Loss in the Time of Cholera: Long-Run Impact of a Disease Epidemic on the Urban Landscape

By Attila Ambrus, Erica Field, and Robert Gonzalez

American Economic Review, February 2020

How do geographically concentrated income shocks influence the long-run spatial distribution of poverty within a city? We examine the impact on housing prices of a cholera epidemic in one neighborhood of nineteenth century London. Ten years after the epid...

A Single-Judge Solution to Beauty Contests

By Zhen Huo and Marcelo Pedroni

American Economic Review, February 2020

We show that the equilibrium policy rule in beauty contest models is equivalent to that of a single agent's forecast of the economic fundamental. This forecast is conditional on a modified information process, which simply discounts the precision of idios...

Online Privacy and Information Disclosure by Consumers

By Shota Ichihashi

American Economic Review, February 2020

I study the welfare and price implications of consumer privacy. A consumer discloses information to a multiproduct seller, which learns about his preferences, sets prices, and makes product recommendations. Although the consumer benefits from accurate rec...

Strategyproof Choice of Social Acts

By Eric Bahel and Yves Sprumont

American Economic Review, February 2020

We model uncertain social prospects as acts mapping states of nature to (social) outcomes. A social choice function (or SCF) assigns an act to each profile of subjective expected utility preferences over acts. An SCF is strategyproof if no agent ever ha...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2020

One Markup to Rule Them All: Taxation by Liquor Pricing Regulation

By Eugenio J. Miravete, Katja Seim, and Jeff Thurk

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2020

Commodity taxation often involves uniform tax rates. We use alcohol laws that tax differentiated spirits with a comprehensive uniform markup to evaluate redistribution generated by such simple tax policy. We document preference heterogeneity among consume...

Mutually Consistent Revealed Preference Demand Predictions

By Abi Adams

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2020

Revealed preference restrictions are increasingly used to predict demand behavior at new budgets of interest and as shape restrictions in nonparametric estimation exercises. However, the restrictions imposed are not sufficient for rationality when predict...

Within-Industry Specialization and Global Market Power

By Ahmad Lashkaripour

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2020

Export price levels exhibit tremendous cross-national and spatial variation, even within narrowly defined industries. Standard theories attribute this variation to within-industry quality specialization. This paper argues that a significant portion of the...

Promotion Signaling and Human Capital Investments

By Michael Waldman and Ori Zax

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2020

In a world characterized by asymmetric learning, promotions can serve as signals of worker ability, and this, in turn, can result in inefficient promotion decisions. If the labor market is competitive, the result will be practices that reduce this distort...

Fighting Bundles: The Effects of Competition on Second-Degree Price Discrimination

By Andre Boik and Hidenori Takahashi

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2020

We study how changes in market structure affect how firms engage in second-degree price discrimination. Specifically, we study how a large incumbent cable firm changes its menu of price-quality offerings and mixed bundles in response to entry. Competition...

Searching for Service

By Maarten C. W. Janssen and T. Tony Ke

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2020

Since Telser (1960), there is a well-established argument that a competitive market will not provide service due to freeriding. We show that with search frictions, the market may well provide service if the cost of doing so is not too large. Any market eq...

Credibility of Crime Allegations

By Frances Xu Lee and Wing Suen

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2020

The lack of hard evidence in allegations about sexual misconduct makes it difficult to separate true allegations from false ones. We provide a model in which victims and potential libelers face the same costs and benefits from making an allegation, but th...

Experimenting with Career Concerns

By Marina Halac and Ilan Kremer

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2020

A manager who learns privately about a project over time may want to delay quitting it if recognizing failure/lack of success hurts his reputation. In the banking industry, managers may want to roll over bad loans. How do distortions depend on expected pr...

Transition Economies: Performance and Challenges

[Symposium: Transition Economies]

By Jan Svejnar

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2002

I present data and assess the first twelve years of the transition from plan to market. Transformations have taken place, but the income gap between the transition and advanced economies has widened. Transition countries further east have performed worse ...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2020

Financial Education versus Costly Counseling: How to Dissuade Borrowers from Choosing Risky Mortgages?

By Sumit Agarwal, Gene Amromin, Itzhak Ben-David, Souphala Chomsisengphet, and Douglas D. Evanoff

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2020

This paper explores the effects of mandatory third-party review of mortgage contracts on consumer choice. The study is based on a legislative pilot carried out in Illinois in 2006, under which mortgage counseling was triggered by applicant credit scores o...

Advertising and Environmental Stewardship: Evidence from the BP Oil Spill

By Lint Barrage, Eric Chyn, and Justine Hastings

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2020

This paper explores whether private markets can incentivize environmental stewardship. We examine the consumer response to the 2010 BP oil spill and test how BP's investment in the 2000–2008 "Beyond Petroleum" green advertising campaign affected this re...

Teacher Value Added in a Low-Income Country

By Natalie Bau and Jishnu Das

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2020

Using data from Pakistan, we show that existing methods produce unbiased and reliable estimates of teacher value added (TVA) despite significant differences in context. Although effective teachers increase learning substantially, observed teacher characte...

A Passage to America: University Funding and International Students

By John Bound, Breno Braga, Gaurav Khanna, and Sarah Turner

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2020

The number of international undergraduate students at US public research universities increased dramatically over the past two decades, alongside concurrent reductions in state support for universities. We show that these trends are closely connected as p...

The Long-Run Impacts of Specialized Programming for High-Achieving Students

By Sarah R. Cohodes

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2020

I evaluate long-run academic impacts of specialized programming for high-achieving students by analyzing Advanced Work Class (AWC), an accelerated curriculum delivered in dedicated classrooms for fourth through sixth graders in Boston Public Schools. Fuzz...