Indirect Effects of Access to Finance

By Jing Cai and Adam Szeidl

American Economic Review, August 2024

We created experimental variation across markets in China in the share of firms having access to a new loan product. Access to finance had a large positive direct effect on the performance of treated firms but a similar-sized negative indirect effect on t...

Long-Run Trends in Long-Maturity Real Rates, 1311–2022

By Kenneth S. Rogoff, Barbara Rossi, and Paul Schmelzing

American Economic Review, August 2024

Taking advantage of key recent advances in long-run economic and financial data, we analyze the statistical properties of global long-maturity real interest rates over the past seven centuries. In contrast to existing consensus, we find that real interest...

Learning by Necessity: Government Demand, Capacity Constraints, and Productivity Growth

By Ethan Ilzetzki

American Economic Review, August 2024

This paper studies how firms adapt to demand shocks when facing capacity constraints. I show that increases in government purchases raise total factor productivity in quantity units at the production line level. Productivity gains are concentrated in plan...

Repeated Trading: Transparency and Market Structure

By Ayça Kaya and Santanu Roy

American Economic Review, August 2024

We analyze the effect of transparency of past trading volumes in markets where an informed long-lived seller can repeatedly trade with short-lived uninformed buyers. Transparency allows buyers to observe previously sold quantities. In markets with intrape...

Monotone Function Intervals: Theory and Applications

By Kai Hao Yang and Alexander K. Zentefis

American Economic Review, August 2024

A monotone function interval is the set of monotone functions that lie pointwise between two fixed monotone functions. We characterize the set of extreme points of monotone function intervals and apply this to a number of economic settings. First, we leve...

Data, Competition, and Digital Platforms

By Dirk Bergemann and Alessandro Bonatti

American Economic Review, August 2024

A monopolist platform uses data to match heterogeneous consumers with multiproduct sellers. The consumers can purchase the products on the platform or search off the platform. The platform sells targeted ads to sellers that recommend their products to con...

A Discrimination Report Card

By Patrick Kline, Evan K. Rose, and Christopher R. Walters

American Economic Review, August 2024

We develop an empirical Bayes ranking procedure that assigns ordinal grades to noisy measurements, balancing the information content of the assigned grades against the expected frequency of ranking errors. Applying the method to a massive correspondence e...

Buying from a Group

By Nima Haghpanah, Aditya Kuvalekar, and Elliot Lipnowski

American Economic Review, August 2024

A buyer procures a good owned by a group of sellers whose heterogeneous cost of trade is private information. The buyer must either buy the whole good or nothing, and sellers share the transfer in proportion to their share of the good. We characterize the...

Final Reminder: Take Part in the Anonymous AEA Survey on Social Media

[News]

July 30, 2024

View the AEA Member Announcement from July 30th, 2024.

2024 Annual Election

[News]

July 31, 2024

View the AEA Member Announcement from July 31th, 2024.

Activated History: The Case of the Turkish Sieges of Vienna

By Christian Ochsner and Felix Roesel

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2024

We show that history stored in collective memories and activated by political campaigns can create xenophobia and radicalization. Turkish troops besieged Vienna in 1529 and 1683 and pillaged individual Austrian villages, killing and kidnapping in the proc...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2024

Labor Market Effects of Credit Constraints: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

By Anil Kumar and Che-Yuan Liang

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2024

We exploit the 1997 and 2003 constitutional amendments in Texas—allowing home equity loans and lines of credit for nonhousing purposes—as natural experiments to estimate the effect of easier credit access on the labor market. Using state-level as well...

Learning by Offending: How Do Criminals Learn about Criminal Law?

By Arnaud Philippe

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2024

This paper investigates how criminals learn about criminal laws. It uses a natural experiment in which sentences were drastically increased for a specific type of recidivism in France. In the short run, advertising the reform did not trigger any change in...

Gender Differences in Preferences for Meaning at Work

By Vanessa Burbano, Nicolas Padilla, and Stephan Meier

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2024

Scholars have examined whether preferences for job characteristics help explain why men and women sort into different occupations but have overlooked preferences for meaning at work. We first document gender differences in preferences for meaning in a lar...

Intergenerational and Sibling Spillovers in High School Majors

By Gordon B. Dahl, Dan-Olof Rooth, and Anders Stenberg

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2024

This paper estimates family spillovers in high school major choice in Sweden, where admission to oversubscribed majors is determined based on GPA. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find large sibling and intergenerational spillovers that depend ...

Firm Donations and Political Rhetoric: Evidence from a National Ban

By Julia Cagé, Caroline Le Pennec, and Elisa Mougin

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2024

We study France's 1995 ban on firm donations to politicians. We use a difference-in-differences approach and a novel dataset combining the campaign manifestos issued by candidates running in French parliamentary elections with data on their campaign contr...

Tripping through Hoops: The Effect of Violating Compulsory Government Procedures

By Natalia Emanuel and Helen Ho

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2024

Millions of Americans must navigate complex government procedures under the threat of punishment. Violating these requirements can lead to poverty traps or deepening legal system involvement. We use a field experiment to estimate the effect of failing to ...

How Do Copayment Coupons Affect Branded Drug Prices and Quantities Purchased?

By Leemore Dafny, Kate Ho, and Edward Kong

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2024

We estimate the causal effects of drug copayment coupons, which reduce consumer cost sharing for branded prescription drugs, on net-of-rebate price and quantities sold. We show that coupon introductions increase the quantity of drugs without generic subst...

Indirect Savings from Public Procurement Centralization

By Clarissa Lotti, Arieda Muço, Giancarlo Spagnolo, and Tommaso Valletti

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2024

Centralization of public procurement can lower prices for the government's direct purchase of goods and services. This paper focuses on indirect savings. Public administrations that do not procure directly through a central procurement agency might benefi...