Civil Service Exams and Organizational Performance: Evidence from the Pendleton Act

By Diana Moreira and Santiago Pérez

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2024

We use newly digitized data to study the impacts of a historical reform that mandated exams for some employees in the largest US customs-collection districts. Although the reform improved targeted employees' professional backgrounds and reduced turnover, ...

Socioeconomic Disparities in Privatized Pollution Remediation: Evidence from Toxic Chemical Spills

By Justin Marion and Jeremy West

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2024

Governments often privatize the administration of regulations to third-party specialists paid for by the regulated parties. We study how the resulting conflict of interest can have unintended consequences for the distributional impacts of regulation. In M...

The Human Capital Effects of Access to Elite Jobs

By Huayu Xu and Achyuta Adhvaryu

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2024

We study the human capital effects of access to elite bureaucratic jobs in Taiwan, where performance on an examination determines entry into the civil service. Historically, quotas for successful applicants were set based on the 1948 populations of indivi...

Health Care Centralization: The Health Impacts of Obstetric Unit Closures in the United States

By Stefanie Fischer, Heather Royer, and Corey White

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2024

Over the last few decades, health care services in the United States have become more geographically centralized. We study how the loss of hospital-based obstetric units in over 400 counties affects maternal and infant health via a difference-in-differenc...

When Individual Politics Become Public: Do Civil Service Protections Insulate Government Workers?

By Morgan Foy

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2024

This paper examines whether the civil service system protected state bureaucrats from political interference following a recall petition against the governor of Wisconsin. I find that most classified workers, who were covered by the state civil service la...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, July 2024

Revealing Stereotypes: Evidence from Immigrants in Schools

By Alberto Alesina, Michela Carlana, Eliana La Ferrara, and Paolo Pinotti

American Economic Review, July 2024

We study how people change their behavior after being made aware of bias. Teachers in Italian schools give lower grades to immigrant students relative to natives of comparable ability. In two experiments, we reveal to teachers their own stereotypes, measu...

Misallocation under Trade Liberalization

By Yan Bai, Keyu Jin, and Dan Lu

American Economic Review, July 2024

This paper formalizes a classic idea that in second-best environments trade can induce welfare losses: incremental income losses from distortions can outweigh trade gains. In a Melitz model with distortionary taxes, we derive sufficient statistics for wel...

Demographic Origins of the Start-up Deficit

By Fatih Karahan, Benjamin Pugsley, and Ayşegül Şahin

American Economic Review, July 2024

We propose a simple explanation for the long-run decline in the US start-up rate. It originates from a slowdown in labor supply growth since the late 1970s, largely predetermined by demographics. This channel can explain roughly half of the decline and wh...

Opportunity Unraveled: Private Information and the Missing Markets for Financing Human Capital

By Daniel Herbst and Nathaniel Hendren

American Economic Review, July 2024

We examine whether adverse selection has unraveled private markets for equity and state-contingent debt contracts for financing higher education. Using survey data on beliefs, we show a typical college-goer would have to repay $1.64 in present value for e...

Bank Runs, Fragility, and Credit Easing

By Manuel Amador and Javier Bianchi

American Economic Review, July 2024

We present a tractable dynamic general equilibrium model of self-fulfilling bank runs, where banks trade capital in competitive and liquid markets but remain vulnerable to runs due to a loss of creditor confidence. We characterize how the vulnerability of...

100 Years of Rising Corporate Concentration

By Spencer Y. Kwon, Yueran Ma, and Kaspar Zimmermann

American Economic Review, July 2024

We collect data on the size distribution of US businesses for 100 years, and use these data to estimate the concentration of production (e.g., asset share or sales share of top businesses). The data show that concentration has increased persistently over ...

Information Choice in Auctions

By Nina Bobkova

American Economic Review, July 2024

The choice of an auction mechanism influences which object characteristics bidders learn about and whether the object is allocated efficiently. Some object characteristics are valued equally by all bidders and thus are inconsequential for the efficient al...

Personalized Pricing and Competition

By Andrew Rhodes and Jidong Zhou

American Economic Review, July 2024

We study personalized pricing in a general oligopoly model. The impact of personalized pricing relative to uniform pricing hinges on the degree of market coverage. If market conditions are such that coverage is high (e.g., the production cost is low or th...

Organized Crime and Economic Growth: Evidence from Municipalities Infiltrated by the Mafia

By Alessandra Fenizia and Raffaele Saggio

American Economic Review, July 2024

This paper studies the long-run economic impact of dismissing city councils infiltrated by organized crime. Applying a matched difference-in-differences design to the universe of Italian social security records, we find that city council dismissals (CCDs)...

The Gift of a Lifetime: The Hospital, Modern Medicine, and Mortality

By Alex Hollingsworth, Krzysztof Karbownik, Melissa A. Thomasson, and Anthony Wray

American Economic Review, July 2024

We explore how access to modern hospitals and medicine affects mortality by leveraging efforts of the Duke Endowment to modernize hospitals in the early twentieth century. The Endowment helped communities build and expand hospitals, obtain state-of-the-ar...

JEP in the Classroom

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JEP in the Classroom

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Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2024

World Productivity: 1996–2014

By Mehrdad Esfahani, John G. Fernald, and Bart Hobijn

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2024

We use a new growth accounting method to quantify the drivers of world total factor productivity (TFP) growth during 1996–2014 and uncover four main results. World productivity growth is volatile from year to year. This mainly reflects reallocation of l...