Cheating and Incentives: Learning from a Policy Experiment

By César Martinelli, Susan W. Parker, Ana Cristina Pérez-Gea, and Rodimiro Rodrigo

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2018

We use a database generated by a policy intervention that incentivized learning as measured by standardized exams to investigate empirically the relationship between cheating by students and cash incentives to students and teachers. We adapt methods from ...

Optimal Trend Inflation

By Klaus Adam and Henning Weber

American Economic Review, February 2019

Sticky price models featuring heterogeneous firms and systematic firm-level productivity trends deliver radically different predictions for the optimal inflation rate than their popular homogenous-firm counterparts: (i) the optimal steady-state inflation ...

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American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2019

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...

Trucks without Bailouts: Equilibrium Product Characteristics for Commercial Vehicles

By Thomas G. Wollmann

American Economic Review, June 2018

The entry and exit of products, rather than firms, serve as the main equilibrating force in many markets, so accurately predicting changes from a merger or bankruptcy should incorporate this behavior. This paper estimates a structural model of the US comm...

Monetary Policy According to HANK

By Greg Kaplan, Benjamin Moll, and Giovanni L. Violante

American Economic Review, March 2018

We revisit the transmission mechanism from monetary policy to household consumption in a Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian (HANK) model. The model yields empirically realistic distributions of wealth and marginal propensities to consume because of two fea...

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American Economic Review, January 2019

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American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2019

Barriers to Reallocation and Economic Growth: The Effects of Firing Costs

By Toshihiko Mukoyama and Sophie Osotimehin

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2019

We study how factors that hinder the reallocation of inputs across firms influence aggregate productivity growth. We extend Hopenhayn and Rogerson's (1993) firm-dynamics model to allow for endogenous innovation. We evaluate the effects of firing taxes on ...

Aggregate Recruiting Intensity

By Alessandro Gavazza, Simon Mongey, and Giovanni L. Violante

American Economic Review, August 2018

We develop an equilibrium model of firm dynamics with random search in the labor market where hiring firms exert recruiting effort by spending resources to fill vacancies faster. Consistent with microevidence, fast-growing firms invest more in recruiting ...

Estimating the Production Function for Human Capital: Results from a Randomized Controlled Trial in Colombia

By Orazio Attanasio, Sarah Cattan, Emla Fitzsimons, Costas Meghir, and Marta Rubio-Codina

American Economic Review, January 2020

We examine the channels through which a randomized early childhood intervention in Colombia led to significant gains in cognitive and socio-emotional skills among a sample of disadvantaged children aged 12 to 24 months at baseline. We estimate the determi...

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...

Discounting Disentangled

By Moritz A. Drupp, Mark C. Freeman, Ben Groom, and Frikk Nesje

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2018

The economic values of investing in long-term public projects are highly sensitive to the social discount rate (SDR). We surveyed over 200 experts to disentangle disagreement on the risk-free SDR into its component parts, including pure time preference, t...

A Model of Endogenous Loan Quality and the Collapse of the Shadow Banking System

By Francesco Ferrante

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2018

I develop a macroeconomic model in which banks can affect loan quality by exerting costly screening effort. Informational frictions limit the amount of external funds that banks can raise. In this framework I consider two types of financial intermediation...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2018

Front Matter

American Economic Review, November 2018

Fiscal Centralization: Theory and Evidence from the Great Depression

By Daniele Coen-Pirani and Michael Wooley

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2018

The Great Depression produced a profound and lasting influence on the structure of US government. This paper studies theoretically and empirically the increased centralization of revenues and expenditures by the states relative to local governments during...

Corrigendum: Review of Oxford Handbook of Professional Economic Ethics by George F. Demartino and Diedre N. McCloskey, Reviewed by Anne Krueger

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2018

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American Economic Review, July 2018

Medium- and Long-Term Educational Consequences of Alternative Conditional Cash Transfer Designs: Experimental Evidence from Colombia

By Felipe Barrera-Osorio, Leigh L. Linden, and Juan E. Saavedra

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2019

In 2005 the city of Bogota, Colombia, introduced three conditional cash transfer programs for secondary schooling, randomly assigning socioeconomically disadvantaged students to different payment structures. We show, through administrative data, that forc...