Working Their Way Up? US Immigrants' Changing Labor Market Assimilation in the Age of Mass Migration

By William J. Collins and Ariell Zimran

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2023

Whether immigrants advance in labor markets during their life- times relative to natives is a fundamental question in the economics of immigration. We examine linked census records for five cohorts spanning 1850–1940, when immigration to the United Stat...

From Hashtag to Hate Crime: Twitter and Antiminority Sentiment

By Karsten Müller and Carlo Schwarz

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2023

We study whether social media can amplify antiminority sentiment with a focus on Donald Trump's political rise. Using an instrumental variable strategy based on Twitter's early adopters at the South by Southwest festival in 2007, we find that higher Twitt...

Does Cash Bail Deter Misconduct?

By Aurélie Ouss and Megan Stevenson

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2023

Courts routinely use low cash bail as a financial incentive to ensure released defendants appear in court and abstain from crime. This can create burdens for defendants with little empirical evidence on its efficacy. We exploit a prosecutor-driven reform ...

When Do Politicians Appeal Broadly? The Economic Consequences of Electoral Rules in Brazil

By Moya Chin

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2023

Electoral rules determine how voters' preferences are aggregated and translated into political representation. Using a regression discontinuity design, I contrast single- and two-round elections in Brazil. In two-round elections, the eventual winner must ...

Uncovering Peer Effects in Social and Academic Skills

By Román Andrés Zárate

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2023

This paper studies the impact of adolescent peers who are central in their social network on the formation of social skills and academic performance of fellow students. I conduct a novel large-scale field experiment at selective public boarding schools in...

When Sarah Meets Lawrence: The Effects of Coeducation on Women's College Major Choices

By Avery Calkins, Ariel J. Binder, Dana Shaat, and Brenden Timpe

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2023

We leverage variation in the adoption of coeducation by US women's colleges to study how exposure to a mixed-gender collegiate environment affects women's human capital investments. Our event-study analyses of newly collected historical data find a 3.0–...

What Difference Does a Health Plan Make? Evidence from Random Plan Assignment in Medicaid

By Michael Geruso, Timothy J. Layton, and Jacob Wallace

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2023

Exploiting the random assignment of Medicaid beneficiaries to managed care plans, we find substantial plan-specific spending effects despite plans having identical cost sharing. Enrollment in the lowest-spending plan reduces spending by at least 25 percen...

Raising the Bar: Certification Thresholds and Market Outcomes

By Xiang Hui, Maryam Saeedi, Giancarlo Spagnolo, and Steven Tadelis

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2023

Certification of sellers by trusted third parties helps alleviate information asymmetries in markets, yet little is known about the impact of a certification's threshold on market outcomes. Exploiting a policy change on eBay, we study how a more selective...

Market design and third-party certificates

[Research Highlight]

June 26, 2023

How do certification thresholds impact quality and prices in markets?

Retraction of "Dividend Taxes and the Allocation of Capital"

By Adrien Matray and Charles Boissel

American Economic Review, July 2023

Front Matter

American Economic Review, July 2023

The Value of Working Conditions in the United States and the Implications for the Structure of Wages

By Nicole Maestas, Kathleen J. Mullen, David Powell, Till von Wachter, and Jeffrey B. Wenger

American Economic Review, July 2023

We document variation in working conditions in the United States, present estimates of how workers value these conditions, and assess the impact of working conditions on estimates of wage inequality. We conduct a series of stated-preference experiments to...

Optimal Monetary Policy According to HANK

By Sushant Acharya, Edouard Challe, and Keshav Dogra

American Economic Review, July 2023

We study optimal monetary policy in an analytically tractable heterogeneous agent New Keynesian model with rich cross-sectional heterogeneity. Optimal policy differs from a representative agent benchmark because monetary policy can affect consumption ineq...

Optimal Policy under Dollar Pricing

By Konstantin Egorov and Dmitry Mukhin

American Economic Review, July 2023

Empirical evidence shows that most international prices are sticky in dollars. This paper studies the policy implications of this fact in the context of an open economy model with general preferences, technologies, asset markets, nominal rigidities, and a...

Prudential Policy with Distorted Beliefs

By Eduardo Dávila and Ansgar Walther

American Economic Review, July 2023

This paper studies leverage regulation when equity investors and/or creditors have distorted beliefs relative to a planner. We characterize how the optimal regulation responds to arbitrary changes in investors'/creditors' beliefs, relating our results to ...

The Old Boys' Club: Schmoozing and the Gender Gap

By Zoë Cullen and Ricardo Perez-Truglia

American Economic Review, July 2023

Offices are social places. Employees and managers take breaks together and talk about family and hobbies. In this study, we show that employees' social interactions with their managers can be advantageous for their careers, and that this phenomenon contri...

Heroes and Villains: The Effects of Heroism on Autocratic Values and Nazi Collaboration in France

By Julia Cagé, Anna Dagorret, Pauline Grosjean, and Saumitra Jha

American Economic Review, July 2023

We measure how a network of heroes can legitimize and diffuse extreme political behaviors. We exploit newly declassified intelligence files, novel voting data, and regimental histories to show that home municipalities of French line regiments arbitrarily ...

Confidence, Self-Selection, and Bias in the Aggregate

By Benjamin Enke, Thomas Graeber, and Ryan Oprea

American Economic Review, July 2023

The influence of behavioral biases on aggregate outcomes depends in part on self-selection: whether rational people opt more strongly into aggregate interactions than biased individuals. In betting market, auction and committee experiments, we document th...

Dividend Taxes and the Allocation of Capital: Comment

By Laurent Bach, Antoine Bozio, Arthur Guillouzouic, and Clément Malgouyres

American Economic Review, July 2023

Boissel and Matray (2022) find that investment increased after 2013 in French firms facing higher dividend taxes. We identify an alteration in the code plotting the event study of the effect of this reform on investment. Using identical data and removing ...

RETRACTED BY THE AUTHORS: Dividend Taxes and the Allocation of Capital

By Charles Boissel and Adrien Matray

American Economic Review, September 2022

This paper investigates the 2013 threefold increase in the French dividend tax rate. Using administrative data covering the universe of firms from 2008 to 2017 and a quasi-experimental setting, we find that firms swiftly cut dividend payments and used thi...