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...

Is Zero a Special Price? Evidence from Child Health Care

By Toshiaki Iizuka and Hitoshi Shigeoka

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2022

Do consumers react differently to zero prices? We test the presence of a zero-price effect in child health care and find that a zero price is special as it boosts demand discontinuously. A zero price affects resource allocations by encouraging healthier c...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, October 2022

Persistent Overconfidence and Biased Memory: Evidence from Managers

By David Huffman, Collin Raymond, and Julia Shvets

American Economic Review, October 2022

A long-standing puzzle is how overconfidence can persist in settings characterized by repeated feedback. This paper studies managers who participate repeatedly in a high-powered tournament incentive system, learning relative performance each time. Using r...

Reference Dependence in the Housing Market

By Steffen Andersen, Cristian Badarinza, Lu Liu, Julie Marx, and Tarun Ramadorai

American Economic Review, October 2022

We quantify reference dependence and loss aversion in the housing market using rich Danish administrative data. Our structural model includes loss aversion, reference dependence, financial constraints, and a sale decision, and matches key nonparametric mo...

Fake News, Voter Overconfidence, and the Quality of Democratic Choice

By Melis Kartal and Jean-Robert Tyran

American Economic Review, October 2022

This paper studies, theoretically and experimentally, the effects of overconfidence and fake news on information aggregation and the quality of democratic choice in a common-interest setting. We theoretically show that overconfidence exacerbates the adver...

Credit, Attention, and Externalities in the Adoption of Energy Efficient Technologies by Low-Income Households

By Susanna B. Berkouwer and Joshua T. Dean

American Economic Review, October 2022

We study an energy efficient charcoal cookstove in an experiment with 1,000 households in Nairobi. We estimate a 39 percent reduction in charcoal spending, which matches engineering estimates, generating a 295 percent annual return. Despite fuel savings o...

Demagogues and the Economic Fragility of Democracies

By Dan Bernhardt, Stefan Krasa, and Mehdi Shadmehr

American Economic Review, October 2022

We investigate the susceptibility of democracies to demagogues, studying tensions between representatives who guard voters' long-run interests and demagogues who cater to voters' short-run desires. Parties propose consumption and investment. Voters base c...

Posterior Separable Cost of Information

By Tommaso Denti

American Economic Review, October 2022

We provide testable conditions under which the cost of acquiring information is given by the expected reduction of a measure of uncertainty (e.g., entropy). The assumption, under the name of posterior separability, is nearly universal in the literature of...