Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2023

Labor Market Responses to Unemployment Insurance: The Role of Heterogeneity

By Serdar Birinci and Kurt See

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2023

We document considerable scope of heterogeneity within the unemployed, especially when they are divided along eligibility for and receipt of unemployment insurance (UI). We study the implications of this heterogeneity on UI's insurance-incentive trade-off...

Has the Information Channel of Monetary Policy Disappeared? Revisiting the Empirical Evidence

By Lukas Hoesch, Barbara Rossi, and Tatevik Sekhposyan

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2023

Does the Federal Reserve have an "information advantage" in forecasting macroeconomic variables beyond what is known to private sector forecasters? And are market participants reacting only to monetary policy shocks or also to information on the future st...

Efficient Consolidation of Incentives for Education and Retirement Savings

By Radoslaw Paluszynski and Pei Cheng Yu

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2023

We study optimal tax policies with human capital investment and retirement savings for present-biased agents. Agents are heterogeneous in their innate ability and make risky education investments, which determines their labor productivity. We demonstrate ...

Estimating the Optimal Inflation Target from Trends in Relative Prices

By Klaus Adam and Henning Weber

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2023

We derive closed-form expressions for the optimal inflation target under Calvo and menu-cost frictions in a model featuring a product life cycle and multiple sources of heterogeneity across goods. We show that both frictions deliver the same optimal targe...

How Does Consumption Respond to News about Inflation? Field Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial

By Olivier Coibion, Dimitris Georgarakos, Yuriy Gorodnichenko, and Maarten van Rooij

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2023

We implement a survey of Dutch households in which random subsets of respondents receive information about inflation. The resulting exogenously generated variation in inflation expectations is used to assess how expectations affect consumption decisions. ...

Measuring the Cost of Living in Mexico and the United States

By David Argente, Chang-Tai Hsieh, and Munseob Lee

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2023

We use a dataset with prices and spending on consumer packaged goods matched at the bar code level across the United States and Mexico to measure the price index in Mexico relative to the United States. Mexican prices relative to the United States are 23 ...

Human Capital Accumulation at Work: Estimates for the World and Implications for Development

By Remi Jedwab, Paul Romer, Asif M. Islam, and Roberto Samaniego

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2023

We (i) study wage-experience profiles and obtain measures of returns to potential work experience using data from about 24 million individuals in 1,084 surveys and census samples across 145 countries; (ii) show that workers in developed countries accumula...

Macroeconomic Implications of Uniform Pricing

By Diego Daruich and Julian Kozlowski

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2023

We compile a new database of grocery prices in Argentina. We find uniform pricing both within and across regions—i.e., prices almost do not vary within the stores of a chain. In line with uniform pricing, prices in stores of chains operating in one regi...

The Macroeconomic Impact of Europe's Carbon Taxes

By Gilbert E. Metcalf and James H. Stock

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2023

We estimate the macroeconomic impacts of carbon taxes on GDP and employment growth rates using 30 years of data on carbon taxation in various European countries. We find no evidence for a negative impact on employment or GDP growth but rather find a zero ...

The Intensive Margin in Trade: How Big and How Important?

By Ana M. Fernandes, Peter J. Klenow, Sergii Meleshchuk, Martha Denisse Pierola, and Andrés Rodríguez-Clare

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2023

In benchmark trade models that feature a constant trade elasticity, bilateral exports vary entirely on the intensive margin (exports per firm) or entirely on the extensive margin (number of firms). Our empirical analysis documents that roughly one-half of...

The Causal Effects of Lockdown Policies on Health and Macroeconomic Outcomes

By Jonas E. Arias, Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, Juan F. Rubio-Ramírez, and Minchul Shin

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2023

We assess the causal impact of pandemic-induced lockdowns on health and macroeconomic outcomes and measure the trade-off between containing the spread of a pandemic and economic activity. To do so, we estimate an epidemiological model with time-varying pa...

Call for Applications: CeMENT Mentoring Workshops for Junior Faculty

[News]

June 29, 2023

The application deadline is August 15, 2023.

Economic questions raised by Alzheimer's disease

[Research Highlight]

July 05, 2023

Corina Mommaerts discusses what economists can do to help policymakers address issues surrounding Alzheimer’s disease.

What Can Economics Say about Alzheimer's Disease?

By Amitabh Chandra, Courtney Coile, and Corina Mommaerts

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2023

Alzheimer's disease (AD) affects one in ten people aged 65 or older and is the most expensive disease in the United States. We describe the central economic questions raised by AD. Although there is overlap with the economics of aging and health, the de...

Nation building and racial animus

[Page]

What impact did racist narratives have on the reconciliation of the North and South after the US Civil War?

Call for Papers: Third Conference on the Interconnectedness of Financial Systems

[News]

July 17, 2023

The deadline for submissions is November 20, 2023.

Bonding with the boss

[Page]

How much does socializing at work contribute to the gender pay gap?

“Why is economics so rewarding to you?”

[Page]

Technical Change and Superstar Effects: Evidence from the Rollout of Television

By Felix Koenig

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2023

Technical change that extends market scale can generate winner-take-all dynamics, with large income growth among top earners. I test this "superstar model" in the entertainer labor market, where the historic rollout of television creates a natural experim...