Using Online Prices for Measuring Real Consumption across Countries

By Alberto Cavallo, W. Erwin Diewert, Robert C. Feenstra, Robert Inklaar, and Marcel P. Timmer

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

We show that online prices can be used to construct quarterly purchasing power parities (PPPs) with a closely matched set of goods and identical methodologies in a variety of developed and developing countries. Our results are close to those reported by t...

Can Information Change Personal Retirement Savings? Evidence from Social Security Benefits Statement Mailings

By Susan Payne Carter and William Skimmyhorn

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Despite concern about the viability of public retirement programs and potential undersaving for retirement, we still know little about the impact of government provided information on individual behavior. We exploit plausibly exogenous variation in exposu...

From "Traditional" to Research-Based Instructional Strategies: An Assessment of Learning Gains

By Sarah B. Cosgrove and Neal H. Olitsky

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

The cognitive science literature provides several research based instructional strategies (RBIS) proven to be effective in student learning. Given the prevalence of lecture-based classes and instructor-led discussions, understanding the effects of switchi...

Reach for Yield and Fickle Capital Flows

By Ricardo J. Caballero and Alp Simsek

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

In Caballero and Simsek (2017), we develop a model of fickle capital flows and show that, when countries are similar, international flows create global liquidity and mitigate crises despite their fickleness. In this paper, we focus on the asymmetric situa...

Is Altruism Sensitive to Scope? The Role of Tangibility

By Alex Imas and George Loewenstein

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Prior work has shown that people appear insensitive to the scope of their altruistic acts and prosocial behavior. While they respond positively when their choices lead to increasing rewards for themselves, people do not change their behavior when the outc...

Welfarism's Envy Problem Extends to Popular Judgments

By Matthew Weinzierl

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Economists use a welfarist approach to policy evaluation, but doing so can lead to recommendations that violate seemingly wise non-welfarist principles. I explore one example: the proper tax policy response to envy. Using a novel survey, I find that a maj...

Foreign Safe Asset Demand for US Treasurys and the Dollar

By Zhengyang Jiang, Arvind Krishnamurthy, and Hanno Lustig

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

We present theory showing that the spot dollar exchange rate reflects the value of all future convenience yields that foreign investors assign to US Treasuries. The convenience yield also creates wedge, the Treasury-based dollar basis, between the yield o...

Low-Cost Randomized Controlled Trials in Education

By Nathan Wozny, Cary Balser, and Drew Ives

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are widely accepted as the gold standard in program evaluation but are uncommon in educational research. A likely explanation is that experiments designed with sufficient statistical precision to detect meaningful impac...

China's Rate-Based Approach to Reducing CO₂ Emissions: Attractions, Limitations, and Alternatives

By Lawrence H. Goulder and Richard D. Morgenstern

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

A distinguishing feature of China's recently launched emissions trading system (ETS) is its rate-based structure. This structure governs the way emissions allowances are allocated and the conditions for compliance, and it has important implications for sy...

China's New National Carbon Market

By William A. Pizer and Xiliang Zhang

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

On December 19, 2017, China announced the official start of its national emissions trading system (ETS) construction program. When fully implemented, this program will more than double the volume of worldwide carbon dioxide emissions covered by either tax...

Split Families and the Future of Children: Immigration Enforcement and Foster Care Placements

By Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes and Esther Arenas-Arroyo

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Tougher immigration enforcement has been responsible for approximately 1.8 million deportations between 2009 and 2013 alone. Children enter the foster care system when their parents are apprehended, deported, and unable to care for them. We find that the ...

Estimating Economic Characteristics with Phone Data

By Joshua E. Blumenstock

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Historically, economists have relied heavily on survey-based data collection to measure social and economic well-being. Here, we investigate the extent to which the "digital footprints" of an individual can be used to infer his or her socioeconomic charac...

In Debt and Approaching Retirement: Claim Social Security or Work Longer?

By Barbara A. Butrica and Nadia S. Karamcheva

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Over the past couple of decades, older Americans have become considerably more leveraged. This paper considers whether household debt affects the timing of retirement and Social Security benefit claiming. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study, w...

Racial and Ethnic Sentencing Differentials in the Federal Criminal Justice System

By Brendon McConnell and Imran Rasul

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

A large body of multidisciplinary research has documented how sentencing outcomes vary tremendously across racial and ethnic groups. The research challenge lies in establishing whether these sentencing differentials are driven by unobserved heterogeneity ...

The Effect of the Disability Insurance Application Decision on the Employment of Denied Applicants

By Mashfiqur R. Khan

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) affects the labor supply of applicants through its work discouragement and through human capital deterioration regardless of the ultimate acceptance or denial of the claim. In this paper, I provide an estimate o...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2014

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...

Report: Job Openings for Economists

By John J. Siegfried

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Report: Committee on the Status of Minority Groups in the Economics Profession (CSMGEP)

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

A Mechanism for Eliciting Second-Order Beliefs and the Inclination to Choose

By Edi Karni

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2018

This paper describes a direct revelation mechanism for eliciting decision makers' introspective beliefs on sets of subjective prior or posterior probabilities. The proposed scheme constitutes a revealed-preference procedure for measuring the inclination o...