Life-Cycle Consumption Patterns at Older Ages in the United States and the United Kingdom: Can Medical Expenditures Explain the Difference?

By James Banks, Richard Blundell, Peter Levell, and James P. Smith

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2019

This paper documents significantly steeper declines in nondurable expenditures at older ages in the United Kingdom compared to the United States, in spite of income paths being similar. Several possible causes are explored, including different employment ...

Casting a Wider Tax Net: Experimental Evidence from Costa Rica

By Anne Brockmeyer, Spencer Smith, Marco Hernandez, and Stewart Kettle

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2019

The majority of firms in developing countries are informal, yet even among registered firms, tax filing rates are low. We argue that non-filing of taxes among registered firms constitutes an important intermediate form of informality, which can be tackled...

Estimating the Value of Public Insurance Using Complementary Private Insurance

By Marika Cabral and Mark R. Cullen

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2019

The welfare associated with public insurance is often difficult to quantify because the demand for coverage is unobserved and thus cannot be used to analyze welfare. However, in many settings, individuals can purchase private insurance to supplement publi...

Liquidity Constraints of the Middle Class

By Jeffrey R. Campbell and Zvi Hercowitz

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2019

Existing evidence from US middle class households shows that their MPCs out of tax rebates greatly exceed the PIH's prediction and are weakly related to their liquid assets. The standard precautionary-saving model predicts the first fact but counterfactua...

Provider Supply, Utilization, and Infant Health: Evidence from a Physician Distribution Policy

By Bladimir Carrillo and Jose Feres

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2019

We analyze a policy that substantially expanded the supply of primary care physicians in Brazil. The program increased doctor visits across all age groups and led to greater utilization of doctors for prenatal care. However, these physicians replaced nurs...

Defensive Medicine: Evidence from Military Immunity

By Michael Frakes and Jonathan Gruber

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2019

We estimate the extent of defensive medicine by physicians, embracing the no-liability counterfactual made possible by the structure of liability rules in the Military Health System. Active-duty patients seeking treatment from military facilities cannot s...

Voter Response to Peak and End Transfers: Evidence from a Conditional Cash Transfer Experiment

By Sebastian Galiani, Nadya Hajj, Patrick J. McEwan, Pablo Ibarrarán, and Nandita Krishnaswamy

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2019

In a Honduran field experiment, sequences of cash transfers to poor households varied in amount of the largest (peak) and last (end) transfers. Larger peak-end transfers increased voter turnout and the incumbent party's vote share in the 2013 presidential...

How Do Tax Incentives Affect Investment and Productivity? Firm-Level Evidence from China

By Yongzheng Liu and Jie Mao

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2019

China initiated a major reform for capital taxation in 2004. Completed in 2009, it introduced permanent tax incentives for firms' investment in fixed assets. We explore a unique firm-level dataset from years 2005–2012 and utilize a quasi-experimental de...

The Long-Run Effects of Teacher Collective Bargaining

By Michael F. Lovenheim and Alexander Willén

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2019

We analyze how exposure to teacher collective bargaining affects long-run outcomes for students, exploiting the timing of state duty-to-bargain law passage in a cross-cohort difference-in-difference framework. Among men, exposure to a duty-to-bargain law ...

Place-Based Policies, Creation, and Agglomeration Economies: Evidence from China's Economic Zone Program

By Yi Lu, Jin Wang, and Lianming Zhu

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2019

Combining rich firm and administrative data, this paper examines the incidence and effectiveness of a prominent place-based policy in China: special economic zones. Establishing zones is found to have had a positive effect on capital investment, employmen...

The Impact of Investment Incentives: Evidence from UK Corporation Tax Returns

By Giorgia Maffini, Jing Xing, and Michael P. Devereux

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2019

Using UK corporation tax returns, we provide evidence on the effects of accelerated depreciation allowances on investment, exploiting exogenous changes in the qualifying thresholds for first-year depreciation allowances (FYAs) in 2004. The investment rate...

Reducing Medical Spending of the Publicly Insured: The Case for a Cash-out Option

By Svetlana Pashchenko and Ponpoje Porapakkarm

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2019

Individuals' medical spending has both necessary and discretionary components, which are not, however, separately observable. This paper studies ways to improve upon existing public health insurance policies by using a framework where both the discretiona...

Do Kidney Exchanges Improve Patient Outcomes?

By Keith F. Teltser

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2019

In this paper, I estimate the number of additional transplants generated by kidney exchanges. To do this, I analyze substitution patterns between exchange transplants and other transplant outcomes. Exploiting variation in patients' exposure to exchange ac...

Corrigendum: Particulate Pollution and the Productivity of Pear Packers

By Tom Chang, Joshua S. Graff Zivin, Tal Gross, and Matthew J. Neidell

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2019

Front Matter

American Economic Review, August 2019

Who Pays for the Minimum Wage?

By Peter Harasztosi and Attila Lindner

American Economic Review, August 2019

This paper provides a comprehensive assessment of the margins along which firms responded to a large and persistent minimum wage increase in Hungary. We show that employment elasticities are negative but small even four years after the reform; that around...

Parents' Beliefs about Their Children's Academic Ability: Implications for Educational Investments

By Rebecca Dizon-Ross

American Economic Review, August 2019

Schools worldwide distribute information to parents about their children's academic performance. Do frictions prevent parents, particularly low-income parents, from accessing this information to make decisions? A field experiment in Malawi shows that, at ...

Identification of and Correction for Publication Bias

By Isaiah Andrews and Maximilian Kasy

American Economic Review, August 2019

Some empirical results are more likely to be published than others. Selective publication leads to biased estimates and distorted inference. We propose two approaches for identifying the conditional probability of publication as a function of a study's re...

Missing Growth from Creative Destruction

By Philippe Aghion, Antonin Bergeaud, Timo Boppart, Peter J. Klenow, and Huiyu Li

American Economic Review, August 2019

For exiting products, statistical agencies often impute inflation from surviving products. This understates growth if creatively-destroyed products improve more than surviving ones. If so, then the market share of surviving products should systematically ...

Crises: Equilibrium Shifts and Large Shocks

By Stephen Morris and Muhamet Yildiz

American Economic Review, August 2019

We study the informational events that trigger equilibrium shifts in coordination games with incomplete information. Assuming that the distribution of the changes in fundamentals has fat tails, we show that majority play shifts either if fundamentals reac...