Disability Insurance and the Great Recession

By Nicole Maestas, Kathleen J. Mullen, and Alexander Strand

American Economic Review, May 2015

The US Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) program is designed to provide income support to workers who become unable to work because of a severe, long-lasting disability. In this study, we use administrative data to estimate the effect of labor m...

Deconstructing the Energy-Efficiency Gap: Conceptual Frameworks and Evidence

By Todd Gerarden, Richard G. Newell, and Robert N. Stavins

American Economic Review, May 2015

Energy-efficient technologies offer considerable promise for reducing the financial costs and environmental damages associated with energy use, but these technologies appear not to be adopted to the degree that appears justified, even on a purely private ...

Tagging and Targeting of Energy Efficiency Subsidies

By Hunt Allcott, Christopher Knittel, and Dmitry Taubinsky

American Economic Review, May 2015

A corrective tax or subsidy is "well-targeted" if it primarily affects choices that are more distorted by market failures. Energy efficiency subsidies are designed to correct multiple distortions: externalities, credit constraints, "landlord-tenant" infor...

Limited Attention and the Residential Energy Efficiency Gap

By Karen Palmer and Margaret Walls

American Economic Review, May 2015

Inattention may be an important contributor to the energy efficiency gap and may be particularly acute in residential buildings where many different features will determine a home's energy use. Energy audits can provide information on how to reduce energy...

Individual Time Preferences and Energy Efficiency

By Richard G. Newell and Juha Siikamäki

American Economic Review, May 2015

We examine the role of individual discount rates in energy efficiency decisions using evidence from an extensive survey of US homeowners to elicit preferences for energy efficiency and cash flows over time. We find considerable heterogeneity in individual...

Are the Non-monetary Costs of Energy Efficiency Investments Large? Understanding Low Take-Up of a Free Energy Efficiency Program

By Meredith Fowlie, Michael Greenstone, and Catherine Wolfram

American Economic Review, May 2015

We document very low take-up of an energy efficiency program that is widely believed to be privately beneficial. Program participants receive a substantial home "weatherization" retrofit; all installation and equipment costs are covered by the program. Le...

Immigration Enforcement and Crime

By Paolo Pinotti

American Economic Review, May 2015

Immigration enforcement has ambiguous implications for the crime rate of undocumented immigrants. On the one hand, expulsions reduce the pool of immigrants at risk of committing crimes, on the other they lower the opportunity cost of crime for those who a...

Effects of Immigrant Legalization on Crime

By Scott R. Baker

American Economic Review, May 2015

I examine the effects that the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), which legalized almost 3 million immigrants, had on crime in the United States. I exploit the IRCA's quasi-random timing as well as geographic variation in the intensity of tre...

The Criminal Justice Response to Policy Interventions: Evidence from Immigration Reform

By Sarah Bohn, Matthew Freedman, and Emily Owens

American Economic Review, May 2015

Changes in the treatment of individuals by the criminal justice system following a policy intervention may bias estimates of the effects of the intervention on underlying criminal activity. We explore the importance of such changes in the context of the I...

The Long-Run Effect of Mexican Immigration on Crime in US Cities: Evidence from Variation in Mexican Fertility Rates

By Aaron Chalfin

American Economic Review, May 2015

Using historical data on the size of state-specific Mexican birth cohorts and geographic migration networks between Mexican states and US metropolitan areas, I construct an instrumental variable that predicts decadal migration from Mexico to the United St...

Growth, Pollution, and Life Expectancy: China from 1991-2012

By Avraham Ebenstein, Maoyong Fan, Michael Greenstone, Guojun He, Peng Yin, and Maigeng Zhou

American Economic Review, May 2015

This paper examines the relationship between income, pollution, and mortality in China from 1991-2012. Using first-difference models, we document a robust positive association between city-level GDP and life expectancy. We also find a negative association...

Satellites, Self-Reports, and Submersion: Exposure to Floods in Bangladesh

By Raymond Guiteras, Amir Jina, and A. Mushfiq Mobarak

American Economic Review, May 2015

A burgeoning "Climate-Economy" literature has uncovered many effects of changes in temperature and precipitation on economic activity, but has made considerably less progress in modeling the effects of other associated phenomena, like natural disasters. W...

Pay as You Go: Prepaid Metering and Electricity Expenditures in South Africa

By B. Kelsey Jack and Grant Smith

American Economic Review, May 2015

High rates of customer default on utility bills present a barrier to the expansion of electricity access in the developing world. Pre-paid electricity metering offers a technological solution to ensuring timely payment. Using an eleven-year panel of pre-p...

Moving Up the Energy Ladder: The Effect of an Increase in Economic Well-Being on the Fuel Consumption Choices of the Poor in India

By Rema Hanna and Paulina Oliva

American Economic Review, May 2015

Rising household wealth may potentially impact both total fuel consumption and fuel-type composition, resulting in significant health and environmental implications. Using data from a field experiment in India, we explore the effects of a transfer program...

Convergence in Adaptation to Climate Change: Evidence from High Temperatures and Mortality, 1900-2004

By Alan Barreca, Karen Clay, Olivier Deschênes, Michael Greenstone, and Joseph S. Shapiro

American Economic Review, May 2015

This paper combines panel data on monthly mortality rates of US states and daily temperature variables for over a century (1900-2004) to explore the regional evolution of the temperature-mortality relationship and documents two key findings. First, the im...

Geography, Depreciation, and Growth

By Solomon M. Hsiang and Amir S. Jina

American Economic Review, May 2015

It has been proposed that geography influences economic growth for many reasons. Previous analyses of comparative development seem to have sidestepped the question of location-dependent depreciation. However the construction of new measures of tropical cy...

Tropical Economics

By Solomon M. Hsiang and Kyle C. Meng

American Economic Review, May 2015

Why wealth is systematically lower in the tropics remains a puzzle. We point out that latitude may have fundamental economic consequence because it plays a key role in how countries experience geophysical processes that have economic implications. We dem...

Federal Crop Insurance and the Disincentive to Adapt to Extreme Heat

By Francis Annan and Wolfram Schlenker

American Economic Review, May 2015

Despite significant progress in average yields, the sensitivity of corn and soybean yields to extreme heat has remained relatively constant over time. We combine county-level corn and soybeans yields in the United States from 1989-2013 with the fraction o...

Why Don't Present-Biased Agents Make Commitments?

By David Laibson

American Economic Review, May 2015

Present-biased preferences engender a demand for commitment. Commitment is a problematic prediction, since we see so little of it. I quantitatively explore the reasons for the "missing" commitment. Extending the procrastination model in Carroll et al. (20...

Present Bias: Lessons Learned and to Be Learned

By Ted O'Donoghue and Matthew Rabin

American Economic Review, May 2015

While present bias is an old idea, it only took hold in economics following David Laibson's (1994) dissertation. Over the past 20 years, research has led to a much better theoretical understanding of present bias, when and how to apply it, and which ancil...