The US-China Trade War and Global Reallocations

By Pablo Fajgelbaum, Pinelopi Goldberg, Patrick Kennedy, Amit Khandelwal, and Daria Taglioni

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2024

The US-China trade war created net export opportunities rather than simply shifting trade across destinations. Many "bystander" countries grew their exports of taxed products into the rest of the world (excluding the United States and China). Country-spec...

The Fading Treatment Effects of a Multifaceted Asset-Transfer Program in Ethiopia

By Nathan Barker, Dean Karlan, Christopher Udry, and Kelsey Wright

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2024

We study the long-run effects of a big-push "graduation" program in Ethiopia in which very poor households received a one-time transfer of productive assets (mainly livestock), technical training, and access to savings accounts. After seven years, treatme...

Inflation Expectations and Misallocation of Resources: Evidence from Italy

By Tiziano Ropele, Yuriy Gorodnichenko, and Olivier Coibion

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2024

Using Italian data that include both inflation forecasts of firms and external information on their balance sheets, we study the causal effect of changes in the dispersion of beliefs about future inflation on the misallocation of resources. We find that a...

Universalism and Political Representation: Evidence from the Field

By Benjamin Enke, Raymond Fisman, Luis Mota Freitas, and Steven Sun

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2024

This paper provides field evidence on the link between morals and political behavior. We create a district-level variable that reflects to what degree charitable giving decreases as a function of (geographic and social) distance, which we interpret as a r...

Trade and Trees

By Bård Harstad

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2024

International trade and natural resource exploitation interact in multiple ways. This paper first presents a dynamic game in which the South (S) exploits (e.g., deforests) in order to export (e.g., lumber and agricultural products). Because of negative ex...

Front Matter

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2024

CTREE Conference 2024

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May 29–31, 2024 | Lowes Atlanta Hotel, Atlanta, GA

Migrants at Sea: Unintended Consequences of Search and Rescue Operations

By Claudio Deiana, Vikram Maheshri, and Giovanni Mastrobuoni

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2024

Many countries are facing and resisting strong migratory pressure, fueling irregular migration. In response to mounting deaths in the Central Mediterranean, European nations intensified rescue operations in 2013. We develop a model of irregular migration ...

Moral hazard and migration

[Research Highlight]

June 04, 2024

Vikram Maheshri discusses unintended consequences of search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean Sea.

Contingent Valuation: A Practical Alternative When Prices Aren't Available

[Symposium: Contingent Valuation]

By Richard T. Carson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2012

A person may be willing to make an economic tradeoff to assure that a wilderness area or scenic resource is protected even if neither that person nor (perhaps) anyone else will actually visit this area. This tradeoff is commonly labeled "passive use valu...

Understanding China's Growth: Past, Present, and Future

[Symposium: China's Economy]

By Xiaodong Zhu

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2012

The pace and scale of China's economic transformation have no historical precedent. In 1978, China was one of the poorest countries in the world. The real per capita GDP in China was only one-fortieth of the U.S. level and one-tenth the Brazilian level. ...

How Did China Take Off?

[Symposium: China's Economy]

By Yasheng Huang

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2012

There are two prevailing perspectives on how China took off. One emphasizes the role of globalization—foreign trade and investments and special economic zones; the other emphasizes the role of internal reforms, especially rural reforms. Detailed docume...

The Economic Impacts of Climate Change: Evidence from Agricultural Output and Random Fluctuations in Weather: Reply

By Olivier Deschênes and Michael Greenstone

American Economic Review, December 2012

Fisher et al. (2012) (henceforth, FHRS) have uncovered coding and data errors in our paper, Deschênes and Greenstone (2007), henceforth, DG. We acknowledge and are embarrassed by these mistakes. We are grateful to FHRS for uncovering them. We hope t...

On the Real Effects of Bank Bailouts: Micro Evidence from Japan

By Mariassunta Giannetti and Andrei Simonov

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2013

Exploiting the Japanese banking crisis of the 1990s as a laboratory, we investigate the effects of bank bailouts on the supply of credit and the performance of banks' clients. Our findings indicate that the size of capital injections relative to the in...

Labor Market Outcomes and Reforms in China

[Symposium: China's Economy]

By Xin Meng

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2012

Over the past few decades of economic reform, China's labor markets have been transformed to an increasingly market-driven system. China has two segregated economies: the rural and urban. Understanding the shifting nature of this divide is probably the k...

Cross-Country Differences in Productivity: The Role of Allocation and Selection

By Eric Bartelsman, John Haltiwanger, and Stefano Scarpetta

American Economic Review, February 2013

This paper investigates the effect of idiosyncratic (firm-level) policy distortions on aggregate outcomes. Exploiting harmonized firm-level data for a number of countries, we show that there is substantial and systematic cross-country variation in the ...

Cultural Change as Learning: The Evolution of Female Labor Force Participation over a Century

By Raquel Fernández

American Economic Review, February 2013

This paper develops a learning model of cultural change to investigate why women's labor force participation (LFP) and attitudes toward women's work both changed dramatically. In the model, women's beliefs about the long-run payoff from working evolve end...

Young Adult Obesity and Household Income: Effects of Unconditional Cash Transfers

By Randall Akee, Emilia Simeonova, William Copeland, Adrian Angold, and E. Jane Costello

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2013

We investigate the effect of household cash transfers during childhood on young adult body mass indexes (BMI). The effects of extra income differ depending on the household's initial socioeconomic status (SES). Children from the initially poorest househ...

Natural Resources and Local Communities: Evidence from a Peruvian Gold Mine

By Fernando M. Aragón and Juan Pablo Rud

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2013

This paper examines the local economic impact of Yanacocha, a large gold mine in Northern Peru. Using annual household data from 1997 to 2006, we find evidence of a positive effect of the mine's demand for local inputs on real income. The effects are o...

Feeling the Florida Heat? How Low-Performing Schools Respond to Voucher and Accountability Pressure

By Cecilia Elena Rouse, Jane Hannaway, Dan Goldhaber, and David Figlio

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2013

While numerous studies have found that school accountability boosts test scores, it is uncertain whether estimated test score gains reflect genuine improvements or merely "gaming" behaviors. This paper brings to bear new evidence from a unique five-yea...