Front Matter

American Economic Review, December 2023

Identifying the Benefits from Homeownership: A Swedish Experiment

By Paolo Sodini, Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, Roine Vestman, and Ulf von Lilienfeld-Toal

American Economic Review, December 2023

Homeownership is widely stimulated by policy, yet its economic effects are poorly understood. We exploit quasi-random variation in homeownership generated by privatization decisions of municipally owned buildings and use granular data on demographics, inc...

Intergenerational Mobility in American History: Accounting for Race and Measurement Error

By Zachary Ward

American Economic Review, December 2023

A large body of evidence finds that relative mobility in the US has declined over the past 150 years. However, long-run mobility estimates are usually based on White samples and therefore do not account for the limited opportunities available for nonwhite...

Populist Leaders and the Economy

By Manuel Funke, Moritz Schularick, and Christoph Trebesch

American Economic Review, December 2023

Populism at the country level is at an all-time high, with more than 25 percent of nations currently governed by populists. How do economies perform under populist leaders? We build a new long-run cross-country database to study the macroeconomic history ...

Taking It to the Limit: Effects of Increased Student Loan Availability on Attainment, Earnings, and Financial Well-Being

By Sandra E. Black, Jeffrey T. Denning, Lisa J. Dettling, Sarena Goodman, and Lesley J. Turner

American Economic Review, December 2023

Growing reliance on student loans and repayment difficulties have raised concerns of a student debt crisis in the United States, but little is known about the effects of student borrowing on human capital and long-run financial well-being. We use variatio...

Happy Times: Measuring Happiness Using Response Times

By Shuo Liu and Nick Netzer

American Economic Review, December 2023

Surveys measuring happiness or preferences generate discrete ordinal data. Ordered response models, which are used to analyze such data, suffer from an identification problem. Their conclusions depend on distributional assumptions about a latent variable....

The (Lack of) Anticipatory Effects of the Social Safety Net on Human Capital Investment

By Manasi Deshpande and Rebecca Dizon-Ross

American Economic Review, December 2023

How does the expectation that a child will receive government benefits in adulthood affect parental investments in the child's human capital? Most parents whose children receive Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits overestimate the likelihood that ...

Who Benefits from State Corporate Tax Cuts? A Local Labor Market Approach with Heterogeneous Firms: Reply

By Juan Carlos Suárez Serrato and Owen Zidar

American Economic Review, December 2023

In Suárez Serrato and Zidar (2016), we estimate the incidence of state corporate taxes. Malgouyres, Mayer, and Mazet-Sonilhac (2023) highlight two errors, ignoring effects on firm composition and characterizing capital costs inconsistently. This reply co...

Who Benefits from State Corporate Tax Cuts? A Local Labor Markets Approach with Heterogeneous Firms

By Juan Carlos Suárez Serrato and Owen Zidar

American Economic Review, September 2016

This paper estimates the incidence of state corporate taxes on the welfare of workers, landowners, and firm owners using variation in state corporate tax rates and apportionment rules. We develop a spatial equilibrium model with imperfectly mobile firms a...

Who Benefits from State Corporate Tax Cuts? A Local Labor Markets Approach with Heterogeneous Firms: Comment

By Clément Malgouyres, Thierry Mayer, and Clément Mazet-Sonilhac

American Economic Review, August 2023

Suarez Serrato and Zidar (2016) identify state corporate tax incidence in a spatial equilibrium model with imperfectly mobile firms. Their identification argument rests on comparative statics omitting a channel implied by their model: the link between com...

Front Matter

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2023

More than a paycheck

[Research Highlight]

August 17, 2018

The AEA interviews Stephan Meier about the nonmonetary rewards of work.

CSMGEP Profile: Gbenga Ajilore

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Government Jobs, in particular the Joint Committee on Taxation (November 2023)

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Watch Rachel Moore

Detecting Mother-Father Differences in Spending on Children: A New Approach Using Willingness-to-Pay Elicitation

By Rebecca Dizon-Ross and Seema Jayachandran

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2023

This paper tests whether mothers and fathers differ in their spending on daughters relative to sons by comparing their willingness to pay (WTP) for specific goods for their children. This method, which we apply in Uganda, offers more precision than the st...

Ghosting the Tax Authority: Fake Firms and Tax Fraud in Ecuador

By Paul Carrillo, Dave Donaldson, Dina Pomeranz, and Monica Singhal

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2023

An important but poorly understood form of firm tax evasion arises from "ghost firms"—fake firms that issue fraudulent receipts so that their clients can claim false deductions. We provide a unique window into this global phenomenon using transaction-le...

The Impact of Host Language Proficiency on Migrants' Employment Outcomes

By Lukas Schmid

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2023

This paper estimates the economic gains from proficiency in the host country's language on migrants' employment outcomes by exploiting the exogenous placement of refugees to Swiss cantons and a sharp language border dividing German- and French-speaking re...

Herd Design

By Itai Arieli, Ronen Gradwohl, and Rann Smorodinsky

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2023

The classic herding model examines the asymptotic behavior of agents who observe their predecessors' actions as well as a private signal from an exogenous information structure. In this paper, we introduce a self-interested sender into the model and study...

Mistakes in Future Consumption, High MPCs Now

By Chen Lian

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2023

In a canonical intertemporal consumption model, future consumption mistakes (in response to saving changes) lead to higher current marginal propensities to consume (MPCs). These mistakes increase the value of changing current consumption relative to chang...

Dishonesty and Public Employment

By Guillermo Cruces, Martín A. Rossi, and Ernesto Schargrodsky

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2023

We exploit a natural experiment to study the causal link between dishonest behavior and public employment. When military conscription was mandatory in Argentina, eligibility was determined by both a lottery and a medical examination. To avoid conscription...