Relinquishing Riches: Auctions versus Informal Negotiations in Texas Oil and Gas Leasing

By Thomas R. Covert and Richard L. Sweeney

American Economic Review, March 2023

This paper compares outcomes from informally negotiated oil and gas leases to those awarded via centralized auction. We focus on Texas, where legislative decisions in the early twentieth century assigned thousands of proximate parcels to different mineral...

An Alternative Explanation for the "Fed Information Effect"

By Michael D. Bauer and Eric T. Swanson

American Economic Review, March 2023

Regressions of private-sector macroeconomic forecast revisions on monetary policy surprises often produce coefficients with signs opposite to standard macroeconomic models. The "Fed information effect" argues these puzzling results are due to monetary pol...

Partisanship and Fiscal Policy in Economic Unions: Evidence from US States

By Gerald Carlino, Thorsten Drautzburg, Robert Inman, and Nicholas Zarra

American Economic Review, March 2023

Partisanship of state governors affects the efficacy of US federal fiscal policy. Using close election data, we find partisan differences in the marginal propensity to spend federal intergovernmental transfers: Republican governors spend less than Democra...

When a Doctor Falls from the Sky: The Impact of Easing Doctor Supply Constraints on Mortality

By Edward N. Okeke

American Economic Review, March 2023

This paper describes the results of a policy experiment conducted in coordination with the Nigerian government. In this experiment, some communities were randomly selected to receive a new doctor. These doctors were posted to the local public health cente...

Subjective Performance Evaluation, Influence Activities, and Bureaucratic Work Behavior: Evidence from China

By Alain de Janvry, Guojun He, Elisabeth Sadoulet, Shaoda Wang, and Qiong Zhang

American Economic Review, March 2023

Subjective performance evaluation could induce influence activities: employees might devote too much effort to pleasing their evaluator, relative to working toward the goals of the organization itself. We conduct a randomized field experiment among Chines...

Nonlinear Pricing with Underutilization: A Theory of Multi-part Tariffs

By Roberto Corrao, Joel P. Flynn, and Karthik A. Sastry

American Economic Review, March 2023

We study the nonlinear pricing of goods whose usage generates revenue for the seller and of which buyers can freely dispose. The optimal price schedule is a multi-part tariff, featuring tiers within which buyers pay a marginal price of zero. We apply our ...

Not Too Late: Improving Academic Outcomes among Adolescents

By Jonathan Guryan, Jens Ludwig, Monica P. Bhatt, Philip J. Cook, Jonathan M. V. Davis, Kenneth Dodge, George Farkas, Roland G. Fryer Jr., Susan Mayer, Harold Pollack, Laurence Steinberg, and Greg Stoddard

American Economic Review, March 2023

Improving academic outcomes for economically disadvantaged students has proven challenging, particularly for children at older ages. We present two large-scale randomized controlled trials of a high-dosage tutoring program delivered to secondary school st...

CSWEP: Panel Data Project

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Rational Inattention: A Review

By Bartosz Maćkowiak, Filip Matějka, and Mirko Wiederholt

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2023

We review the recent literature on rational inattention, identify the main theoretical mechanisms, and explain how it helps us understand a variety of phenomena across fields of economics. The theory of rational inattention assumes that agents cannot pr...

How Unique Is VC's American History?

By Arthur Korteweg and Berk Sensoy

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2023

VC: An American History, by Tom Nicholas, offers a compelling chronicle of the development of professional venture capital (VC) in the United States—from VC-like forebearers as diverse as eighteenth-century cotton manufacturing and nineteenth...

Hysteresis and Business Cycles

By Valerie Cerra, Antonio Fatás, and Sweta C. Saxena

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2023

Traditionally, economic growth and business cycles have been treated independently. However, the dependence of GDP levels on its history of shocks, what economists refer to as "hysteresis," argues for unifying the analysis of growth and cycles. In this ...

The Economics of Internal Migration: Advances and Policy Questions

By Ning Jia, Raven Molloy, Christopher Smith, and Abigail Wozniak

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2023

We review developments in research on within-country migration, focusing on internal migration in the United States. We begin by describing approaches to modeling individuals' migration decisions and equilibrium outcomes across local areas. Next, we summa...

The Public Health Effects of Legalizing Marijuana

By D. Mark Anderson and Daniel I. Rees

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2023

Thirty-six states have legalized medical marijuana and 18 states have legalized the use of marijuana for recreational purposes. In this paper, we review the literature on the public health consequences of legalizing marijuana, focusing on studies that h...

The Best of Both Worlds: Combining Randomized Controlled Trials with Structural Modeling

By Petra E. Todd and Kenneth I. Wolpin

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2023

There is a long-standing debate about the extent to which economic theory should inform econometric modeling and estimation. This debate is particularly evident in the program/policy evaluation literature, where reduced-form (experimental or quasi-experim...

Designing Information Provision Experiments

By Ingar Haaland, Christopher Roth, and Johannes Wohlfart

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2023

Information provision experiments allow researchers to test economic theories and answer policy-relevant questions by varying the information set available to respondents. We survey the emerging literature using information provision experiments in econom...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2023

Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2023

JEL Classification System for Books

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2023

Economic Effects of Environmental Crises: Evidence from Flint, Michigan

By Peter Christensen, David A. Keiser, and Gabriel E. Lade

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2023

In April 2014 Flint, Michigan switched its drinking water supply from the Detroit water system to the Flint River as a temporary means to save $5 million. Over 18 months it was revealed that the switch exposed residents to dangerous levels of lead, culmin...

The economic fallout from environmental crises

[Research Highlight]

March 02, 2023

The effect of the Flint water crisis on housing prices.