The Labor Market Impacts of Reducing Felony Convictions

By Amanda Agan, Andrew Garin, Dmitri Koustas, Alexandre Mas, and Crystal S. Yang

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2024

We study the labor market impacts of retroactively reducing felonies to misdemeanors in San Joaquin County, California, where criminal justice agencies implemented Proposition 47 reductions in a quasi-random order, without requiring input or action from a...

Central Bank Credibility and Fiscal Responsibility

By Jesse Schreger, Pierre Yared, and Emilio Zaratiegui

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2024

We consider a New Keynesian model with strategic monetary and fiscal interactions. The fiscal authority maximizes social welfare. Monetary policy is delegated to a central bank with an anti-inflation bias that suffers from a lack of commitment. The impact...

The Socioeconomic Distribution of Choice Quality: Evidence from Health Insurance in the Netherlands

By Benjamin Handel, Jonathan Kolstad, Thomas Minten, and Johannes Spinnewijn

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2024

We study how choice quality relates to socioeconomic factors, using population-wide data on health insurance choices and utilization in the Netherlands. We document a striking choice quality gradient with respect to socioeconomic status, finding that thos...

Regulating Transformative Technologies

By Daron Acemoglu and Todd Lensman

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2024

Transformative technologies like generative AI promise to accelerate productivity growth across many sectors, but they also present new risks from potential misuse. We develop a multisector technology adoption model to study the optimal regulation of tran...

Dynamic Spending Responses to Wealth Shocks: Evidence from Quasi Lotteries on the Stock Market

By Asger Lau Andersen, Niels Johannesen, and Adam Sheridan

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2024

How much and over what horizon do households adjust their consumption in response to stock market wealth shocks? We address these questions using granular data on spending and stock portfolios from a large bank and exploiting lottery-like variation in gai...

Repression and Repertoires

By Stephen Morris and Mehdi Shadmehr

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2024

We formalize Tilly's concept of repertoires of collective action and analyze how state repression affects the variety of observed contentious actions. When repression accelerates with higher levels of antiregime actions (convex repression structure), oppo...

Front Matter

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2024

Call for Nominations: Editorial Team for Eastern Economic Journal

[News]

September 03, 2024

Nominations are being accepted until October 31, 2024.

Keeping young drivers safe

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Targeted nighttime restrictions on teen drivers in Australia

Research Highlights

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AEA Research Highlights feature selected articles published in the AEA journals.

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2024

Central Bank Communication with the General Public: Promise or False Hope?

By Alan S. Blinder, Michael Ehrmann, Jakob de Haan, and David-Jan Jansen

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2024

Central banks are increasingly reaching out to the general public to motivate and explain their monetary policy actions. One major aim of this outreach is to ensure accountability and create trust; another is to guide inflation expectations. This article ...

Data and the Aggregate Economy

By Laura Veldkamp and Cindy Chung

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2024

Recent data technology innovations, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, have transformed the production of knowledge and increased the importance of data. This review explores how data—digitized information—has been modeled within cl...

Meta-analysis of Empirical Estimates of Loss Aversion

By Alexander L. Brown, Taisuke Imai, Ferdinand M. Vieider, and Colin F. Camerer

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2024

Loss aversion is one of the most widely used concepts in behavioral economics. We conduct a large-scale, interdisciplinary meta-analysis to systematically accumulate knowledge from numerous empirical estimates of the loss aversion coefficient reported fro...

Combinatorial Auctions in Practice

By Ignacio Palacios-Huerta, David C. Parkes, and Richard Steinberg

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2024

We survey the uses of combinatorial auctions that have been deployed in practice, giving emphasis to their key representational and economic aspects. In addition, we discuss behavioral economics considerations on both the bidder and auctioneer sides of th...

Nonparametric Approaches to Empirical Welfare Analysis

By Debopam Bhattacharya

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2024

Welfare analysis of policy interventions is ubiquitous in economic research. It plays an important role in merger analysis and antitrust litigation, design of tax and subsidies, and informs the current debate on a universal basic income. This paper prov...

The Political Economics of Non-democracy

By Georgy Egorov and Konstantin Sonin

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2024

We survey recent theoretical and empirical literature on political economics of non-democracies. Nondemocratic regimes face multiple challenges to their rule, both internal, such as palace coups or breakdown of their support coalition, and external, such ...

Optimal Income Taxation

By Louis Kaplow

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2024

This article explores subjects in optimal income taxation characterized by recent research interest, practical importance in light of concerns about inequality, potential for misunderstanding, and prospects for advancement. Throughout the analysis, path...

Debunking Immigration Myths: A Review Essay of Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success

By Marco Tabellini

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2024

This essay reviews Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success by Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan. This elegantly written book, which is a must-read for anyone interested in the topic of immigration, walks the reader through a hi...

Racial Disparities in the Criminal Legal System: Shadows of Doubt and Beyond

By Amanda Y. Agan

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2024

Racial disparities permeate every single stage of the criminal legal process. In Shadows of Doubt: Stereotypes, Crime, and the Pursuit of Justice, Brendan O'Flaherty and Rajiv Sethi shed light on the stereotype-driven biases that contribute to th...