Mental Models and Learning: The Case of Base-Rate Neglect

By Ignacio Esponda, Emanuel Vespa, and Sevgi Yuksel

American Economic Review, March 2024

We experimentally document persistence of suboptimal behavior despite ample opportunities to learn from feedback in a canonical updating problem where people suffer from base-rate neglect. Our results provide insights on the mechanisms hindering learning ...

The Comparative Statics of Sorting

By Axel Anderson and Lones Smith

American Economic Review, March 2024

We create a general and tractable theory of increasing sorting in pairwise matching models with monetary transfers. The positive quadrant dependence partial order subsumes Becker (1973) as the extreme cases with most and least sorting and implies increasi...

Hub-and-Spoke Cartels: Theory and Evidence from the Grocery Industry

By Robert Clark, Ig Horstmann, and Jean-François Houde

American Economic Review, March 2024

Numerous recently uncovered cartels operated along the supply chain, with firms at one end facilitating collusion at the other—hub-and-spoke arrangements. These cartels are hard to rationalize because they induce double marginalization and higher costs....

The Effect of Macroeconomic Uncertainty on Household Spending

By Olivier Coibion, Dimitris Georgarakos, Yuriy Gorodnichenko, Geoff Kenny, and Michael Weber

American Economic Review, March 2024

We use randomized treatments that provide different types of information about the first and/or second moments of future economic growth to generate exogenous changes in the perceived macroeconomic uncertainty of treated households. The effects on their s...

Does the Squeaky Wheel Get More Grease? The Direct and Indirect Effects of Citizen Participation on Environmental Governance in China

By Mark T. Buntaine, Michael Greenstone, Guojun He, Mengdi Liu, Shaoda Wang, and Bing Zhang

American Economic Review, March 2024

We conducted a nationwide field experiment in China to evaluate the direct and indirect impacts of assigning firms to public or private citizen appeals when they violate pollution standards. There are three main findings. First, public appeals to the regu...

Optimal Inference for Spot Regressions

By Tim Bollerslev, Jia Li, and Yuexuan Ren

American Economic Review, March 2024

Betas from return regressions are commonly used to measure systematic financial market risks. "Good" beta measurements are essential for a range of empirical inquiries in finance and macroeconomics. We introduce a novel econometric framework for the nonpa...

The Gender Gap in Confidence: Expected but Not Accounted For

By Christine L. Exley and Kirby Nielsen

American Economic Review, March 2024

We investigate how the gender gap in confidence affects the views that evaluators (e.g., employers) hold about men and women. We find the confidence gap is contagious, causing evaluators to form overly pessimistic beliefs about women. This result arises e...

2024 AEA Poster Videos

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Watch videos from the 2024 AEA Annual Meeting Poster Session.

The Human Capital Stock: A Generalized Approach

By Benjamin F. Jones

American Economic Review, November 2014

This paper reconsiders the traditional approach to human capital measurement in the study of cross-country income differences. Within a broader class of neoclassical human capital aggregators, traditional accounting is found to be a theoretical lower boun...

The Human Capital Stock: A Generalized Approach: Comment

By Francesco Caselli and Antonio Ciccone

American Economic Review, March 2019

Jones (2014) examines development accounting with imperfect substitutability between different types of skills in the production of output. He finds that human capital variation can account for the totality of the variation in income across countries. We ...

The Human Capital Stock: A Generalized Approach: Reply

By Benjamin F. Jones

American Economic Review, March 2019

Human capital differences across countries can appear large or small depending on measurement methods. This Reply clarifies key assumptions and conceptual distinctions across accounting approaches. Accounting-based arguments for small human capital differ...

Aleksandr Gevorkyan on the Lebanese Diaspora

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What determines how much diaspora members stay financially engaged with their native country?

The Dynamic Effects of Personal and Corporate Income Tax Changes in the United States

By Karel Mertens and Morten O. Ravn

American Economic Review, June 2013

This paper estimates the dynamic effects of changes in taxes in the United States. We distinguish between changes in personal and corporate income taxes and develop a new narrative account of federal tax liability changes in these two tax components. We...

The Dynamic Effects of Personal and Corporate Income Tax Changes in the United States: Comment

By Carsten Jentsch and Kurt G. Lunsford

American Economic Review, July 2019

Mertens and Ravn (2013) estimate impulse response functions (IRFs) from income tax changes in a structural vector autoregression (SVAR) by using narrative accounts of tax liability changes as proxy variables. To produce confidence intervals for their IRFs...

The Dynamic Effects of Personal and Corporate Income Tax Changes in the United States: Reply

By Karel Mertens and Morten O. Ravn

American Economic Review, July 2019

In this reply to a comment by Jentsch and Lunsford, we show that the evidence for economic and statistically significant macroeconomic effects of tax changes in Mertens and Ravn (2013) remains present for a range of asymptotically valid inference methods.

CSMGEP Profile: Ebonya Washington

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RAND

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Watch Melanie Zaber (RAND)