Call for nominations for CSWEP’s Carolyn Shaw Bell Award

[News]

May 16, 2023

Nominations are due by September 22, 2023.

Climate policies around the world

[Page]

How do climate change mitigation approaches vary across countries?

The economics of autocratic legalism

[Research Highlight]

September 14, 2023

How do modern autocracies immiserate their populace to satisfy the elite?

The Dynamics of Property Rights in Modern Autocracies

By Dan Cao and Roger Lagunoff

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2023

We study a dynamic model of property appropriation in autocracies. To maintain the appearance of the rule of law, an autocrat reassigns property only when the reassignment is acceptable to all affected citizens. Nevertheless, the autocrat can appropriate ...

Call for Research Proposals: The Kroner Center for Financial Research (KCFR)

[News]

September 25, 2023

The submission deadline is November 1, 2023.

Front Matter

American Economic Review, October 2023

Intrinsic Information Preferences and Skewness

By Yusufcan Masatlioglu, Yeşim Orhun, and Collin Raymond

American Economic Review, October 2023

We examine whether people have an intrinsic preference for negatively skewed or positively skewed information structures and how these preferences relate to intrinsic preferences for informativeness. The results from lab experiments show a strong intrinsi...

The Behavioral Foundations of Default Effects: Theory and Evidence from Medicare Part D

By Zarek Brot-Goldberg, Timothy Layton, Boris Vabson, and Adelina Yanyue Wang

American Economic Review, October 2023

We show in two natural experiments that default rules in Medicare Part D have large, persistent effects on enrollment and drug utilization of low-income beneficiaries. The implications of this phenomenon for welfare and optimal policy depend on the sensit...

Matching Mechanisms for Refugee Resettlement

By David Delacrétaz, Scott Duke Kominers, and Alexander Teytelboym

American Economic Review, October 2023

Current refugee resettlement processes account for neither the preferences of refugees nor the priorities of hosting communities. We introduce a new framework for matching with multidimensional knapsack constraints that captures the (possibly multidimensi...

Profits, Scale Economies, and the Gains from Trade and Industrial Policy

By Ahmad Lashkaripour and Volodymyr Lugovskyy

American Economic Review, October 2023

This paper examines the efficacy of second-best trade restrictions at correcting sectoral misallocation due to scale economies or profit-generating markups. To this end, we characterize optimal trade and industrial policies in an important class of quanti...

Regulation Design in Insurance Markets

By Dhruva Bhaskar, Andrew McClellan, and Evan Sadler

American Economic Review, October 2023

Regulators often impose rules that constrain the behavior of market participants. We study the design of regulatory policy in an insurance market as a delegation problem. A regulator restricts the menus of contracts an informed firm is permitted to offer,...

A Signal to End Child Marriage: Theory and Experimental Evidence from Bangladesh

By Nina Buchmann, Erica Field, Rachel Glennerster, Shahana Nazneen, and Xiao Yu Wang

American Economic Review, October 2023

Child marriage remains common even where female schooling and employment opportunities have grown. We experimentally evaluate a financial incentive to delay marriage alongside a girls' empowerment program in Bangladesh. While girls eligible for two years ...

Optimal Insurance: Dual Utility, Random Losses, and Adverse Selection

By Alex Gershkov, Benny Moldovanu, Philipp Strack, and Mengxi Zhang

American Economic Review, October 2023

We study a generalization of the classical monopoly insurance problem under adverse selection (see Stiglitz 1977) where we allow for a random distribution of losses, possibly correlated with the agent's risk parameter that is private information. Our mode...

Unequal growth in learning

[Page]

Was remote instruction a driver of the widening academic achievement gap between high- and low-poverty school districts during the pandemic?