Measuring Business Trends and Outlook through a New Survey

By Catherine Buffington, Lucia Foster, and Colin Shevlin

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

The Census Bureau's new Business Trends and Outlook Survey (BTOS) provides timely information from businesses on their current trends and expectations over core concepts such as prices, employment, and revenue. The BTOS collects qualitative information in...

Payroll Employment at the Weekly Frequency

By Tomaz Cajner, Leland D. Crane, Ryan A. Decker, Adrian Hamins-Puertolas, and Christopher Kurz

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

Nontraditional data can provide critical economic insights in real time. We document the development of weekly employment indexes based on microdata from the payroll processor ADP. These data have provided insights into labor market developments in the fa...

Are Business Applications Early Economic Indicators?

By Jose Asturias, Emin Dinlersoz, John Haltiwanger, and Rebecca Hutchinson

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

Are business applications early indicators of economic activity? Our analysis indicates that monthly year-over-year growth in applications for likely employer businesses significantly leads growth in total nonfarm employment and has a positive correlation...

Knowledge about Federal Employment Nondiscrimination Protections on the Basis of Sexual Orientation

By Billur Aksoy, Christopher S. Carpenter, and Dario Sansone

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

Using a US nationally representative online sample, we measure the level of knowledge on employment nondiscrimination laws. Although Americans are well informed about sex, race, and disability being protected characteristics, only about 71 percent think t...

Heterogeneity in Attitude Responses: Evidence from Bostock v. Clayton County

By Cameron Deal

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

Traditional models of policy formation emphasize how political attitudes and actions affect policy outcomes. However, the converse may occur—policies are often a signal to constituents about the priorities and positions of both political actors and the ...

Hormone Therapy, Suicidal Risk, and Transgender Youth in the United States

By Travis Campbell, Samuel Mann, Duc Hien Nguyen, and Yana van der Meulen Rodgers

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

This study uses the 2015 US Transgender Survey to test how initiation of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) affects the risk of attempting suicide among transgender individuals. We constructed a retrospective panel and employed a stacked event study design...

The Impact of COVID-19 on Access to Mental Health Care Services

By Benjamin Harrell, Luca Fumarco, Patrick Button, David J. Schwegman, and Kyla Denwood

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

The COVID-19 pandemic increased the rate of mental health disorders, as well as demand for mental health services. It remains unclear, however, the extent to which it impacted access to mental health care. Using data from an audit field experiment, which ...

(Incorrect) Perceived Returns and Strategic Behavior among Talented Low-Income College Graduates

By Jorge M. Agüero, Francisco Galarza, and Gustavo Yamada

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

Job applicants use resumes to send signals to potential employers. Applicants are free to select the items that go in their resumes and are expected to include signals they perceive will help them achieve their goals and avoid those that they anticipate c...

Males Should Mail? Gender Discrimination in Access to Childcare

By Henning Hermes, Philipp Lergetporer, Fabian Mierisch, Frauke Peter, and Simon Wiederhold

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

This study investigates discrimination against women when searching and applying for childcare in a nationwide field experiment. We send emails from fictitious parents to 9,313 childcare centers in Germany inquiring about access to childcare. We randomize...

Do Financial Incentives Encourage Women to Apply for a Tech Job? Evidence from a Natural Field Experiment

By Jan Feld, Edwin Ip, Andreas Leibbrandt, and Joseph Vecci

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

We conduct a natural field experiment to test whether offering financial incentives encourages more female job seekers to complete their applications for a tech job. All eligible applicants for the job were invited to perform an online skill assessment. W...

Perceptions of Gender Diversity in Occupations

By Jeffrey Flory, Andreas Leibbrandt, Olga Shurchkov, Olga Stoddard, and Alva Taylor

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

We design a survey experiment to investigate the effect of intervention with diversity on preferences for diverse outcomes. First, subjects report their perceptions of the archetypical occupations boss, professor, nurse, and clerk, rating boss/professor a...

Policies for Electrifying the Light-Duty Vehicle Fleet in the United States

By Cassandra Cole, Michael Droste, Christopher Knittel, Shanjun Li, and James H. Stock

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

Decarbonization of light-duty vehicles (LDVs) in the United States is an important policy priority. We investigate the roles of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act in accelerating the transition of LDVs to electric v...

Pass-through of Electric Vehicle Subsidies: A Global Analysis

By Panle Jia Barwick, Hyuk-soo Kwon, Binglin Wang, and Nahim Bin Zahur

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

We investigate the pass-through of electric vehicle (EV) subsidies in 13 countries that account for 95 percent of global EV sales from 2013 to 2020. Our results indicate high pass-through rates of 70-80 percent on average. Pass-through is highest for glob...

Has Consumer Acceptance of Electric Vehicles Been Increasing? Evidence from Microdata on Every New Vehicle Sale in the United States

By Kenneth T. Gillingham, Arthur A. van Benthem, Stephanie Weber, Mohamed Ali Saafi, and Xin He

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

Electric vehicle (EV) sales have been rapidly growing around the world, spurred by technology advances and policy actions. This study leverages rich data on all individual new light-duty vehicles sold in the United States from 2014 to 2020. We examine how...

The Impact of Distance in Retail Markets

By Danny Edgel, Jean-François Houde, Peter Newberry, and Katja Seim

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

We examine the demand-side implications of Amazon's distribution and logistics investments. Our results indicate that online demand—transactions at Amazon and its competitors—does not respond to the consumer's proximity to Amazon's upstream fulfillmen...

The Role of Housing Platforms in Facilitating Trading between Firms

By Xuequan Elsie Peng and Maisy Wong

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

We study the 2013 merger of three multiple listings services (MLSes) in Florida, the primary platforms where properties are transacted. We use MLS listings data from 2009 to 2019 to trace out the effects of the merger on the likelihood that listings by br...

Self-Preferencing at Amazon: Evidence from Search Rankings

By Chiara Farronato, Andrey Fradkin, and Alexander MacKay

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

We study whether Amazon engages in self-preferencing on its marketplace by favoring its own brands (e.g., Amazon Basics) in search. To address this question, we collect new micro-level consumer search data using a custom browser extension installed by a p...

Matching and Network Effects in Ride-Hailing

By Juan Camilo Castillo and Shreya Mathur

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

A recent empirical literature models search and matching frictions by means of a reduced-form matching function. An alternative approach is to simulate the matching process directly. In this paper, we follow the latter approach to model matching in ride-h...

Do Tax Increases Tame Inflation?

By James Cloyne, Joseba Martinez, Haroon Mumtaz, and Paolo Surico

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

The answer is "yes" for personal income taxes but "no" for corporate income taxes. Using narrative-identified US federal tax changes post-World War II and disaggregated sectoral data on consumer and producer prices, we show that higher average personal in...

Do Government Spending Multipliers Depend on the Sign of the Shock?

By Nadav Ben Zeev, Valerie A. Ramey, and Sarah Zubairy

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

We analyze whether government spending multipliers differ by the sign of the shock. Using aggregate historical US data, we apply Ben Zeev's (2020) nonlinear diagnostic tests and find evidence of nonlinearities in the impulse response functions of both gov...