The Effect of Cash, Vouchers, and Food Transfers on Intimate Partner Violence: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment in Northern Ecuador

By Melissa Hidrobo, Amber Peterman, and Lori Heise

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2016

Using a randomized experiment in Ecuador, this study provides evidence on whether cash, vouchers, and food transfers targeted to women and intended to reduce poverty and food insecurity also affected intimate partner violence. Results indicate that transf...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, July 2016

Behavioral Economics: Past, Present, and Future

By Richard H. Thaler

American Economic Review, July 2016

Perceiving Prospects Properly

By Jakub Steiner and Colin Stewart

American Economic Review, July 2016

When an agent chooses between prospects, noise in information processing generates an effect akin to the winner's curse. Statistically unbiased perception systematically overvalues the chosen action because it fails to account for the possibility that noi...

The Surprisingly Swift Decline of US Manufacturing Employment

By Justin R. Pierce and Peter K. Schott

American Economic Review, July 2016

This paper links the sharp drop in US manufacturing employment after 2000 to a change in US trade policy that eliminated potential tariff increases on Chinese imports. Industries more exposed to the change experience greater employment loss, increased imp...

Network Structure and the Aggregation of Information: Theory and Evidence from Indonesia

By Vivi Alatas, Abhijit Banerjee, Arun G. Chandrasekhar, Rema Hanna, and Benjamin A. Olken

American Economic Review, July 2016

We use unique data from over 600 Indonesian communities on what individuals know about the poverty status of others to study how network structure influences information aggregation. We develop a model of semi-Bayesian learning on networks, which we struc...

CoVaR

By Tobias Adrian and Markus K. Brunnermeier

American Economic Review, July 2016

CoVaR, defined as the change in the value at risk of the financial system conditional on an institution being under distress relative to its median state. Our estimates show that characteristics such as leverage, size, maturity mismatch, and asset price b...

Interest Rates and Equity Extraction during the Housing Boom

By Neil Bhutta and Benjamin J. Keys

American Economic Review, July 2016

Credit record panel data from 1999-2010 indicates that the likelihood of home equity extraction (borrowing, on average, about $40,000 against one's home) peaked in 2003 when mortgage rates reached historic lows. We estimate a 27 percent rise in extraction...

Experiments on Decisions under Uncertainty: A Theoretical Framework

By Eran Shmaya and Leeat Yariv

American Economic Review, July 2016

The analysis of lab data entails a joint test of the underlying theory and of subjects' conjectures regarding the experimental design itself, how subjects frame the experiment. We provide a theoretical framework for analyzing such conjectures. We use expe...

The Long-Run Effects of the Scramble for Africa

By Stelios Michalopoulos and Elias Papaioannou

American Economic Review, July 2016

We explore the consequences of ethnic partitioning, a neglected aspect of the Scramble for Africa, and uncover the following. First, apart from the land mass and water bodies, split and non-split groups are similar across several dimensions. Second, the i...

Discounts as a Barrier to Entry

By Enrique Ide, Juan-Pablo Montero, and Nicolás Figueroa

American Economic Review, July 2016

To what extent can an incumbent manufacturer use discount contracts to foreclose efficient entry? We show that off-list-price rebates that do not commit buyers to unconditional transfers--like the rebates in EU Commission v. Michelin II, for instance--can...

Charters without Lotteries: Testing Takeovers in New Orleans and Boston

By Atila Abdulkadiroğlu, Joshua D. Angrist, Peter D. Hull, and Parag A. Pathak

American Economic Review, July 2016

Charter takeovers are traditional public schools restarted as charter schools. We develop a grandfathering instrument for takeover attendance that compares students at schools designated for takeover with a matched sample of students attending similar sch...

Sequential Markets, Market Power, and Arbitrage

By Koichiro Ito and Mar Reguant

American Economic Review, July 2016

We develop a framework to characterize strategic behavior in sequential markets under imperfect competition and restricted entry in arbitrage. Our theory predicts that these two elements can generate a systematic price premium. We test the model predictio...

Tracing Value-Added and Double Counting in Gross Exports: Comment

By Bart Los, Marcel P. Timmer, and Gaaitzen J. de Vries

American Economic Review, July 2016

In a recent contribution to the AER, Koopman, Wang, and Wei (2014) proposed a decomposition of a country's gross exports into value-added components and double-counted terms. It is motivated by complex manipulation of basic accounting identities. In this ...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2016

Entry, Exit, Firm Dynamics, and Aggregate Fluctuations

By Gian Luca Clementi and Berardino Palazzo

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2016

Firm entry and exit amplify and propagate the effects of aggregate shocks, leading to greater persistence and unconditional variation of aggregate quantities. Following a positive aggregate shock, entry rises. As in the data, entrants are small and their ...

How Credible Is the Federal Reserve? A Structural Estimation of Policy Re-optimizations

By Davide Debortoli and Aeimit Lakdawala

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2016

The paper proposes a new measure of the degree of credibility of the Federal Reserve. We estimate a medium-scale macroeconomic model, where the central bank has access to a commitment technology, but where a regime-switching process governs occasional re-...

Explaining the Evolution of Educational Attainment in the United States

By Rui Castro and Daniele Coen-Pirani

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2016

We study the evolution of educational attainment of the 1932-1972 cohorts using a human capital investment model with heterogeneous learning ability. Inter-cohort variation in schooling is driven by changes in skill prices, tuition, and education quality ...

Are Chinese Growth and Inflation Too Smooth? Evidence from Engel Curves

By Emi Nakamura, Jón Steinsson, and Miao Liu

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2016

China has experienced remarkably stable growth and inflation in recent years according to official statistics. We use systematic discrepancies between cross-sectional and time-series Engel curves to construct alternative estimates of Chinese growth and in...

Early Childhood Human Capital and Development

By Todd Schoellman

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2016

A growing literature stresses the importance of early childhood human capital. I ask whether variation in early childhood investments can help explain cross-country income differences. I provide new empirical evidence: the adult outcomes of refugees are i...