Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2024

When Dad Can Stay Home: Fathers' Workplace Flexibility and Maternal Health

By Petra Persson and Maya Rossin-Slater

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2024

We study how fathers' access to workplace flexibility affects maternal postpartum health. We use variation from a Swedish reform that granted new fathers more flexibility to take intermittent parental leave during the postpartum period and show that incre...

Optimal Sin Taxation and Market Power

By Martin O'Connell and Kate Smith

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2024

We study how market power impacts the efficiency and redistributive properties of sin taxation, with an empirical application to sugar-sweetened beverage taxation. We estimate an equilibrium model of the UK drinks market, which we embed in a tax design fr...

Schoolgirls, Not Brides: Education as a Shield against Child Marriage

By Hélène Giacobino, Elise Huillery, Bastien Michel, and Mathilde Sage

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2024

We study the impact of a scholarship-based intervention aimed to reduce child marriage by fostering secondary education among adolescent girls in Niger. Using a large-scale randomized controlled trial, we find that after three years of implementation, the...

Preferences, Access, and the STEM Gender Gap in Centralized High School Assignment

By Diana Ngo and Andrew Dustan

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2024

The gender gap in STEM widens during high school due both to differences in student choices and institutional barriers to accessing STEM education. Using rich data from Mexico City's centralized assignment system and a structural model of high school choi...

Experience-Based Discrimination

By Louis-Pierre Lepage

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2024

I study discrimination arising from individual experiences of employers with worker groups. I present a model in which employers are uncertain about the productivity of one of two groups and learn through hiring. Positive experiences lead to positive bias...

Distortion by Audit: Evidence from Public Procurement

By Maria Paula Gerardino, Stephan Litschig, and Dina Pomeranz

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2024

Public sector audits are key to state capacity. However, they can create unintended distortions. Regression discontinuity analysis from Chile shows that audits lowered the use of auctions for public procurement, reduced supplier competition, and increased...

Noise, Cognitive Function, and Worker Productivity

By Joshua T. Dean

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2024

Noisy workplaces common in low- and middle-income countries can impair workers' cognitive functions. However, whether this lowers earnings depends on the importance of these functions for productivity and whether workers understand these effects. I study ...

Customer Capital Spillovers: Evidence from Sales Managers in International Markets

By Bérengère Patault and Clémence Lenoir

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2024

Expanding their customer base is crucial for firms to grow. This paper leverages sales managers' job-to-job transitions to better understand how buyer-seller relationships form. Combining unique French firm-to-firm trade data with matched employer-employe...

Expected Returns to Crime and Crime Location

By Nils Braakmann, Arnaud Chevalier, and Tanya Wilson

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2024

We provide first evidence that variations in the expected returns to crime affect the location of property crime. Our identification strategy relies on the widely held perception in the United Kingdom that South Asian households store gold jewelry at home...

Independent Media, Propaganda, and Religiosity: Evidence from Poland

By Irena Grosfeld, Etienne Madinier, Seyhun Orcan Sakalli, and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2024

Exploring a drastic change in media landscape in Poland, we show that mainstream media can significantly affect religious participation. After nationalist populist party PiS came to power in 2015, news on state and private independent TV diverged due to p...

The Dynamic Response of Municipal Budgets to Revenue Shocks

By Ines Helm and Jan Stuhler

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2024

We study the fiscal and tax response to intergovernmental grants, exploiting quasi-experimental variation within Germany's fiscal equalization scheme triggered by census revisions of population counts. Municipal budgets do not adjust instantly. Instead, s...

Family Formation and Crime

By Maxim Massenkoff and Evan K. Rose

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2024

We perform a large-scale analysis of the impact of family formation on crime. For mothers, criminal arrests drop precipitously in the first few months of pregnancy, decreasing 50 percent overall. Men show a sustained 20 percent decline in crime that begin...

The Paradox of Innovation Nondisclosure: Evidence from Licensing Contracts

By Gaurav Kankanhalli, Alan Kwan, and Kenneth Merkley

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2024

Innovative firms must trade off disclosing to investors and maintaining secrecy from competitors. We study this trade-off in a sample of IP licenses mandatorily disclosed by US public firms, whose contents can be temporarily redacted. Hand classifying the...

Unintended Consequences of Welfare Cuts on Children and Adolescents

By Christian Dustmann, Rasmus Landersø, and Lars Højsgaard Andersen

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2024

This paper studies the effects of a large welfare benefit reduction on the children in the affected families. The welfare cut targeted adult refugees who received residency in Denmark, and it reduced their disposable income by 30 percent on average over t...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, October 2024

Public Discourse and Socially Responsible Market Behavior

By Björn Bartling, Vanessa Valero, Roberto A. Weber, and Lan Yao

American Economic Review, October 2024

We investigate the causal impact of public discourse on socially responsible market behavior. Across three laboratory experiments, having market participants engage in public discourse generally increases market social responsibility. These positive impac...

Optimally Imprecise Memory and Biased Forecasts

By Rava Azeredo da Silveira, Yeji Sung, and Michael Woodford

American Economic Review, October 2024

We propose a model of optimal decision-making subject to a memory constraint in the spirit of models of rational inattention. Our theory differs from that of Sims (2003) in not assuming costless memory of past cognitive states. The model implies that both...

Monitoring in Small Firms: Experimental Evidence from Kenyan Public Transit

By Erin M. Kelley, Gregory Lane, and David Schönholzer

American Economic Review, October 2024

Small firms struggle to grow beyond a few employees. We introduce monitoring devices into commuter minibuses in Kenya and randomize which minibus owners have access to the data using a novel mobile app. We find that treated vehicle owners modify the terms...

Efficiency and Equity Impacts of Urban Transportation Policies with Equilibrium Sorting

By Panle Jia Barwick, Shanjun Li, Andrew Waxman, Jing Wu, and Tianli Xia

American Economic Review, October 2024

We estimate an equilibrium sorting model of housing location and commuting mode choice with endogenous traffic congestion to evaluate urban transportation policies. Leveraging fine-scale data from travel diaries and housing transactions identifying reside...