Call for Papers: CSWEP at the Eastern Economic Association (EEA)

[News]

September 08, 2022

The deadline is October 24, 2022.

2022 Center for Accounting Research and Education Conference

[News]

September 09, 2022

The COVID-19 Pandemic Disrupted Both School Bullying and Cyberbullying

By Andrew Bacher-Hicks, Joshua Goodman, Jennifer Greif Green, and Melissa K. Holt

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2022

One-fifth of US high school students report being bullied each year. We use internet search data for real-time tracking of bullying patterns as COVID-19 disrupted in-person schooling. We first show that pre-pandemic internet searches contain useful inform...

2023 John Bates Clark Medal Nominations

[News]

September 16, 2022

Economics Departments are invited to submit nominations for the 2023 John Bates Clark Medal.

Conference on Reproducibility and Replicability in Economics and the Social Sciences

[News]

September 21, 2022

The first session in the monthly series begins on September 27, 2022.

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2022

Time to Repay or Time to Delay? The Effect of Having More Time before a Payday Loan Is Due

By Susan Payne Carter, Kuan Liu, Paige Marta Skiba, and Justin Sydnor

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2022

We examine the effect of state laws on minimum payday loan durations that give some borrowers an additional pay cycle to repay their initial loan with no other changes to contract terms. Neoclassical models predict this "grace period" would reduce borrowe...

Leave the Door Open? Prison Conditions and Recidivism

By Giovanni Mastrobuoni and Daniele Terlizzese

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2022

We estimate the effect on recidivism of replacing time served in a common closed-cell prison with time served in an open-cell one. We deal with the endogenous assignment of inmates to different prison regimes using variation that is driven by nearby priso...

Mortality Change among Less Educated Americans

By Paul Novosad, Charlie Rafkin, and Sam Asher

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2022

Measurements of mortality change among less educated Americans can be biased because the least educated groups (e.g., dropouts) become smaller and more negatively selected over time. We show that mortality changes at constant education percentiles can be ...

The Impact of Privatization of State-Owned Enterprises on Workers

By David Arnold

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2022

While privatization of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) remains a popular policy tool in many countries, the impacts on workers are unclear. This paper studies the case of Brazil, which implemented a large privatization program in the 1990s. Following priva...

Lifetime Earnings in the United States over Six Decades

By Fatih Guvenen, Greg Kaplan, Jae Song, and Justin Weidner

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2022

Between the 1957 and 1983 labor market entry cohorts, median lifetime earnings declined by 10–19 percent for men and increased by 22–33 percent for women, albeit relative to very low median lifetime earnings for the early cohorts. The difference betwe...

The Round Trip Effect: Endogenous Transport Costs and International Trade

By Woan Foong Wong

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2022

Container ships travel between a fixed set of origins and destinations in round trips, inducing a negative correlation in their freight rates. I study the implications of this round trip effect on international trade and trade policy. I identify this effe...

Money and Politics: The Effects of Campaign Spending Limits on Political Entry and Competition

By Eric Avis, Claudio Ferraz, Frederico Finan, and Carlos Varjão

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2022

This paper studies the effects of campaign spending limits on the political entry, selection, and behavior of local politicians in Brazil. We analyze a reform that limits campaign spending for mayoral elections. The limits were implemented with a disconti...

Using Individual-Level Randomized Treatment to Learn about Market Structure

By Lorenzo Casaburi and Tristan Reed

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2022

Interference across competing firms in RCTs can be informative about market structure. An experiment that subsidizes a random subset of traders who buy cocoa from farmers in Sierra Leone illustrates this idea. Interpreting treatment-control differences in...

Capital Destruction and Economic Growth: The Effects of Sherman's March, 1850–1920

By James Feigenbaum, James Lee, and Filippo Mezzanotti

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2022

Using General Sherman's March through Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina during the Civil War, we study the effect of capital destruction on medium- and long-run local economic activity, and the role of financial markets in recovery. We show that...

The Health Effects of Prison

By Randi Hjalmarsson and Matthew J. Lindquist

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2022

This paper studies the health effects of Swedish prison reforms that held sentences constant but increased the share of time inmates had to serve. The increased time served did not harm post-release health and actually reduced mortality risk. We find espe...

Why Is Europe More Equal than the United States?

By Thomas Blanchet, Lucas Chancel, and Amory Gethin

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2022

This article combines all available data to produce pretax and posttax income inequality series in 26 European countries from 1980 to 2017. Our estimates are consistent with macroeconomic growth and comparable with US distributional national accounts. Ine...

Competition and Pass-Through: Evidence from Isolated Markets

By Christos Genakos and Mario Pagliero

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2022

We measure how pass-through varies with competition in isolated oligopolistic markets with captive consumers. Using daily pricing data from gas stations on small Greek islands, we study how unanticipated and exogenous changes in excise duties are passed t...

Pathways into Opioid Dependence: Evidence from Practice Variation in Emergency Departments

By Sarah Eichmeyer and Jonathan Zhang

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2022

We use practice variation across physicians to uncover the role of medical care in causing opioid dependence. Using health records of 2 million US veterans with emergency department visits, we find that quasi-random assignment to a top (versus bottom) dec...

The Impact of Presidential Appointment of Judges: Montesquieu or the Federalists?

By Sultan Mehmood

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2022

A central question in development economics is whether there are adequate checks and balances on the executive. This paper provides causal evidence of how increasing constraints on the executive—via removal of presidential discretion in judicial appoint...