Externalities and Taxation of Supplemental Insurance: A Study of Medicare and Medigap

By Marika Cabral and Neale Mahoney

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2019

Most health insurance uses cost-sharing to reduce excess utilization. Supplemental insurance can blunt the impact of this cost-sharing, increasing utilization and exerting a negative externality on the primary insurer. This paper estimates the effect of p...

Changes in Workplace Heterogeneity and How They Widen the Gender Wage Gap

By Benjamin Bruns

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2019

Using linked employer-employee data for West Germany, I investigate the role of growing wage differentials between firms in the slowdown of gender wage convergence since the 1990s. The results show that two factors are at play: first, high-wage firms expe...

Soft Commitments, Reminders, and Academic Performance

By Oliver Himmler, Robert Jäckle, and Philipp Weinschenk

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2019

We provide first evidence that a soft commitment device enhances progress in education and, more generally, improves the completion of complex tasks—such as passing exams. In our field experiment, students can sign a nonbinding agreement and commit to s...

Was the First Public Health Campaign Successful?

By D. Mark Anderson, Kerwin Kofi Charles, Claudio Las Heras Olivares, and Daniel I. Rees

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2019

The US tuberculosis (TB) movement pioneered many of the strategies of modern public health campaigns. Using newly transcribed mortality data at the municipal level for the period 1900–1917, we explore the effectiveness of public health measures champion...

Using Linked Survey and Administrative Data to Better Measure Income: Implications for Poverty, Program Effectiveness, and Holes in the Safety Net

By Bruce D. Meyer and Nikolas Mittag

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2019

We examine the consequences of survey underreporting of transfer programs for prototypical analyses of low-income populations. We link administrative data for four transfer programs to the CPS to correct its severe understatement of transfer dollars recei...

Property Rights and Gender Bias: Evidence from Land Reform in West Bengal

By Sonia Bhalotra, Abhishek Chakravarty, Dilip Mookherjee, and Francisco J. Pino

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2019

We examine intra-household gender-differentiated effects of property rights securitisation following West Bengal's tenancy registration program, using two independently gathered datasets. In both samples, higher program implementation increased male child...

Temperature and Decisions: Evidence from 207,000 Court Cases

By Anthony Heyes and Soodeh Saberian

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2019

We analyze the impact of outdoor temperature on high-stakes decisions (immigration adjudications) made by professional decision-makers (US immigration judges). In our preferred specification, which includes spatial, temporal, and judge fixed effects, and ...

Cooperation in Polygynous Households

By Abigail Barr, Marleen Dekker, Wendy Janssens, Bereket Kebede, and Berber Kramer

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2019

Using a carefully designed series of public goods games, we compare, across monogamous and polygynous households, the willingness of husbands and wives to cooperate to maximize household gains. Compared to monogamous husbands and wives, polygynous husband...

Bridging the Intention-Behavior Gap? The Effect of Plan-Making Prompts on Job Search and Employment

By Martin Abel, Rulof Burger, Eliana Carranza, and Patrizio Piraino

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2019

The paper tests the effects of plan making on job search and employment. In a field experiment with unemployed youths, participants who complete a detailed job search plan increase the number of job applications submitted (by 15 percent) but not the time ...

Health Care Spending and Utilization in Public and Private Medicare

By Vilsa Curto, Liran Einav, Amy Finkelstein, Jonathan Levin, and Jay Bhattacharya

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2019

We compare health care spending in public and private Medicare using newly available claims data from Medicare Advantage (MA) insurers. MA insurer revenues are 30 percent higher than their health care spending. Adjusting for enrollee mix, health care spen...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, April 2019

Public Debt and Low Interest Rates

By Olivier Blanchard

American Economic Review, April 2019

This lecture focuses on the costs of public debt when safe interest rates are low. I develop four main arguments. First, I show that the current US situation, in which safe interest rates are expected to remain below growth rates for a long time, is mor...

A Model of Safe Asset Determination

By Zhiguo He, Arvind Krishnamurthy, and Konstantin Milbradt

American Economic Review, April 2019

What makes an asset a "safe" asset? We study a model where two countries each issue sovereign bonds to satisfy investors' safe asset demands. The countries differ in the float of their bonds and the fundamental resources available to rollover debts. A sov...

Vulnerable Growth

By Tobias Adrian, Nina Boyarchenko, and Domenico Giannone

American Economic Review, April 2019

We study the conditional distribution of GDP growth as a function of economic and financial conditions. Deteriorating financial conditions are associated with an increase in the conditional volatility and a decline in the conditional mean of GDP growth, l...

Alcohol and Self-Control: A Field Experiment in India

By Frank Schilbach

American Economic Review, April 2019

This paper studies alcohol consumption among low-income workers in India. In a 3-week field experiment, the majority of 229 cycle-rickshaw drivers were willing to forgo substantial monetary payments in order to set incentives for themselves to remain sobe...

Selling to Advised Buyers

By Andrey Malenko and Anton Tsoy

American Economic Review, April 2019

In many cases, buyers are not informed about their valuations and rely on experts, who are informed but biased for overbidding. We study auction design when selling to such "advised buyers." We show that a canonical dynamic auction, the English auction, h...

Delegated Expertise, Authority, and Communication

By Inga Deimen and Dezső Szalay

American Economic Review, April 2019

A decision maker needs to reach a decision and relies on an expert to acquire information. Ideal actions of expert and decision maker are partially aligned and the expert chooses what to learn about each. The decision maker can either get advice from the ...

Large Firm Dynamics and the Business Cycle

By Vasco M. Carvalho and Basile Grassi

American Economic Review, April 2019

Do large firm dynamics drive the business cycle? We answer this question by developing a quantitative theory of aggregate fluctuations caused by firm-level disturbances alone. We show that a standard heterogeneous firm dynamics setup already contains in i...

Disrupting Education? Experimental Evidence on Technology-Aided Instruction in India

By Karthik Muralidharan, Abhijeet Singh, and Alejandro J. Ganimian

American Economic Review, April 2019

We study the impact of a personalized technology-aided after-school instruction program in middle-school grades in urban India using a lottery that provided winners with free access to the program. Lottery winners scored 0.37 sigma higher in math and 0.23...

Targeting with In-Kind Transfers: Evidence from Medicaid Home Care

By Ethan M. J. Lieber and Lee M. Lockwood

American Economic Review, April 2019

Making a transfer in kind reduces its value to recipients but can improve targeting. We develop an approach to quantifying this trade-off and apply it to home care. Using randomized experiments by Medicaid, we find that in-kind provision significantly red...