Coming Apart? Cultural Distances in the United States over Time

By Marianne Bertrand and Emir Kamenica

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2023

We analyze trends in cultural distances between groups in the United States defined by income, education, gender, race, and political ideology. We measure cultural distance as the ability to infer an individual's group based on media diet, consumer behavi...

Discrimination in Times of Crises and the Role of the Media

By Asaf Zussman

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2023

Can the extent of ethnic discrimination change quickly, and what circumstances and mechanisms make such changes possible? I address these questions by using scraped data to study the daily evolution of customer discrimination against Arab doctors in Israe...

Civil Liberties in Times of Crisis

By Marcella Alsan, Luca Braghieri, Sarah Eichmeyer, Minjeong Joyce Kim, Stefanie Stantcheva, and David Y. Yang

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2023

We study people's willingness to trade off civil liberties for increased health security in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic by deploying representative surveys involving around 550,000 responses across 15 countries. We document significant heterogene...

Coordination and Bandwagon Effects: How Past Rankings Shape the Behavior of Voters and Candidates

By Riako Granzier, Vincent Pons, and Clemence Tricaud

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2023

Candidates' placements in polls and past elections can be powerful coordination devices for parties and voters. Using a regression discontinuity design in French two-round elections, we show that candidates who place first in the first round are more like...

Temporal Instability of Risk Preference among the Poor: Evidence from Payday Cycles

By Mika Akesaka, Peter Eibich, Chie Hanaoka, and Hitoshi Shigeoka

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2023

The poor live paycheck to paycheck and are repeatedly exposed to strong cyclical income fluctuations. We investigate whether such income fluctuations affect their risk preference. If risk preference temporarily changes around payday, optimal decisions mad...

The Effect of Hospital Postpartum Care Regulations on Breastfeeding and Maternal Time Allocation

By Emily C. Lawler and Katherine G. Yewell

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2023

We study the effects of state hospital regulations intended to increase breastfeeding by requiring certain standards of care during the immediate postpartum hospital stay. We find that these regulations significantly increased breastfeeding initiation by ...

Returns to International Migration: Evidence from a Bangladesh-Malaysia Visa Lottery

By Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak, Iffath Sharif, and Maheshwor Shrestha

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2023

South Asians traveling to richer Asian nations is the world's largest migration corridor. We track down applicants to a government lottery that randomly allocated visas to Bangladeshis for temporary labor contracts in Malaysia, five years later. Most lott...

Physical Disability and Labor Market Discrimination: Evidence from a Video Résumé Field Experiment

By Charles Bellemare, Marion Goussé, Guy Lacroix, and Steeve Marchand

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2023

We sent fictitious applications to firms advertising job openings. We find that revealing a disability decreases callback rates by 25 percentage points. This result is not explained by accessibility constraints or lower productivity due to disability. We ...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2023

Schooling, Skill Demand, and Differential Fertility in the Process of Structural Transformation

By T. Terry Cheung

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2023

Demography and structural transformation are interrelated, and depend critically on education. At the turn of the twentieth century, US parents began having fewer children while increasing educational investment per child. This quantity-quality tradeoff f...

Overpersistence Bias in Individual Income Expectations and Its Aggregate Implications

By Filip Rozsypal and Kathrin Schlafmann

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2023

Using microlevel data, we document systematic forecast errors in household income expectations that are related to the level of income. We show that these errors can be formalized by a modest deviation from rational expectations, where agents overestimate...

Optimal Policy for Macrofinancial Stability

By Gianluca Benigno, Huigang Chen, Christopher Otrok, Alessandro Rebucci, and Eric R. Young

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2023

There is a new and now large literature analyzing government policies for financial stability based on models with endogenous borrowing constraints. These normative analyses build upon the concept of constrained efficient allocation where the social plann...

Monetary Policy in Sudden Stop-Prone Economies

By Louphou Coulibaly

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2023

This paper proposes a parsimonious theory explaining the cyclicality of monetary policy in emerging countries in a model where access to foreign financing depends on the real exchange rate and the government lacks commitment. The discretionary monetary po...

Taxation of Consumption and Labor Income: A Quantitative Approach

By Francesca Parodi

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2023

I quantitatively characterize optimal consumption and labor income taxes in a structural life-cycle model of household consumption, saving, and employment choices that allows for irreversibility of durable goods and preference heterogeneity. I find that d...

Disentangling COVID-19, Economic Mobility, and Containment Policy Shocks

By Annika Camehl and Malte Rieth

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2023

We study the dynamic interaction between COVID-19, economic mobility, and containment policy. We use Bayesian panel structural vector autoregressions with daily data for 44 countries, identified through traditional and narrative sign restrictions. We find...

Information Dynamics and Macro Fluctuations

By Kyriakos Chousakos, Gary Gorton, and Guillermo Ordoñez

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2023

The amount of information produced about firms' productivities and about the quality of collateral backing their loans varies over time. These information dynamics determine the evolution of credit, output and productivity, which feeds back into incentive...

Product Variety, the Cost of Living, and Welfare across Countries

By Alberto Cavallo, Robert C. Feenstra, and Robert Inklaar

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2023

We use the structure of the Melitz (2003) model to compute the cost of living and welfare across 47 countries, and compare these to conventional measures of prices and real consumption from the International Comparisons Project (ICP). The cost of living i...

Trade Policies and Fiscal Devaluations

By Christopher Erceg, Andrea Prestipino, and Andrea Raffo

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2023

Fiscal devaluations—an increase in import tariffs and export subsidies (IX) or an increase in value-added taxes and payroll subsidies (VP)—have been shown to provide as much stimulus under fixed exchange rates as a currency devaluation. We find that i...

Electricity and Firm Productivity: A General-Equilibrium Approach

By Stephie Fried and David Lagakos

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2023

Many policymakers view power outages as a major constraint on firm productivity in developing countries. Yet empirical studies find modest short-run effects of outages on firm performance. This paper builds a dynamic macroeconomic model to study the long-...

Call for Papers: The 5th China International Forum on Finance and Policy

[News]

September 29, 2023

The submission deadline is October 20, 2023.