Simplified Distributional National Accounts

By Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

This paper develops a simplified methodology to distribute total national income across income groups that reproduces closely the sophisticated methodology of Piketty, Saez, and Zucman (2018). It starts from top income share series based on fiscal income ...

Unequal Distributions: EG DNA versus DINA Approach

By Jorrit Zwijnenburg

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

In the past years, projects have been initiated to develop distributional results in line with national accounts totals. Their results differ from those obtained from micro statistics, but also show differences across projects, due to different underlying...

An Economist's Perspective on the Bitcoin Payment System

By Gur Huberman, Jacob D. Leshno, and Ciamac Moallemi

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

The paper's introduction offers a high-level review of Bitcoin's features, especially its governance by protocol. The paper proceeds to summarize Bitcoin's analysis as a payment system. It pays particular attention to a comparison between Bitcoin and a fi...

Exploring Variation in College Counselor Effectiveness

By Andrew Barr and Ben Castleman

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Several recent studies have investigated the impact of college advising on whether students enter and succeed in postsecondary education. These papers generally find positive impacts from advising, yet few explore the extent of heterogeneity in impacts be...

A Cautionary Tale about Emergency Financial Assistance without Services: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial Evaluation at a Community College

By William N. Evans, Melissa S. Kearney, Brendan Perry, and James X. Sullivan

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Community college completion rates are extremely low, especially among low-income students. One potential explanation is that low-income students have limited capacity to overcome financial shocks, such as large medical, legal, or car repair bills. Some p...

How (Not) to Allocate Affordable Housing

By Nick Arnosti and Peng Shi

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We describe the wait-list procedure used in Providence and the lotteries used in New York City, and argue that despite their apparent differences, these systems should lead to similar outcomes. Neither approach effectively uses applicants' preferences to ...

The Right to Education Act: Trends in Enrollment, Test Scores, and School Quality

By Manisha Shah and Bryce Steinberg

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

The Right to Education (RTE) Act passed in 2009 guarantees access to free primary education to all children ages 6-14 in India. This paper investigates whether national trends in educational outcomes change around the time of this law using household surv...

Is Inflation Just Around the Corner? The Phillips Curve and Global Inflationary Pressures

By Olivier Coibion, Yuriy Gorodnichenko, and Mauricio Ulate

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Tightening labor markets in the United States and other advanced economies suggest inflation should be on the rise, yet it remains subdued. Is the Phillips curve broken? We bring together surveys of household or firm expectations for 18 countries to estim...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2019

Crises: Equilibrium Shifts and Large Shocks

By Stephen Morris and Muhamet Yildiz

American Economic Review, August 2019

We study the informational events that trigger equilibrium shifts in coordination games with incomplete information. Assuming that the distribution of the changes in fundamentals has fat tails, we show that majority play shifts either if fundamentals reac...

Who Is Screened Out? Application Costs and the Targeting of Disability Programs

By Manasi Deshpande and Yue Li

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2019

We study the effect of application costs on the targeting of disability programs. We identify these effects using the closings of Social Security Administration field offices, which provide assistance with filing disability applications. Closings lead to ...

Report of the Editor: Journal of Economic Perspectives

By Enrico Moretti

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Report of the Editor: American Economic Review

By Esther Duflo

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Enfranchising Your Own? Experimental Evidence on Bureaucrat Diversity and Election Bias in India

By Yusuf Neggers

American Economic Review, June 2018

This paper investigates the effects of polling station administrator diversity on elections in India, using a natural experiment: the random assignment of government officials to teams managing stations on election day, together with surveys conducted wit...

The Effect of Consumer Sentiment on Consumption: Cross-Sectional Evidence from Elections

By Christian Gillitzer and Nalini Prasad

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2018

We seek to identify the causal effect of sentiment innovations on consumption. Using unique Australian consumer sentiment survey data we show that, immediately after elections with a change of government, supporters of the winning party report substantial...

Place-Based Policies, Creation, and Agglomeration Economies: Evidence from China's Economic Zone Program

By Yi Lu, Jin Wang, and Lianming Zhu

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2019

Combining rich firm and administrative data, this paper examines the incidence and effectiveness of a prominent place-based policy in China: special economic zones. Establishing zones is found to have had a positive effect on capital investment, employmen...

Examining Medicaid Expansion and the Treatment of Substance Use Disorders

By Jevay Grooms and Alberto Ortega

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

As the drug epidemic continues to cripple communities and disrupt our country, identifying and understanding state and federal policies which have helped alleviate the burden of substance use disorders (SUDs) is imperative. In 2010, the passage of the Pat...

Front Matter

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Traditional Medicine in Central Africa

By Sara Lowes and Eduardo Montero

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

In many settings, traditional medicine is a popular, accessible, and affordable alternative to modern medicine. Understanding the determinants of the use of traditional medicine is important because it is widespread and because of the growing evidence of ...

Economic Institutions and Social Progress

By Daniel C. Fehder, Michael E. Porter, and Scott Stern

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Combining data from the social progress index and measures of economic institutions and performance, our analysis focuses on how changes in economic institutions and performance are related to subsequent changes in social progress (noneconomic dimensions ...