Winners and Losers? The Effect of Gaining and Losing Access to Selective Colleges on Education and Labor Market Outcomes

By Sandra E. Black, Jeffrey T. Denning, and Jesse Rothstein

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2023

We use the introduction of the Texas Top Ten Percent rule to estimate the effect of access to a selective college on graduation and earnings outcomes for two groups of students. For highly ranked students at more disadvantaged high schools, who gained acc...

The Impact of Income-Driven Repayment on Student Borrower Outcomes

By Daniel Herbst

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2023

In the United States, most student loans follow a fixed payment schedule that falls early in borrowers' careers. This structure provides no insurance against earnings risk and may increase student loan defaults. Income-driven repayment (IDR) plans are des...

Employer Responses to Family Leave Programs

By Rita Ginja, Arizo Karimi, and Pengpeng Xiao

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2023

Search frictions make worker turnover costly to firms. A three-month parental leave expansion in Sweden provides exogenous variation that we use to quantify firms' adjustment costs upon worker absence. The reform increased women's leave duration and likel...

A Glimpse of Freedom: Allied Occupation and Political Resistance in East Germany

By Luis R. Martinez ⓡ Jonas Jessen ⓡ Guo Xu

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2023

This paper exploits the idiosyncratic line of contact separating Allied and Soviet troops within East Germany at the end of WWII to study political resistance in a non-democracy. When Nazi Germany surrendered, 40 percent of what would become the authorita...

Temperature, Worker Productivity, and Adaptation: Evidence from Survey Data Production

By Melissa LoPalo

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2023

This paper estimates the impact of daily weather on worker productivity by using household survey data to study interviewers. Using data from over 9,000 Demographic and Health Surveys interviewers in 46 countries, I find that interviewers complete 13.6 pe...

The Economic Incidence of Wildfire Suppression in the United States

By Patrick Baylis and Judson Boomhower

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2023

This study measures the degree to which public expenditures on wildfire protection subsidize development in harm's way. We use administrative data on firefighting expenditures to measure the causal effect of nearby homes on the amount spent to extinguish ...

Labor Supply and Directed Technical Change: Evidence from the Termination of the Bracero Program in 1964

By Shmuel San

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2023

This paper studies the impact of labor supply on the creation of new technology, exploiting a large exogenous shock to the US agricultural labor supply caused by the termination of the Bracero agreements between the US and Mexico at the end of 1964. Using...

The Employee Costs of Corporate Debarment in Public Procurement

By Christiane Szerman

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2023

This paper studies an anticorruption policy—corporate debarment, or blacklisting—to understand how disclosing illicit corporate practices and the sanctions for these practices affect firm and worker outcomes. Exploiting a policy change in Brazil that ...

Incentivized Peer Referrals for Tuberculosis Screening: Evidence from India

By Jessica Goldberg, Mario Macis, and Pradeep Chintagunta

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2023

We study whether and how peer referrals increase screening, testing, and identification of patients with tuberculosis, an infectious disease responsible for over one million deaths annually. In an experiment with 3,176 patients at 122 tuberculosis treatme...

Strategic Formal Layoffs: Unemployment Insurance and Informal Labor Markets

By Bernardus Van Doornik, David Schoenherr, and Janis Skrastins

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2023

Exploiting an unemployment insurance reform in Brazil, we study incentive effects of UI in the presence of informal labor markets. We find that eligibility for UI benefits increases formal layoffs by 11 percent. Most of the additional layoffs are related ...

The Effect of Immigration Restrictions on Local Labor Markets: Lessons from the 1920s Border Closure

By Ran Abramitzky, Philipp Ager, Leah Boustan, Elior Cohen, and Casper W. Hansen

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2023

In the 1920s, the United States substantially reduced immigration by imposing country-specific entry quotas. We compare local labor markets differentially exposed to the quotas due to variation in the national-origin mix of their immigrant population. US-...

Inefficient Water Pricing and Incentives for Conservation

By Ujjayant Chakravorty, Manzoor H. Dar, and Kyle Emerick

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2023

Farmers often buy water using fixed fees—rather than with marginal prices. We use two randomized controlled trials in Bangladesh to study the relationship between marginal prices, adoption of a water-saving technology, and water usage. Our first experim...

The Effects of Working While in School: Evidence from Employment Lotteries

By Thomas Le Barbanchon, Diego Ubfal, and Federico Araya

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2023

Does working while in school smooth students' transition into the labor market? We provide evidence on this question by leveraging a one-year work-study program that randomized job offers among over 90,000 student applicants in Uruguay. Program rules forb...

High School Majors and Future Earnings

By Gordon B. Dahl, Dan-Olof Rooth, and Anders Stenberg

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2023

We study how high school majors affect adult earnings using a regression discontinuity design. In Sweden students are admitted to majors in tenth grade based on their preference rankings and ninth grade GPA. We find engineering, natural science, and busin...

CSWEP Mentoring Breakfasts for Junior Economists

[News]

October 27, 2022

The deadline to register for the breakfast events is December 1, 2022.

CSWEP Mentoring Breakfast for Mid-Career Economists

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October 27, 2022

The registration deadline is December 1, 2022.

CSWEP Seeks Mentors for Annual Mentoring Breakfasts

[News]

October 27, 2022

Please sign up to be a mentor by December 1, 2022.

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2023

Learning about Debt Crises

By Radoslaw Paluszynski

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2023

The European debt crisis presents a challenge to our understanding of the relationship between government bond yields and economic fundamentals. I argue that information frictions are an important missing element and support that claim with evidence on th...

Robust Predictions for DSGE Models with Incomplete Information

By Ryan Chahrour and Robert Ulbricht

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2023

We provide predictions for DSGE models with incomplete information that are robust across information structures. Our approach maps an incomplete-information model into a full-information economy with time-varying expectation wedges and provides condition...