Monetary Policy, Market Power, and SMEs

By Annalisa Ferrando, Peter McAdam, Filippos Petroulakis, and Xavier Vives

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

Monetary policy aims to affect corporate borrowing by influencing the marginal costs of firms, but its potency can be conditioned by the degree of market competition. We first identify conditions under which changes in marginal costs have different effect...

The Wage Phillips Curve under Labor Market Power

By Anastasia Burya, Rui Mano, Yannick Timmer, and Anke Weber

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

Using the near universe of online vacancy postings in the United States, we explore linkages between labor market power and the trade-off between unemployment and wages. We estimate the Phillips curve at the commuting zone level and find that the relation...

Learning Curve: Progress in the Replication Crisis

By Noam Angrist, Claire Cullen, Micheal Ainomugisha, Sai Pramod Bathena, Peter Bergman, Colin Crossley, Thato Letsomo, Moitshepi Matsheng, Rene Marlon Panti, Shwetlena Sabarwal, and Tim Sullivan

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

We present detailed monitoring data across a five-country randomized trial of phone-based targeted tutoring—one of the largest multicountry replication efforts in education to date. We study an approach shown to work in Botswana and replicated in India,...

Exacerbated Inequalities: The Learning Loss from COVID-19 in Italy

By Michela Carlana, Eliana La Ferrara, and Carolina Lopez

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

Using administrative data on the universe of eighth graders, we study learning losses in Italy between 2021 and 2019 to estimate the effect of schools' closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We find an average learning loss of 0.14 SD in math and 0.05 SD ...

Behavioral Nudges Reduced Dropout Risk among Vulnerable Students during the Pandemic: Experimental Evidence from Brazil

By Guilherme Lichand, Julien Christen, and Eppie van Egeraat

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

In a companion paper (Lichand, Christen and Van Egeraat, 2022), we documented that learning losses in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic were magnified by the fact that most schools neglected students' socio-emotional skills during remote learning. Taki...

Emotional and Behavioral Impacts of Telementoring and Homeschooling Support on Children

By Hashibul Hassan, Asad Islam, Abu Siddique, and Liang Choon Wang

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

We examine the emotional and behavioral impacts of a randomized telementoring intervention on Bangladeshi primary school-aged children during COVID-19 school closures. We measured the prevalence of emotional, conduct, hyperactivity/inattention, and peer-r...

Time Savings When Working from Home

By Cevat Giray Aksoy, Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, Steven J. Davis, Mathias Dolls, and Pablo Zarate

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

We quantify the commute time savings associated with work from home, drawing on data for 27 countries. The average daily time savings when working from home are 72 minutes in our sample. We estimate that work from home saved about two hours per week per w...

Unlocked Potential: Work-from-Home Job Postings in 20 OECD Countries

By Pawel Adrjan, Gabriele Ciminelli, Alexandre Judes, Michael Koelle, Cyrille Schwellnus, and Tara Sinclair

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

Starting from over 1.2 billion job postings, we construct and make publicly available a novel dataset on postings advertising work from home (WFH) in 20 countries and 55 occupational categories from January 2019 to September 2022. We document three styliz...

How Work from Home Changes Housing Demand: Evidence from Online Search

By Elisa Guglielminetti, Michele Loberto, Giordano Zevi, and Roberta Zizza

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

We quantify the impact of work from home (WFH) on housing demand by leveraging a unique dataset of online housing sales advertisements in Italy and considering intensity in the adoption of WFH. By exploiting both the time series and the geographical varia...

Measuring Work from Home in the Cross Section

By Augustus Kmetz, John Mondragon, and Johannes F. Wieland

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

We compare survey-based measures of work from home (WFH) in the cross section. While the surveys differ in how comprehensively they measure WFH, they are highly correlated in the cross section of US states, suggesting that they will yield similar causal e...

The Mental Health of Caregivers and Young Children in Conflict-Affected Settings

By Juliana Sánchez-Ariza, Jorge Cuartas, and Andrés Moya

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

We analyze the effects of conflict-related violence on the mental health of caregivers and young children, as well as the role of caregivers' mental health in explaining the toll of conflict on early childhood mental health. Although an upcoming body of w...

Reparations for Victims: Lessons from Colombia

By Arlen Guarin, Juliana Londoño-Vélez, and Christian Posso

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

Reparations recognize and address the harm that victims suffered during war, conflict, or authoritarianism, and some experts argue that the compensation can also help victims to rebuild life projects. Using linked administrative microdata, we study the wo...

Least Protected, Most Affected: Impacts of Migration Regularization Programs on Pandemic Resilience

By Maria José Urbina ⓡ Sandra V. Rozo ⓡ Andrés Moya ⓡ Ana María Ibáñez

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

How can regularization programs improve forced migrants' resilience to shocks? We leverage panel data collected during the COVID-19 pandemic to assess whether Venezuelan forced migrants who were eligible for a regularization program in Colombia were more ...

Refugee Entrepreneurship: The Case of Venezuelans in Colombia

By Dany Bahar, Bo Cowgill, and Jorge Guzman

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

This paper analyzes the entire business registry of Colombia during 2015–2022, a period when Colombia received two million Venezuelan immigrants and refugees. We present two main findings. First, firms owned by foreigners, most of them Venezuelans, tend...

Innovation for Innovators: The Financing of Intangibles

By Ana Babus, Matias Marzani, and Sara Moreira

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

This paper examines the characteristics of firms that adopt new financial products and their association with measures of performance. We build a novel firm-level panel dataset and document a positive association between intangible capital and the adoptio...

The Great Start-up Sellout and the Rise of Oligopoly

By Florian Ederer and Bruno Pellegrino

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

We document a secular shift from initial public offerings to acquisitions of venture capital-backed start-ups and show that this trend is accompanied by an increase in the opportunity cost of going public over the last quarter-century. Dominant companies ...

Interest Rates and World Trade: An "Austrian" Perspective

By Pol Antràs

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

I develop a framework to study the interplay between world trade and interest rates. The model incorporates an explicit notion of time and production length, in the "Austrian" tradition of Bohm-Bawerk (1889). Changes in the interest rate affect production...

The Trickling Up of Excess Savings

By Adrien Auclert, Matthew Rognlie, and Ludwig Straub

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

We provide a simple framework connecting the distribution of excess savings across households to the dynamics of aggregate demand. Deficit-financed fiscal transfers generate excess savings. The poorest households with the highest marginal propensities to ...

Quantifying the Inflationary Impact of Fiscal Stimulus under Supply Constraints

By Julian di Giovanni, Şebnem Kalemli-Özcan, Alvaro Silva, and Muhammed A. Yıldırım

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

This paper builds on Baqaee and Farhi (2022) and di Giovanni et al. (2022) to quantify the contribution of fiscal policy on US inflation over the December 2019 to June 2022 period. Model calibrations show that aggregate demand shocks explain roughly two-t...

A Solomonic Solution to Blockchain Front-Running

By Joshua S. Gans and Richard Holden

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

Blockchain front-running involves multiple agents, other than the legitimate agent, claiming a payment from performing a contract. It arises because of the public nature of blockchain transactions and potential network congestion. This paper notes that di...