Refugees Are Hosted in Highly Vulnerable Communities

By C. Austin Davis, Paula López-Peña, Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak, and Jaya Y. Wen

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

Low- and middle-income nations host 76 percent of the world's refugees. This study uses original data to explore within-country spatial variability in refugee-hosting responsibilities. We find that hosting responsibilities for the displaced Rohingya peopl...

The Intensifying Effects of Prolonged Climate Change on Conflict, 1400–1900 CE

By Murat Iyigun, Joris Mueller, and Nancy Qian

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

This study uses historical conflict and weather data for the period 1400–1900 CE to investigate the long-run effects of climate change on political instability in a context that suffered extensive cooling. The results show that temperature changes have ...

Maternal Mental Health Responses to COVID-19 Shocks and Uncertainty in Rural Pakistan

By Michelle Escobar Carias, Victoria Baranov, Joanna Maselko, Pietro Biroli, and Sonia Bhalotra

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

In this paper, we investigate the association between a battery of mental health measures and experienced morbidity and mortality due to COVID-19, worry about disease risk, experienced economic shocks, and economic uncertainty about the future. We find th...

Depression, Poverty, and Economic Shocks: Evidence from India

By Manuela Angelucci and Daniel Bennett

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

This paper examines the correlations between socioeconomic status, economic shocks, and depression, and how these vary by gender, in a sample of adults from India. Poverty and the exposure to negative shocks are both associated with depression. However, t...

The Economic Burden of Dementia in India

By Marco Angrisani, Maria Casanova, Jinkook Lee, and Erik Meijer

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

This paper provides the first estimate of the economic cost borne by Indian individuals living with dementia and their families based on nationally and state-wise representative data from the Longitudinal Aging Study in India (LASI). We found that the ann...

Air Pollution and Mental Health: Evidence from China

By Shuai Chen, Paulina Oliva, and Peng Zhang

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

We estimate the short-run effect of air pollution on mental illness. Using the China Family Panel Studies covering 12,615 urban residents during 2014–2015, we find a significantly positive effect of air pollution—instrumented by thermal inversions—o...

Auditability in School Choice

By Aram Grigoryan and Markus Möller

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

In centralized public school admissions, participants may not fully observe other participants' preference rankings and priorities. In this paper, we evaluate prominent assignment rules in terms of their auditability properties. We show that Serial Dictat...

Diversity Balance in Centralized Public School Admissions

By Atila Abdulkadiroğlu and Aram Grigoryan

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

Parental choice over public schools has become a major educational reform throughout the United States and the world. Most district policies are implemented via admission priorities. Diversity in admissions is a common policy goal. However, it necessitate...

Exorbitant Privilege and the Sustainability of US Public Debt

By Jason Choi, Duong Dang, Rishabh Kirpalani, and Diego J. Perez

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

We study the extent to which the perceived cost of losing the exorbitant privilege the United States holds in global safe asset markets sustains its public debt safety. Our findings indicate that losing this special status in the event of a default signif...

Borrowing from China and Sovereign Credit Risk

By Illenin Kondo, Astghik Mkhitaryan, and César Sosa-Padilla

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

China's lending to developing nations has surged since the mid–2000s, making it these nations' largest official creditor. Contracts frequently feature unique terms, indicating China's substantial privileges as a lender. However, other lenders are also i...

Global Spillovers from Fed Hikes and a Strong Dollar: The Risk Channel

By José Cristi, Şebnem Kalemli-Özcan, Mariana Sans, and Filiz Unsal

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

We study the international transmission of US monetary policy shocks and a strong US dollar. We show that monetary tightening is linked to a higher risk premium, only in emerging markets, measured by deviations from uncovered interest parity. An appreciat...

Comparative Advantage of Humans versus AI in the Long Tail

By Nikhil Agarwal, Ray Huang, Alex Moehring, Pranav Rajpurkar, Tobias Salz, and Feiyang Yu

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

Machine learning algorithms now exceed human performance on several predictive tasks, generating concerns about widespread job displacement. However, supervised learning approaches rely on large amounts of high-quality labeled data and are designed for sp...

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Algorithms

By Jens Ludwig, Sendhil Mullainathan, and Ashesh Rambachan

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

We calculate the social return on algorithmic interventions (specifically, their marginal value of public funds (MVPF)) across multiple domains of interest to economists—regulation, criminal justice, medicine, and education. Though these algorithms are ...

Algorithmic Fairness and Social Welfare

By Annie Liang and Jay Lu

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

What constitutes a fair algorithm? In the literature on algorithmic fairness, a common approach is to formulate fairness concerns as statistical constraints and to select the most accurate algorithm satisfying this constraint. This approach is facially di...

Algorithmic Recommendations When the Stakes Are High: Evidence from Judicial Elections

By Victoria Angelova, Will Dobbie, and Crystal S. Yang

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

We ask whether increased public scrutiny leads to the more effective use of predictive algorithms. We focus on the context of bail, where judges face heightened public scrutiny during competitive partisan elections. We find that judges up for reelection a...

Creating the "American Way" of Business: Evidence from WWII in the United States

By Michela Giorcelli

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

World War II was arguably one of history's largest shocks to the US economic and production system. In this paper, I argue that "managerial technology" played a key role in shaping US WWII production and its capacity to defeat some of the most advanced ec...

Global Managers, Local Workers: Wage Setting inside a Multinational Firm

By Virginia Minni

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

How are wages set within a multinational firm? Combining cross-country data on wages and labor regulations with personnel records of a large multinational firm, I find that wage setting depends on the rank of the employee in the firm hierarchy. For manage...

Regional Differences in Public-Sector Productivity and Managerial Talent

By Alessandra Fenizia

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

This paper studies whether regional differences in the productivity of Italian Social Security Agency offices can be explained by variation in manager characteristics. Consistent with other settings, offices in the North are more productive on average tha...

Synergistic Impacts of Expansions in Pre-K Access and School Funding on Student Achievement: Evidence from California's Transitional Kindergarten Rollout

By Rucker C. Johnson

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

This paper investigates the extent to which expansions in public pre-K and increases in K12 funding improve student learning trajectories and narrow achievement gaps. I link school- and student-level information on public preschool participation with long...

In Search of Dynamic Complementarities between Early and Later Education: Evidence from North Carolina's Pre-K and K–12 School Funding Reforms

By Jade M. Jenkins, Tyler W. Watts, and Kenneth A. Dodge

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

We extend Johnson and Jackson's (2019) seminal paper on dynamic complementarities between early and late educational opportunities using modern-day programs in North Carolina. We exploit exogenous variation in the allocations made to counties for state pr...