The Violent Legacy of Conflict: Evidence on Asylum Seekers, Crime, and Public Policy in Switzerland

By Mathieu Couttenier, Veronica Petrencu, Dominic Rohner, and Mathias Thoenig

American Economic Review, December 2019

We study empirically how past exposure to conflict in origin countries makes migrants more violence-prone in their host country, focusing on asylum seekers in Switzerland. We exploit a novel and unique dataset on all crimes reported in Switzerland by the ...

Front Matter

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2019

Discriminating against Captive Customers

By Mark Armstrong and John Vickers

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2019

We analyze a market where some consumers only consider buying from a specific seller while other consumers choose the best deal from several sellers. When sellers are able to discriminate against their captive customers, we show that discrimination harms ...

Reported Effects versus Revealed-Preference Estimates: Evidence from the Propensity to Spend Tax Rebates

By Jonathan A. Parker and Nicholas S. Souleles

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2019

We evaluate the consistency of two methods for estimating the effect of an economic policy: (i) asking people how the policy caused them to change their behavior (reported effects) and (ii) inferring this change using data on behavior and differences in t...

Measuring Success in Education: The Role of Effort on the Test Itself

By Uri Gneezy, John A. List, Jeffrey A. Livingston, Xiangdong Qin, Sally Sadoff, and Yang Xu

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2019

US students often rank poorly on standardized tests that estimate and compare educational achievements. We investigate whether this might reflect not only differences in ability but also differences in effort on the test. We experimentally offer students ...

Maimonides' Rule Redux

By Joshua D. Angrist, Victor Lavy, Jetson Leder-Luis, and Adi Shany

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2019

We use Maimonides' rule as an instrument for class size in large Israeli samples from 2002–2011. In contrast with Angrist and Lavy (1999), newer estimates show no evidence of class size effects. The new data also reveal enrollment manipulation near Maim...

Aging, Output Per Capita, and Secular Stagnation

By Gauti B. Eggertsson, Manuel Lancastre, and Lawrence H. Summers

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2019

This paper re-examines the relationship between population aging and economic growth. We confirm previous research such as Cutler et al. (1990) and Acemoglu and Restrepo (2017) that show positive correlation between population aging and per capita output ...

A Bias of Screening

By David Lagziel and Ehud Lehrer

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2019

This paper deals with the issue of screening. It focuses on a decision maker who, based on noisy unbiased assessments, screens elements from a general set. Our analysis shows that stricter screening not only reduces the number of accepted elements, but po...

An Event Long-Short Index: Theory and Applications

By Raymond Fisman and Eric Zitzewitz

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2019

We propose a stock market-based measure to capture initial beliefs about an event's effect on firm profits, which may be used to measure whether initial expectations are subsequently realized. Our "Event Long-Short Index" is the difference in market-capit...

Clearing the Fog: The Predictive Power of Weather for Employment Reports and Their Asset Price Responses

By Daniel J. Wilson

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2019

This paper exploits vast granular data—with over one million county-month observations—to estimate a dynamic panel data model of weather's local employment effects. The fitted county model is then aggregated and used to generate in-sample and rolling ...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2019

Caste and the Indian Economy

By Kaivan Munshi

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2019

Caste plays a role at every stage of an Indian's economic life, in school, university, the labor market, and into old age. The influence of caste extends beyond private economic activity into the public sphere, where caste politics determine access to p...

The Identification Zoo: Meanings of Identification in Econometrics

By Arthur Lewbel

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2019

Over two dozen different terms for identification appear in the econometrics literature, including set identification, causal identification, local identification, generic identification, weak identification, identification at infinity, and many more. Thi...

Tax Compliance and Enforcement

By Joel Slemrod

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2019

This paper reviews recent economic research in tax compliance and enforcement. After briefly laying out the economics of tax evasion, it focuses on recent empirical contributions. It first discusses what methodologies and data have facilitated these con...

Review of Walter Scheidel's The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century

By William Easterly

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2019

The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-first Century's thesis is that violence and only violence significantly reduces inequality. It shows supportive cases of violence reducing inequality, es...

A Review Essay: David Kynaston's Till Time's Last Sand: A History of the Bank of England, 1694–2013

By Charles R. Bean

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2019

This essay reviews Till Time's Last Sand: A History of the Bank of England, 1694–2013, David Kynaston's history of the Bank of England (the Bank) from its foundation in 1694 to the present day. I focus on three themes running through his narrat...

Rationalizing Choice: A Review Essay on Peter Leeson's WTF?!: An Economic Tour of the Weird

By Rajiv Sethi

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2019

The methodology of economics has been applied with increasing frequency to nonmarket behavior and interactions. Peter Leeson's book WTF?!: An Economic Tour of the Weird illustrates both the promise and the perils of this practice. When applied ju...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2019

Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2019

JEL Classification System

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2019