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

[News]

September 25, 2023

The submission deadline is November 1, 2023.

CSMGEP: Resources - Links & Newsletters

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Resources including advice from editors on publishing, a wiki on diversifying economic quality for instructors and departments, and much more!

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

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

Victor Fuchs (1924–2023)

[News]

September 21, 2023

The longtime Stanford University professor and former AEA president has passed away at the age of 99.

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2023

Improving Regulatory Effectiveness through Better Targeting: Evidence from OSHA

By Matthew S. Johnson, David I. Levine, and Michael W. Toffel

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2023

We study how a regulator can best target inspections. Our case study is a US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) program that randomly allocated some inspections. On average, each inspection led to 2.4 (9 percent) fewer serious injuries o...

Immigration, Crime, and Crime (Mis)Perceptions

By Nicolás Ajzenman, Patricio Dominguez, and Raimundo Undurraga

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2023

This paper studies the effects of immigration on crime and crime perceptions in Chile, where the foreign-born population tripled in less than ten years. We document null effects of immigration on crime but positive and significant effects on crime-related...

How Do Households Respond to Job Loss? Lessons from Multiple High-Frequency Datasets

By Asger Lau Andersen, Amalie Sofie Jensen, Niels Johannesen, Claus Thustrup Kreiner, Søren Leth-Petersen, and Adam Sheridan

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2023

How much and through which channels do households self-insure against job loss? Combining data from a large bank and from government sources, we quantify a broad range of responses to job loss in a unified empirical framework. Cumulated over a two-year pe...

Contagious Dishonesty: Corruption Scandals and Supermarket Theft

By Giorgio Gulino and Federico Masera

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2023

Is dishonest behavior contagious? We answer this question by studying whether corruption scandals affect the propensity of supermarket customers to steal while using a self-service checkout system. Crucially, this system allows shoppers to engage in disho...

How Cable News Reshaped Local Government

By Elliott Ash and Sergio Galletta

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2023

This paper shows that partisan cable news broadcasts have a causal effect on the size and composition of budgets in US localities. Using exogenous channel positioning as an instrument for viewership, we show that exposure to the conservative Fox News chan...

Hidden Income and the Perceived Returns to Migration

By Travis Baseler

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2023

In many developing economies, urban workers earn substantially more than rural workers with the same level of education. Why don't more rural workers migrate to cities? I use two field experiments in Kenya to show that low migration is partly due to under...

Collateralized Marriage

By Jeanne Lafortune and Corinne Low

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2023

Marriage rates have become increasingly stratified by homeownership. We investigate this in a household model where investments in public goods reduce future earnings and, thus, divorce risk creates inefficiencies. Access to a joint savings technology, li...