A Macroeconomic Approach to Optimal Unemployment Insurance: Theory

By Camille Landais, Pascal Michaillat, and Emmanuel Saez

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2018

This paper develops a theory of optimal unemployment insurance (UI) in matching models. The optimal UI replacement rate is the conventional Baily-Chetty replacement rate, which solves the tradeoff between insurance and job-search incentives, plus a correc...

The Effects of Tax Changes at the Zero Lower Bound: Evidence from Japan

By Akihisa Kato, Wataru Miyamoto, Thuy Lan Nguyen, and Dmitriy Sergeyev

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

We use the narrative approach to identify tax changes unrelated to current economic conditions and estimate the effects of these changes on macroeconomic variables during and outside of the zero lower bound period in Japan. We find little difference in th...

The Welfare Consequences of Income-Induced Expenditure Switching

By Rudolfs Bems and Julian Di Giovanni

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Bems and di Giovanni (2016) establish that income-induced expenditure switching (IIES) from foreign goods to cheaper domestic substitutes played a significant role in external rebalancing during the 2008–2009 financial crisis in Latvia. In this paper, w...

Last Place? The Intersection of Ethnicity, Gender, and Race in Biomedical Authorship

By Gerald Marschke, Allison Nunez, Bruce A. Weinberg, and Huifeng Yu

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Applying big data methods to biomedical science articles, we show that women and underrepresented racial and ethnic groups are less likely to be last authors, an indicator of career independence. We leverage the massive size of our data to highlight the i...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2018

Front Matter

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Private Paternalism, the Commitment Puzzle, and Model-Free Equilibrium

By David Laibson

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Paternalism is a policy that advances an individual's interests by restricting his or her freedom. In a setting with present-biased agents, I characterize the scope of private paternalism—paternalism implemented by private institutions. Private patern...

Economic Expectations, Voting, and Economic Decisions around Elections

By Gur Huberman, Tobias Konitzer, Masha Krupenkin, David Rothschild, and Shawndra Hill

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Survey respondents who associate themselves with the "winning team" in an election, substantially increase their expectations for their stock market, but only modestly increase their expected household economic well-being. The impact of the election outco...

Child Penalties across Countries: Evidence and Explanations

By Henrik Kleven, Camille Landais, Johanna Posch, Andreas Steinhauer, and Josef Zweimüller

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

This paper provides evidence on child penalties in female and male earnings in different countries. The estimates are based on event studies around the birth of the first child, using the specification proposed by Kleven et al. (2018). The analysis reveal...

The Empirics of Social Progress: The Interplay between Subjective Well-Being and Societal Performance

By Daniel Fehder, Michael Porter, and Scott Stern

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Though economists have long recognized that GDP is not by itself a measure of societal well-being, most GDP alternatives incorporate direct measures of economic performance. We propose instead an independently constructed measure, a social progress index,...

A Foundation for Efficiency Wage Contracts

By John Y. Zhu

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2018

In many jobs, the worker generates only subjective performance measures privately observed by the employer, and contracts must rely on employer reports about these measures. This setting is a game with private monitoring, and prior work suggests that the ...

Sophisticated Bidders in Beauty-Contest Auctions

By Stefano Galavotti, Luigi Moretti, and Paola Valbonesi

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2018

We study bidding behavior by firms in beauty-contest auctions, i.e., auctions in which the winning bid is the one which gets closest to some function (average) of all submitted bids. Using a dataset on public procurement beauty-contest auctions, we show t...

School Finance Reform and the Distribution of Student Achievement

By Julien Lafortune, Jesse Rothstein, and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2018

We study the impact of post-1990 school finance reforms, during the so-called "adequacy" era, on absolute and relative spending and achievement in low-income school districts. Using an event study research design that exploits the apparent randomness of r...

The Currency Composition of Sovereign Debt

By Pablo Ottonello and Diego J. Perez

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2019

We study the currency composition of sovereign debt in emerging economies through the lens of a model in which the government lacks commitment regarding debt and monetary policy. High levels of debt in local currency give rise to incentives to dilute debt...

Provider Supply, Utilization, and Infant Health: Evidence from a Physician Distribution Policy

By Bladimir Carrillo and Jose Feres

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2019

We analyze a policy that substantially expanded the supply of primary care physicians in Brazil. The program increased doctor visits across all age groups and led to greater utilization of doctors for prenatal care. However, these physicians replaced nurs...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2011

Links to individual book reviews now available online.

Education and Mortality: Evidence from a Social Experiment

By Costas Meghir, Mårten Palme, and Emilia Simeonova

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2018

We examine the effects on mortality and health due to a major Swedish educational reform that increased the years of compulsory schooling. Using the gradual phase-in of the reform between 1949 and 1962 across municipalities, we estimate insignificant effe...

Retirement Lock and Prescription Drug Insurance: Evidence from Medicare Part D

By Gal Wettstein

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2020

I examine whether lack of an individual market for prescription drug insurance causes individuals to delay retirement. Exploiting the 2006 introduction of Medicare Part D, which subsidized drug insurance for Americans over age 65, I use a triple-differenc...

Resurrecting the Role of the Product Market Wedge in Recessions

By Mark Bils, Peter J. Klenow, and Benjamin A. Malin

American Economic Review, April 2018

Employment and hours are more cyclical than dictated by productivity and consumption. This intratemporal labor wedge can arise from product or labor market distortions. Based on employee wages, the literature has attributed the intratemporal wedge almost ...

Social Media and Corruption

By Ruben Enikolopov, Maria Petrova, and Konstantin Sonin

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2018

Does new media promote accountability in nondemocratic countries, where offline media is often suppressed? We show that blog posts, which exposed corruption in Russian state-controlled companies, had a negative causal impact on their market returns. For i...