Do Parents Value School Effectiveness?

By Atila Abdulkadiroğlu, Parag A. Pathak, Jonathan Schellenberg, and Christopher R. Walters

American Economic Review, May 2020

School choice may lead to improvements in school productivity if parents' choices reward effective schools and punish ineffective ones. This mechanism requires parents to choose schools based on causal effectiveness rather than peer characteristics. We st...

Oligopsony and Monopsonistic Competition in Labor Markets

By V. Bhaskar, Alan Manning, and Ted To

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2002

We argue that models of oligopsony or monopsonistic competition provide insights and explanation for many empirical phenomena in labor markets. Using a simple model with job differentiation and preference heterogeneity, we illustrate how such models can b...

Why Special Economic Zones? Using Trade Policy to Discriminate across Importers

By Matthew Grant

American Economic Review, May 2020

Tariffs are generally assumed to depend on the product, not the identity of the importer. However, special economic zones are a common, economically important policy used worldwide to lower tariffs on selected goods for selected manufacturers. I show this...

Building Nations through Shared Experiences: Evidence from African Football

By Emilio Depetris-Chauvin, Ruben Durante, and Filipe Campante

American Economic Review, May 2020

We examine whether shared collective experiences help build a national identity, by looking at the impact of national football teams' victories in sub-Saharan Africa. We find that individuals surveyed in the days after an important victory of their countr...

Deposit Insurance Around the Globe: Where Does It Work?

By Asli Demirgüç-Kunt and Edward J. Kane

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2002

Explicit deposit insurance has been spreading rapidly in recent years, even to countries with low levels of financial and institutional development. This paper documents the extent of cross-country differences in deposit insurance design and reviews empir...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2020

Tax Credits and Small Firm R&D Spending

By Ajay Agrawal, Carlos Rosell, and Timothy Simcoe

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2020

In 2004, Canada changed the eligibility rules for its Scientific Research and Experimental Development (SRED) tax credit, which provides tax incentives for R&D conducted by small private firms. Difference-in-difference estimates show a 17 percent increase...

An Equilibrium Theory of Retirement Plan Design

By Ryan Bubb and Patrick L. Warren

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2020

We develop an equilibrium theory of employer-sponsored retirement plan design using a behavioral contract theory approach. The operation of the labor market results in retirement plans that generally cater to, rather than correct, workers' mistakes. Our t...

Where Do Students Go When For-Profit Colleges Lose Federal Aid?

By Stephanie R. Cellini, Rajeev Darolia, and Lesley J. Turner

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2020

We examine the effects of federal sanctions imposed on for-profit institutions in the 1990s. Using county-level variation in the timing and magnitude of sanctions linked to student loan default rates, we estimate that sanctioned for-profits experience a 6...

Revisiting the Effects of Unemployment Insurance Extensions on Unemployment: A Measurement-Error-Corrected Regression Discontinuity Approach

By Steven Dieterle, Otávio Bartalotti, and Quentin Brummet

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2020

This study documents two potential biases in recent analyses of UI benefit extensions using boundary-based identification: bias from using county-level aggregates and bias from across-border policy spillovers. To examine the first bias, the analysis uses ...

Take Two! SAT Retaking and College Enrollment Gaps

By Joshua Goodman, Oded Gurantz, and Jonathan Smith

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2020

Only half of SAT-takers retake the exam, with even lower retake rates among low-income students and underrepresented minority (URM) students. We exploit discontinuous jumps in retake probabilities at multiples of 100, driven by left-digit bias, to estimat...

Unemployment Insurance and Means-Tested Program Interactions: Evidence from Administrative Data

By Pauline Leung and Christopher O'Leary

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2020

We study the ways in which unemployment insurance (UI) benefits interact with other elements of the social safety net around job losses. We exploit a cutoff for UI eligibility, based on a workers' highest quarterly earnings in the past year, to generate q...

Upstream and Downstream Impacts of College Merit-Based Financial Aid for Low-Income Students: Ser Pilo Paga in Colombia

By Juliana Londoño-Vélez, Catherine Rodríguez, and Fabio Sánchez

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2020

How does financial aid affect postsecondary enrollment, college choice, and student composition? We present new evidence based on a large-scale program available to high-achieving, low-income students for attending high-quality colleges in Colombia. RD es...

Does School Desegregation Promote Diverse Interactions? An Equilibrium Model of Segregation within Schools

By Angelo Mele

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2020

This paper studies racial segregation in schools using data on student friendships from Add Health. I estimate an equilibrium model of friendship formation, with preferences allowing both homophily and heterophily in direct and indirect ties. I find that ...

Rethinking Detroit

By Raymond Owens III, Esteban Rossi-Hansberg, and Pierre-Daniel Sarte

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2020

This paper studies the urban structure of Detroit—one that is clearly not optimal for its size—which features a business district immediately surrounded by largely vacant neighborhoods. A model is presented where residential externalities lead to mult...

Retrospectives: Captains of Industry

By Robert Dixon

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2002

This paper traces the origin and use of the term "captains of industry." Introduced by the Scottish historian and essayist Thomas Carlyle in the mid-nineteenth century, its meanings and associations were very different from today. For Carlyle, they were f...

Heat and Learning

By R. Jisung Park, Joshua Goodman, Michael Hurwitz, and Jonathan Smith

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2020

We demonstrate that heat inhibits learning and that school air conditioning may mitigate this effect. Student fixed effects models using 10 million students who retook the PSATs show that hotter school days in the years before the test was taken reduce sc...

Optimal Climate Policy When Damages Are Unknown

By Ivan Rudik

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2020

Integrated assessment models (IAMs) are economists' primary tool for analyzing the optimal carbon tax. Damage functions, which link temperature to economic impacts, have come under fire because of their assumptions that may be incorrect in significant but...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2020

Votes for Women: An Economic Perspective on Women's Enfranchisement

[Symposium: One Hundred Years of Women's Suffrage]

By Carolyn M. Moehling and Melissa A. Thomasson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2020

The ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 officially granted voting rights to women across the United States. However, many states extended full or partial suffrage to women before the federal amendment. In this paper, we discuss the history ...