Brexit Uncertainty and Its (Dis)service Effects

By Saad Ahmad, Nuno Limão, Sarah Oliver, and Serge Shikher

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2023

We estimate the impact of increased policy uncertainty from Brexit on UK trade in services. We apply an uncertainty-augmented gravity equation to UK services trade with the European Union at the industry level from 2016:I to 2018:IV. By exploiting the var...

Public Pension Reforms and Retirement Decisions: Narrative Evidence and Aggregate Implications

By Huixin Bi and Sarah Zubairy

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2023

We construct a database of public pension policy changes with motivation and implementation information for ten OECD countries. Structural pension reforms, motivated by long-run sustainability concerns, often come with prolonged phase-in periods. In respo...

Age Discrimination across the Business Cycle

By Gordon B. Dahl and Matthew Knepper

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2023

We test whether age discrimination rises during recessions using two complementary analyses. Confidential EEOC microdata reveal that age-related firing and hiring charges rise by 3.3 percent and 1.6 percent, respectively, for each percentage point increas...

Market Power and Price Exposure: Learning from Changes in Renewable Energy Regulation

By Natalia Fabra and Imelda

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2023

Given the critical role of renewable energies in current and future electricity markets, it is important to understand how they affect firms' pricing incentives. We study whether the price-depressing effect of renewables depends on their degree of market ...

Do Credit Supply Shocks Affect Employment in Middle-Income Countries?

By Emilio Gutierrez, David Jaume, and Martín Tobal

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2023

This paper studies the effect of bank credit supply shocks on formal employment in Mexico using a proprietary dataset containing information on all loans extended to firms by commercial banks during 2010–2015. We find large impacts on the formal employm...

Moved to Poverty? A Legacy of the Apartheid Experiment in South Africa

By Bladimir Carrillo, Carlos Charris, and Wilman Iglesias

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2023

During the South African apartheid, Black people were forced to move to homelands during the 1960s and 1970s, resulting in one of history's largest segregation policy experiments. We examine how and why relocation to the homelands affected human capital a...

Juvenile Crime and Anticipated Punishment

By Ashna Arora

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2023

Can sanctions deter juvenile crime? Research indicates that they may not, as offending barely decreases when individuals cross the age of criminal majority and begin to face harsher sanctions. Several models of criminal behavior predict, however, that the...

Public and Private Options in Practice: The Military Health System

By Michael D. Frakes, Jonathan Gruber, and Timothy Justicz

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2023

Recent debates over health care reform, including in the context of the Military Health System (MHS) and Veterans Administration, highlight the dispute between public and private provision of health care services. Using novel data on childbirth claims fro...

My Professor Cares: Experimental Evidence on the Role of Faculty Engagement

By Scott E. Carrell and Michal Kurlaender

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2023

We provide experimental evidence on the impact of specific faculty behaviors aimed at increasing student success for college students from historically underrepresented groups. The intervention was developed after conducting in-person focus groups and a p...

Digitization and the Market for Physical Works: Evidence from the Google Books Project

By Abhishek Nagaraj and Imke Reimers

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2023

The free digital distribution of creative works could cannibalize demand for physical versions, but it could also boost physical sales by enabling consumers to discover the original work. We study the impact of the Google Books digitization project on the...

Effects of Maturing Private School Choice Programs on Public School Students

By David N. Figlio, Cassandra M. D. Hart, and Krzysztof Karbownik

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2023

Using a rich dataset that merges student-level school records with birth records, and leveraging a student fixed effects design, we explore how a Florida private school choice program affected public school students' outcomes as the program matured and sc...

Information and Spillovers from Targeting Policy in Peru's Anchoveta Fishery

By Gabriel Englander

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2023

This paper establishes that a targeted policy backfires because it reveals information about nontargeted units. In the world's largest fishery, the regulator attempts to reduce the harvesting of juvenile fish by temporarily closing areas where the share o...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2023

Where Does Wealth Come From? Measuring Lifetime Resources in Norway

[Symposium: Wealth]

By Sandra E. Black, Paul J. Devereux, Fanny Landaud, and Kjell G. Salvanes

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2023

In this paper, we use comprehensive administrative data on the population of Norway to create a measure of lifetime resources, which generates several stylized facts. First, lifetime resources are highly correlated with net wealth, but net wealth is more ...

The Importance of Financial Literacy: Opening a New Field

[Symposium: Wealth]

By Annamaria Lusardi and Olivia S. Mitchell

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2023

We undertake an assessment of our two decades of research on financial literacy, building on our empirical research and theoretical work casting financial knowledge as a form of investment in human capital. We also draw on recent data to determine who is ...

Transmission Impossible? Prospects for Decarbonizing the US Grid

[Symposium: The Electricity Grid]

By Lucas W. Davis, Catherine Hausman, and Nancy L. Rose

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2023

Encouraged by the declining cost of grid-scale renewables, recent analyses conclude that the United States could reach net zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 at relatively low cost using currently available technologies. While the cost of renewable gen...

The Economics of Electricity Reliability

[Symposium: The Electricity Grid]

By Severin Borenstein, James Bushnell, and Erin Mansur

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2023

The physics of an electrical grid requires that the supply injected into the grid is always in balance with the quantity consumed. If that balance is not maintained, cascading outages are likely to disrupt supply to all consumers on the grid. In the past,...

The Economics Profession's Socioeconomic Diversity Problem

[Symposium: Economics Career Paths]

By Anna Stansbury and Robert Schultz

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2023

It is well-documented that women and racial and ethnic minorities are underrepresented in the economics profession, relative to both the general population and other academic disciplines. Less is known about the socioeconomic diversity of the economics pr...

The Evolution of Work from Home

[Symposium: After the Pandemic]

By José María Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, and Steven J. Davis

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2023

Full days worked at home account for 28 percent of paid workdays among Americans 20–64 years old, as of mid-2023. That's about four times the 2019 rate and ten times the rate in the mid-1990s. We first explain why the big shift to work from home has end...

Early Career Paths of Economists inside and outside of Academia

[Symposium: Economics Career Paths]

By Lucia Foster, Erika McEntarfer, and Danielle H. Sandler

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2023

Economics job candidates face considerable professional and financial uncertainties when deciding between academic and nonacademic career paths. Using novel panel data, we provide a broad picture of PhD economists' early career mobility and earnings growt...