Front Matter

American Economic Review, August 2022

Community Colleges and Upward Mobility

By Jack Mountjoy

American Economic Review, August 2022

Two-year community colleges enroll nearly half of all first-time undergraduates in the United States, but to ambiguous effect: low persistence rates and the potential for diverting students from four-year institutions cast ambiguity over two-year colleges...

The Impact of Childhood Social Skills and Self-Control Training on Economic and Noneconomic Outcomes: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment Using Administrative Data

By Yann Algan, Elizabeth Beasley, Sylvana Côté, Jungwee Park, Richard E. Tremblay, and Frank Vitaro

American Economic Review, August 2022

A childhood intervention to improve the social skills and self-control of at-risk kindergarten boys in the 1980s had positive impacts over the life course: higher trust and self-control as adolescents; increased social group membership, education, and red...

Sentiment and Speculation in a Market with Heterogeneous Beliefs

By Ian W. R. Martin and Dimitris Papadimitriou

American Economic Review, August 2022

We present a model featuring risk-averse investors with heterogeneous beliefs. Individuals who are correct in hindsight—whether through luck or judgment—get rich, so sentiment is bullish following good news and bearish following bad news. Sentiment ma...

The Economic Effects of Mafia: Firm Level Evidence

By Litterio Mirenda, Sauro Mocetti, and Lucia Rizzica

American Economic Review, August 2022

We analyze the effects of Mafia infiltration in the legal economy. Combining information from investigative records with panel data on firms' governance and balance sheets, we build an indicator of infiltration in firms located in an area with no traditio...

The Human Side of Structural Transformation

By Tommaso Porzio, Federico Rossi, and Gabriella Santangelo

American Economic Review, August 2022

We document that nearly half of the global decline in agricultural employment was driven by new cohorts entering the labor market. A new dataset of policy reforms supports an interpretation of these cohort effects as human capital. Using a model of fricti...

Capital Gains Taxes and Real Corporate Investment: Evidence from Korea

By Terry S. Moon

American Economic Review, August 2022

This paper assesses the effects of capital gains taxes on investment in the Republic of Korea (hereafter, Korea), where capital gains tax rates vary at the firm level by firm size. Following a reform in 2014, firms with a tax cut increased investment by 3...

Dynamic Oligopoly and Price Stickiness

By Olivier Wang and Iván Werning

American Economic Review, August 2022

How does market concentration affect the potency of monetary policy? To address this question we embed a dynamic oligopolistic game into a general-equilibrium macroeconomic model. We provide a sufficient-statistic formula for the response to monetary shoc...

Market Access and Quality Upgrading: Evidence from Four Field Experiments

By Tessa Bold, Selene Ghisolfi, Frances Nsonzi, and Jakob Svensson

American Economic Review, August 2022

Smallholder farming in many developing countries is characterized by low productivity and low-quality output. Low quality limits the price farmers can command and their potential income. We conduct a series of experiments among maize farmers in Uganda to ...

Supply Network Formation and Fragility

By Matthew Elliott, Benjamin Golub, and Matthew V. Leduc

American Economic Review, August 2022

We model the production of complex goods in a large supply network. Each firm sources several essential inputs through relationships with other firms. Individual supply relationships are at risk of idiosyncratic failure, which threatens to disrupt product...

All Eyes on Them: A Field Experiment on Citizen Oversight and Electoral Integrity

By Natalia Garbiras-Díaz and Mateo Montenegro

American Economic Review, August 2022

Can information and communication technologies help citizens monitor their elections? We analyze a large-scale field experiment designed to answer this question in Colombia. We leveraged Facebook advertisements sent to over 4 million potential voters to e...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2022

Housing Lock: Dutch Evidence on the Impact of Negative Home Equity on Household Mobility

By Asaf Bernstein and Daan Struyven

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2022

This paper employs Dutch administrative population data to test the "housing lock hypothesis": the conjecture that homeowners with negative home equity, low levels of financial assets, and restricted opportunities to borrow reduce their mobility. Variatio...

Human Trafficking and Regulating Prostitution

By Samuel Lee and Petra Persson

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2022

Certain markets are illicit because part of the supply is coerced, but little is known about the optimal regulation of such markets. We model a prostitution market with voluntary and coerced prostitutes and ask what regulation can restore the benchmark ou...

Centralized Admissions, Affirmative Action, and Access of Low-Income Students to Higher Education

By Ursula Mello

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2022

I analyze how two reforms, introduced to expand college access in Brazil, impacted enrollments of low-SES students. The first policy centralized applications in a nationwide platform (SISU), and the second expanded affirmative action quotas (AA) to a unif...

Child Marriage Bans and Female Schooling and Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from Natural Experiments in 17 Low- and Middle-Income Countries

By Nicholas Wilson

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2022

I measure the effect of child marriage bans on female educational attainment and employment using a difference-in-differences approach employing subnational spatial and cohort variation in a sample of over 250,000 female respondents from 17 low- and middl...

Out of the Woodwork: Enrollment Spillovers in the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment

By Adam Sacarny, Katherine Baicker, and Amy Finkelstein

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2022

We study the impact of expanded adult Medicaid eligibility on the enrollment of already-eligible children. We analyze the 2008 Oregon Medicaid lottery, in which some low-income uninsured adults were randomly selected to be allowed to apply for Medicaid. C...

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...