Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2019

Text as Data

By Matthew Gentzkow, Bryan Kelly, and Matt Taddy

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2019

An ever-increasing share of human interaction, communication, and culture is recorded as digital text. We provide an introduction to the use of text as an input to economic research. We discuss the features that make text different from other forms of dat...

What Can Be Learned from Spatial Economics?

By Stef Proost and Jacques-François Thisse

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2019

Spatial economics aims to explain why there are peaks and troughs in the spatial distribution of wealth and people, from the international and regional to the urban and local. The main task is to identify the microeconomic underpinnings of centripetal for...

A Review on Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy by Philippe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght

By Caterina Calsamiglia and Sabine Flamand

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2019

In order to clarify the potential impact of a basic income, we argue that any discussion on whether to adopt a basic income policy should be framed within the greater context of the transfer system as a whole. In particular, such discussion should conside...

Measuring Progress: A Review Essay on The Pricing of Progress: Economic Indicators and the Capitalization of American Life by Eli Cook

By Diane Coyle

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2019

There is growing interest in the history of economic statistics, and Eli Cook has provided in The Pricing of Progress: Economic Indicators and the Capitalization of American Life a fascinating account of the era of economic measurement prior to...

Society and Economy: Frameworks and Principles: A Book Review

By Sanjeev Goyal

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2019

Mark Granovetter has written a deep and wide-ranging book on economy and society entitled Society and Economy: Frameworks and Principles. Economists, in particular, will find his discussion on the role of social networks in understanding the pr...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2019

Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2019

JEL Classification System

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2019

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2019

Trade and Income—Exploiting Time Series in Geography

By James Feyrer

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2019

Establishing a robust causal relationship between trade and income has been difficult. Frankel and Romer (1999) uses a geographic instrument to identify a positive effect of trade on income. Rodriguez and Rodrik (2001) shows that these results are not r...

There Is No Free House: Ethnic Patronage in a Kenyan Slum

By Benjamin Marx, Thomas M. Stoker, and Tavneet Suri

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2019

Using unique data from one of Africa's largest informal settlements, the Kibera slum in Nairobi, we provide evidence of ethnic patronage in the determination of rental prices and investments. Slum residents pay higher rents and live in lower quality housi...

Regulating Markups in US Health Insurance

By Steve Cicala, Ethan M. J. Lieber, and Victoria Marone

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2019

A health insurer's Medical Loss Ratio (MLR) is the share of premiums spent on medical claims, or the inverse markup over average claims cost. The Affordable Care Act introduced minimum MLR provisions for all health insurance sold in fully insured commerci...

The Local Economic and Welfare Consequences of Hydraulic Fracturing

By Alexander W. Bartik, Janet Currie, Michael Greenstone, and Christopher R. Knittel

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2019

Exploiting geological variation and timing in the initiation of hydraulic fracturing, we find that fracking leads to sharp increases in oil and gas recovery and improvements in a wide set of economic indicators. There is also evidence of deterioration in ...

Peer Effects in Legislative Voting

By Nikolaj Harmon, Raymond Fisman, and Emir Kamenica

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2019

We exploit seating rules in the European Parliament to identify peer effects in legislative voting. Sitting adjacently leads to a 7 percent reduction in the overall likelihood that two members of the European Parliament (MEPs) from the same party differ i...

Children and Gender Inequality: Evidence from Denmark

By Henrik Kleven, Camille Landais, and Jakob Egholt Søgaard

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2019

Using Danish administrative data, we study the impacts of children on gender inequality in the labor market. The arrival of children creates a long-run gender gap in earnings of around 20 percent driven by hours worked, participation, and wage rates. We i...

Allocating Scarce Organs: How a Change in Supply Affects Transplant Waiting Lists and Transplant Recipients

By Stacy Dickert-Conlin, Todd Elder, and Keith Teltser

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2019

Vast organ shortages motivated recent efforts to increase the supply of transplantable organs, but we know little about the demand side of the market. We test the implications of a model of organ demand using the universe of US transplant data from 1987 t...

Leader Selection and Service Delivery in Community Groups: Experimental Evidence from Uganda

By Erika Deserranno, Miri Stryjan, and Munshi Sulaiman

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2019

In developing countries, NGOs and governments often rely on local groups for the delivery of financial and public services. This paper studies how the design of rules used for group leader selection affects leader identity and shapes service delivery. To ...

Minimum Wages and the Distribution of Family Incomes

By Arindrajit Dube

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2019

There is robust evidence that higher minimum wages increase family incomes at the bottom of the distribution. The long-run (3 or more years) minimum wage elasticity of the non-elderly poverty rate with respect to the minimum wage ranges between −0.220 a...

Does Cheap Talk Affect Market Outcomes? Evidence from eBay

By Daniel W. Elfenbein, Raymond Fisman, and Brian McManus

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2019

We study cheap talk by firms and responses by their consumers, focusing on unverifiable promises of charitable donations on eBay during 2005–2006. Cheap talk listings have lower sales probabilities but sell at higher prices when successful. The negative...