Pandemic Schooling Mode and Student Test Scores: Evidence from US School Districts

By Rebecca Jack, Clare Halloran, James Okun, and Emily Oster

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2023

We estimate the impact of district-level schooling mode (in-person versus hybrid or virtual learning) in the 2020–2021 school year on students' pass rates on standardized tests in grades 3–8 across 11 states. Pass rates declined from 2019 to 2021: an ...

The Agglomeration of Urban Amenities: Evidence from Milan Restaurants

By Marco Leonardi and Enrico Moretti

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2023

We estimate agglomeration externalities in Milan's restaurant sector using the abolition of a unique regulation that restricted where restaurants could locate. In 2005, Milan abolished a minimum distance requirement that had kept the number of establishme...

Status Quo Property Protection in Politico-Legal Systems

By Roger Lagunoff

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2023

This paper models status quo (SQ) protection of property rights. A politico-legal system determines eligibility of citizen groups for protection. A ruling authority can reallocate property if and only if reallocation is preferable to the status quo for on...

A Note on Temporary Supply Shocks with Aggregate Demand Inertia

By Ricardo J. Caballero and Alp Simsek

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2023

We study optimal monetary policy during temporary supply contractions when aggregate demand has inertia and the central bank is concerned about future constraints on expansionary policy. In this environment, it is optimal to run the economy hot until supp...

National and Global Impacts of Genetically Modified Crops

By Casper Worm Hansen and Asger Mose Wingender

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2023

We estimate the impact of genetically modified (GM) crops on countrywide yields, harvested area, and trade using a triple-differences rollout design that exploits variation in the availability of GM seeds across crops, countries, and time. We find positiv...

Influence Motives in Social Signaling: Evidence from COVID-19 Vaccinations in Germany

By Emilio Esguerra, Leonhard Vollmer, and Johannes Wimmer

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2023

We investigate whether a desire to influence others' choices affects our own behavior. To separate such influence motives from social pressure, we study participants' willingness to register for a COVID-19 vaccination in a field experiment in Germany. We ...

Should We Tax Capital Income or Wealth?

By Corina Boar and Virgiliu Midrigan

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2023

We study optimal capital income and wealth taxation in an economy that reproduces the importance of private businesses for output and inequality. If entrepreneurs are subject to collateral constraints, they face heterogeneous rates of return, which genera...

Front Matter

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2023

Presidential Address: Does Monetary Policy Matter? The Narrative Approach after 35 Years

By Christina D. Romer and David H. Romer

American Economic Review, June 2023

The narrative approach to macroeconomic identification uses qualitative sources, such as newspapers or government records, to provide information that can help establish causal relationships. This paper discusses the requirements for rigorous narrative ...

Report of Independent Auditor

American Economic Review, June 2023

Front Matter

American Economic Review, June 2023

When Losses Turn into Loans: The Cost of Weak Banks

By Laura Blattner, Luisa Farinha, and Francisca Rebelo

American Economic Review, June 2023

We provide evidence that banks distort the composition of credit supply in order to comply with ratio-based capital requirements in times of economic distress. An unexpected intervention by the European Banking Authority provides a natural experiment to s...

The Birth of a Nation: Media and Racial Hate

By Desmond Ang

American Economic Review, June 2023

This paper documents the impact of popular media on racial hate by examining the first American blockbuster: 1915's The Birth of a Nation, a fictional portrayal of the KKK's founding rife with racist stereotypes. Exploiting the film's five-year "...

Optimal Contracting with Altruistic Agents: Medicare Payments for Dialysis Drugs

By Martin Gaynor, Nirav Mehta, and Seth Richards-Shubik

American Economic Review, June 2023

We study health-care provider agency and optimal payments, considering an expensive medication for dialysis patients. Using Medicare claims data we estimate a structural model of treatment decisions, in which providers differ in their altruism and margina...

Optimal Procurement with Quality Concerns

By Giuseppe Lopomo, Nicola Persico, and Alessandro T. Villa

American Economic Review, June 2023

Adverse selection in procurement arises when low-cost bidders are also low-quality suppliers. We propose a mechanism called LoLA (lowball lottery auction) which, under some conditions, maximizes any combination of buyer's and social surplus, subject to in...

Occupational Exposure to Capital-Embodied Technical Change

By Julieta Caunedo, David Jaume, and Elisa Keller

American Economic Review, June 2023

We study differences in exposure to factor-biased technical change among occupations by providing the first measures of capital-embodied technical change (CETC) and of the elasticity of substitution between capital and labor at the occupational level. We ...

Reconciliation Narratives: The Birth of a Nation after the US Civil War

By Elena Esposito, Tiziano Rotesi, Alessandro Saia, and Mathias Thoenig

American Economic Review, June 2023

We study how the spread of the Lost Cause narrative—a revisionist and racist retelling of the US Civil War—shifted opinions and behaviors toward national reunification and racial discrimination against African Americans. Looking at screenings of T...

The Common-Probability Auction Puzzle

By M. Kathleen Ngangoué and Andrew Schotter

American Economic Review, June 2023

This paper presents a puzzle in the behavior of experimental subjects in what we call common-probability auctions. In common-value auctions, uncertainty is defined over values, while in common-probability auctions, uncertainty is defined over probabilitie...

How Experiments with Children Inform Economics

By John A. List, Ragan Petrie, and Anya Samek

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2023

In the past several decades, the experimental method has lent deep insights into economics. One area that has contributed is the experimental study of children, where advances as varied as the evolution of human behaviors that shape markets and institut...

Encouraging Desistance from Crime

By Jennifer L. Doleac

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2023

Half of individuals released from prison in the United States will be re-incarcerated within three years, creating an incarceration cycle that is detrimental to individuals, families, and communities. There is tremendous public interest in ending this cyc...