stability. Is this relationship causal? We test three theories linking income to conflict with new data on export price shocks. Price shocks have no effect on new conflict, even large shocks in high...

Trade in Intermediate Inputs and Business Cycle Comovement

By Robert C. Johnson

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2014

Does input trade synchronize business cycles across countries? I incorporate input trade into a dynamic multisector model with many countries, calibrate the model to match bilateral input-output data, and estimate trade-comovement regressions in simula...