The Employment Effects of Ethnic Politics

By Francesco Amodio, Giorgio Chiovelli, and Sebastian Hohmann

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2024

We study the labor market consequences of ethnic politics in African democracies. Using subnational georeferenced data from 15 countries from 1996 to 2017, we compare individuals from ethnicities linked to parties at the margin of electing a representativ...

Maternal Dengue and Health Outcomes of Children

By Martin Foureaux Koppensteiner and Lívia Menezes

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2024

We study the effect of maternal dengue infections on birth outcomes using linked administrative records from Brazil estimating maternal fixed-effect specifications. In contrast to previous studies, we find robust evidence for the negative effect of dengue...

Intergenerational Mobility in India: New Measures and Estimates across Time and Social Groups

By Sam Asher, Paul Novosad, and Charlie Rafkin

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2024

We study intergenerational mobility in India. We propose a new measure of upward mobility: the expected education rank of a child born to parents in the bottom half of the education distribution. This measure works well under data constraints common in de...

How the Internet Changed the Market for Print Media

By Manudeep Bhuller, Tarjei Havnes, Jeremy McCauley, and Magne Mogstad

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2024

Combining rich data from the Norwegian media market with exogenous variation in the availability and adoption of broadband internet, this paper provides causal evidence on how the internet affected traditional print media. Broadband internet adoption trig...

Does Promoting One Healthy Behavior Detract from Others? Evidence from a Field Experiment

By Hannah Trachtman

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2024

Impact evaluations of behavioral interventions typically focus on target outcomes. Might interventions induce negative spillovers on other behaviors? I run a large field experiment in which individuals receive combinations of messages and incentives promo...

The Impact of Cash Transfers to Poor Mothers on Family Structure and Maternal Well-Being

By Anna Aizer, Sungwoo Cho, Shari Eli, and Adriana Lleras-Muney

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2024

We use newly collected data for 16,000 women who applied for Mothers' Pensions, America's first welfare program, to investigate the effect of means-tested cash transfers on lifetime family structure and maternal well-being. In the short term, cash transfe...

Housing the Homeless: The Effect of Placing Single Adults Experiencing Homelessness in Housing Programs on Future Homelessness and Socioeconomic Outcomes

By Elior Cohen

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2024

This study measures the impact of rapidly placing single adults experiencing homelessness in housing programs on future homelessness, crime, and health. Using a caseworker placement tendencies design and a novel dataset constructed by linking administrati...

Predistribution versus Redistribution: Evidence from France and the United States

By Antoine Bozio, Bertrand Garbinti, Jonathan Goupille-Lebret, Malka Guillot, and Thomas Piketty

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2024

We construct series of posttax income for France over the 1900–2018 period and compare them with US series. We quantify the extent of redistribution—the reduction from pretax to posttax inequality—and estimate the contribution of redistribution in e...

Private Input Suppliers as Information Agents for Technology Adoption in Agriculture

By Manzoor H. Dar, Alain de Janvry, Kyle Emerick, Elisabeth Sadoulet, and Eleanor Wiseman

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2024

Information frictions limit the adoption of new agricultural technologies in developing countries. Efforts to improve learning involve spreading information from government agents to farmers. We show that when compared to this government approach, informi...

Multigenerational Transmission of Wealth: Florence, 1403–1480

By Marianna Belloc, Francesco Drago, Mattia Fochesato, and Roberto Galbiati

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2024

By using hand-collected data on households' wealth assessments, we study multigenerational mobility in Florence during the late Middle Ages. We find that Florentine society was more mobile than one would expect but also that multigenerational mobility was...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, April 2024

Anticipatory Anxiety and Wishful Thinking

By Jan B. Engelmann, Maël Lebreton, Nahuel A. Salem-Garcia, Peter Schwardmann, and Joël J. van der Weele

American Economic Review, April 2024

Across five experiments (N = 1,714), we test whether people engage in wishful thinking to alleviate anxiety about adverse future outcomes. Participants perform pattern recognition tasks in which some patterns may result in an electric shock or a monetary ...

Motivated Errors

By Christine L. Exley and Judd B. Kessler

American Economic Review, April 2024

Myriad environments allow for the possibility of confusion. Agents may appeal to such confusion—or the possibility of making an honest mistake—to justify their behavior. In three sets of experiments involving thousands of subjects, we document evidenc...

When Tariffs Disrupt Global Supply Chains

By Gene M. Grossman, Elhanan Helpman, and Stephen J. Redding

American Economic Review, April 2024

We study unanticipated tariffs in a setting with firm-to-firm supply relationships. Firms conduct costly searches and negotiate with potential suppliers that pass a reservation level of match productivity. Global supply chains form in anticipation of free...

Local Productivity Spillovers

By Nathaniel Baum-Snow, Nicolas Gendron-Carrier, and Ronni Pavan

American Economic Review, April 2024

Using Canadian administrative data, this paper presents evidence of revenue and productivity spillovers across firms at fine spatial scales. Accounting for the endogenous sorting of firms across space, we estimate an average elasticity of firm revenue and...

Redesigning the US Army's Branching Process: A Case Study in Minimalist Market Design

By Kyle Greenberg, Parag A. Pathak, and Tayfun Sönmez

American Economic Review, April 2024

We present a proof-of-concept for minimalist market design (Sönmez 2023) as an effective methodology to enhance an institution based on stakeholders' desiderata with minimal interference. Four objectives—respecting merit, increasing retention, aligning...

The Political Development Cycle: The Right and the Left in People's Republic of China from 1953

By Anton Cheremukhin, Mikhail Golosov, Sergei Guriev, and Aleh Tsyvinski

American Economic Review, April 2024

We quantify the effects of the political development cycle—the fluctuations between the Left (Maoist) and the Right (pragmatist) development policies—on growth and structural transformation of China in 1953–1978. The left policies prioritized struct...

The Opportunity Cost of Debt Aversion

By Alejandro Martínez-Marquina and Mike Shi

American Economic Review, April 2024

We provide evidence of the existence of debt aversion and its negative implications for financial decisions. In a new experimental design where subjects are assigned debt randomly, we quantify the opportunity cost of subjects' debt-biased decisions. One-t...

Nurturing Childhood Curiosity to Enhance Learning: Evidence from a Randomized Pedagogical Intervention

By Sule Alan and Ipek Mumcu

American Economic Review, April 2024

We evaluate a pedagogical intervention aimed at improving learning in elementary school children by fostering their curiosity. We test the effectiveness of the pedagogy using achievement scores and a novel measure of curiosity. The latter involves creatin...

A Price Theory of Multi-sided Platforms

By E. Glen Weyl

American Economic Review, September 2010

I develop a general theory of monopoly pricing of networks. Platforms use insulating tariffs to avoid coordination failure, implementing any desired allocation. Profit maximization distorts in the spirit of A. Michael Spence (1975) by internalizing only n...