Retrospectives: Ricardo on Machinery

By Samuel Hollander

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2019

We are currently experiencing an outpouring of concern both popular and professional regarding technological unemployment. I shall be discussing an apparent about-turn on the subject by David Ricardo (1772-1823), who at different times, even in different ...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2019

Front Matter

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Foreword

By Ben S. Bernanke

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Editors' Introduction

By William R. Johnson and Kelly Markel

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Work of the Past, Work of the Future

By David H. Autor

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

US cities today are vastly more educated and skill-intensive than they were five decades ago. Yet, urban non-college workers perform substantially less skilled jobs than decades earlier. This deskilling reflects the joint effects of automation and, seco...

The Impact of Big Data on Firm Performance: An Empirical Investigation

By Patrick Bajari, Victor Chernozhukov, Ali Hortaçsu, and Junichi Suzuki

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We examine the impact of "big data" on firm performance in the context of forecast accuracy using proprietary retail sales data obtained from Amazon. We measure the accuracy of forecasts in two relevant dimensions: the number of products (N), and the numb...

Big Data and Firm Dynamics

By Maryam Farboodi, Roxana Mihet, Thomas Philippon, and Laura Veldkamp

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We study a model where firms accumulate data as a valuable intangible asset. Data accumulation affects firms' dynamics. It increases the skewness of the firm size distribution as large firms generate more data and invest more in active experimentation. On...

Empirical Bayes Estimation of Treatment Effects with Many A/B Tests: An Overview

By Eduardo M. Azevedo, Alex Deng, José L. Montiel Olea, and E. Glen Weyl

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

The use of large-scale experimentation to screen product innovations is increasingly common. This is a practical guide on how to use treatment effect estimates from a large number of experiments to improve estimates of the effects of each experiment. When...

Mobile Wallet and Entrepreneurial Growth

By Sumit Agarwal, Wenlan Qian, Bernard Y. Yeung, and Xin Zou

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Using mobile wallet and card transaction data from a leading Singapore bank, this paper studies the effect of a mobile wallet payment technology introduction in 2017 on business growth. We find that mobile wallet usage doubled after the new technology int...

Generational Differences in Managing Personal Finances

By Bruce Carlin, Arna Olafsson, and Michaela Pagel

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

In this article, we provide a descriptive account of how people from different generations vary in their use of financial management technology, their access credit markets, and how they finance consumption and incur financial costs and penalties. We use ...

How FinTech Enters China's Credit Market

By Harald Hau, Yi Huang, Hongzhe Shan, and Zixia Sheng

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

How does FinTech credit mitigate local credit supply frictions in China's segmented credit market? In our simple theoretical models, we show that FinTech credit (i) expands the extensive margin of credit to borrowers of lower credit scores and (ii) provid...

Ensemble Methods for Causal Effects in Panel Data Settings

By Susan Athey, Mohsen Bayati, Guido Imbens, and Zhaonan Qu

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

In many prediction problems researchers have found that combinations of prediction methods ("ensembles") perform better than individual methods. In this paper we apply these ideas to synthetic control type problems in panel data. Here a number of conceptu...

Augmenting Pre-Analysis Plans with Machine Learning

By Jens Ludwig, Sendhil Mullainathan, and Jann Spiess

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Concerns about the dissemination of spurious results have led to calls for pre-analysis plans (PAPs) to avoid ex-post "p-hacking." But often the conceptual hypotheses being tested do not imply the level of specificity required for a PAP. In this paper we ...

Mastering Panel Metrics: Causal Impact of Democracy on Growth

By Shuowen Chen, Victor Chernozhukov, and Iván Fernández-Val

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We revisit the panel data analysis of Acemoglu et al. (forthcoming) on the relationship between democracy and economic growth using state-of-the-art econometric methods. We argue that panel data settings are high-dimensional, resulting in estimators to be...

Currency Substitution under Transaction Costs

By Linda M. Schilling and Harald Uhlig

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We consider a setting where agents can choose between two currencies to conduct their goods purchases. The usage of either currency comes with currency-specific transactions costs. For example, purchasing some goods with cryptocurrencies rather than dolla...

Blockchains, Coordination, and Forks

By Bruno Biais, Christophe Bisière, Matthieu Bouvard, and Catherine Casamatta

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Blockchains are distributed ledgers. Their protocol aims at ensuring that the miners in charge of recording transactions reach a consensus about a unique ledger. In this paper, we highlight that the game induced by the blockchain proof-of-work protocol ge...

An Economist's Perspective on the Bitcoin Payment System

By Gur Huberman, Jacob D. Leshno, and Ciamac Moallemi

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

The paper's introduction offers a high-level review of Bitcoin's features, especially its governance by protocol. The paper proceeds to summarize Bitcoin's analysis as a payment system. It pays particular attention to a comparison between Bitcoin and a fi...

Price Discovery in Cryptocurrency Markets

By Igor Makarov and Antoinette Schoar

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We ask which markets drive bitcoin prices and how price discovery happens across different exchanges. Does the greater exuberance for cryptocurrencies outside the United States affect prices only on local markets or does it impact price formation on globa...

Does Maternal Education Decrease Female Genital Cutting?

By Elisabetta De Cao and Giulia La Mattina

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Female genital cutting (FGC) affects more than 200 million women globally. Education is often depicted as an effective instrument for abandoning the practice, but causal evidence is scant. This paper uses the introduction of the Universal Primary Educatio...