The 2021 Child Tax Credit: Who Received It and How Did They Spend It?

By Katherine Michelmore and Natasha V. Pilkauskas

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

In March of 2021, Congress passed a one-year expansion of the Child Tax Credit (CTC), creating a temporary, near-universal child benefit. Despite expanding eligibility to millions of previously ineligible children living in low-income households, only two...

The Impact of COVID-19 on Workers' Expectations and Preferences for Remote Work

By Yuting Chen, Patricia Cortes, Gizem Kosar, Jessica Pan, and Basit Zafar

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

We study how COVID-19 affected the prevalence, expectations, and attitudes toward remote work using specially designed surveys. The incidence of remote work remains higher than prepandemic levels, and both men and women expect this to persist postpandemic...

Selection Bias in Voluntary Random Testing: Evidence from a COVID-19 Antibody Study

By Deniz Dutz, Michael Greenstone, Ali Hortaçsu, Santiago Lacouture, Magne Mogstad, Danae Roumis, Azeem M. Shaikh, Alexander Torgovitsky, and Winnie van Dijk

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

We use data from a serological study that experimentally varied financial incentives for participation to detect and characterize selection bias. Participants are from neighborhoods with substantially lower COVID-19 risks. Existing methods to account for ...

Gendered Disparities during the COVID-19 Crisis in Sierra Leone

By Madison Levine, Niccolò F. Meriggi, Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak, Vasudha Ramakrishna, Maarten Voors, and Uday Wadehra

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

The COVID-19 outbreak had severe adverse impacts on the health and wealth of households in lower-income countries (LICs), and has affected even more severely female-headed households in LICs. Using high-frequency phone surveys in Sierra Leone, we show tha...

The Health of Democracies during the Pandemic: Results from a Randomized Survey Experiment

By Marcella Alsan, Luca Braghieri, Sarah Eichmeyer, Minjeong Joyce Kim, Stefanie Stantcheva, and David Y. Yang

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

Concerns have been raised about the "demise of democracy," possibly accelerated by pandemic-related restrictions. Using a survey experiment involving 8,206 respondents from 5 Western democracies, we find that subjects randomly exposed to information regar...

Homophily and Community Structure at Scale: An Application to a Large Professional Network

By Juan Nelson Martínez Dahbura, Shota Komatsu, Takanori Nishida, and Angelo Mele

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

Professional networks affect labor market outcomes, efficiency, and knowledge diffusion. We study a large business card exchange network from Eight, a contact and career management app popular in Japan. Our empirical analysis is guided by a structural mod...

Using Grouped Data to Estimate Revenue Heterogeneity in Online Advertising Auctions

By Nils A. Breitmar, Matthew Harding, and Carlos Lamarche

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

This paper estimates the heterogeneous impact of advertising networks from the perspective of a publisher who has access to limited information provided by the advertising platform in the form of grouped data over different auctions and users. The models ...

Born to Be (Sub)Prime: An Exploratory Analysis

By Helena Bach, Pietro Campa, Giacomo De Giorgi, Jaromir Nosal, and Davide Pietrobon

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

We study how inheriting parents' credit histories affects the initial credit scores, access to credit, and life cycle borrowing of young individuals entering the credit market. We establish that inherited histories significantly positively affect initial ...

Rising Markups, Rising Prices?

By Christopher Conlon, Nathan H. Miller, Tsolmon Otgon, and Yi Yao

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

The rise in markups and market power documented by De Loecker, Eeckhout, and Unger (2020) has recently generated much discussion in economics. We measure the correlation between the change in firm level markups and the change in industry level prices as m...

Terms of the Deal Were Not Announced: Accounting for Mergers with Unpublicized Values

By Thomas G. Wollmann

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

Most economy-wide studies of merger activity ignore deals whose terms are not announced. Using US data, I find that restricting attention to mergers with publicized values eliminates 60 percent or more of transactions. Exploiting a change in antitrust law...

M&A and Innovation: A New Classification of Patents

By Zhaoqi Cheng, Ginger Zhe Jin, Mario Leccese, Dokyun Lee, and Liad Wagman

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

Policymakers are increasingly concerned that incumbent acquisitions of small or young firms may slow down rather than speed up innovation, but it is difficult to identify which firms are related in the fast-changing space of technological innovation. This...

Mergers and Acquisitions under Common Ownership

By Miguel Antón, Florian Ederer, Mireia Giné, and Bruno Pellegrino

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

We provide new facts about the cross section and evolution of mergers and acquisitions for US public firms. Using a general equilibrium model with a hedonic demand system and data on institutional ownership, we document that mergers are increasingly conce...

Risk Rating without Information Provision

By Philip Mulder and Carolyn Kousky

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

We describe the initial impact of risk-based flood insurance pricing in the United States. More than two-thirds of National Flood Insurance Program policyholders are paying higher premiums under "Risk Rating 2.0" (RR2.0), and increases will continue in th...

Efficient Adaptation to Flood Risk

By Winston P. Hovekamp and Katherine R. H. Wagner

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

This paper studies whether private adaptation to flood risk is economically efficient. We estimate the return to elevating houses, one of the most significant private defensive investments against flooding, using two decades of microdata on the universe o...

Wildfire Insurance, Information, and Self-Protection

By Judson Boomhower, Meredith Fowlie, and Andrew J. Plantinga

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

Like other climate-related disasters, wildfires are intensifying. Property owners can reduce their vulnerability to wildfire losses but are not well informed about the costs and benefits of available self-protection investments. Technological advances mea...

A Disaggregated View of Household Production Trends

By Benjamin Bridgman

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

The shift of working time from the household to the market, or marketization, was one of the most important changes in the US economy. This paper estimates US household production (HP) by product and examines the marketization of these products. I find th...

A Model of Demand for Health and Caregiving Incorporating Marriage Markets

By Shoshana Grossbard and Lorena Hakak

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

According to the Grossman model, the demand for health-related goods or services varies with the costs of their substitutes produced in the household. This paper contributes to the literature on the demand for health-related products and home care by also...

Is All Caregiving Created Equal? A Comparison of Caregiving to Children and Adults

By Corina Mommaerts and Yulya Truskinovsky

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

In this paper, we compare patterns of family care provided to children and to adults, and discuss what these patterns suggest about how individuals make decisions over, and ultimately value, such care. We show that patterns of informal adult care do not r...

The Girly Economics of Care Work: Implications for Economic Statistics

By Misty L. Heggeness

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

Unpaid care is work. Yet, the field of economics struggles to acknowledge and measure its value. In modern home economics, the household is unitary and harmonious, time in the home is leisure, and power dynamics are unimportant. Even with the development ...

Why Did COVID-19 Vaccinations Lag in Low- and Middle-Income Countries? Lessons from Descriptive and Experimental Data

By Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

Two years after COVID-19 vaccine rollouts began, COVID-19 vaccination rates in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) continue to lag. Tracing individual country experiences with vaccine procurement in the early stages of the pandemic suggests that inte...