Sustaining Honesty in Public Service: The Role of Selection

By Sebastian Barfort, Nikolaj A. Harmon, Frederik Hjorth, and Asmus Leth Olsen

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2019

We study the role of self-selection into public service in sustaining honesty in the public sector. Focusing on the world's least corrupt country, Denmark, we use a survey experiment to document strong self-selection of more honest individuals into public...

The Mortality and Medical Costs of Air Pollution: Evidence from Changes in Wind Direction

By Tatyana Deryugina, Garth Heutel, Nolan H. Miller, David Molitor, and Julian Reif

American Economic Review, December 2019

We estimate the causal effects of acute fine particulate matter exposure on mortality, health care use, and medical costs among the US elderly using Medicare data. We instrument for air pollution using changes in local wind direction and develop a new app...

Revenue Guarantee Equivalence

By Dirk Bergemann, Benjamin Brooks, and Stephen Morris

American Economic Review, May 2019

We revisit the revenue comparison of standard auction formats, including first-price, second-price, and English auctions. We rank auctions according to their revenue guarantees, i.e., the greatest lower bound of revenue across all informational environm...

Optimal Regulation of Financial Intermediaries

By Sebastian Di Tella

American Economic Review, January 2019

I characterize the optimal financial regulation policy in an economy where financial intermediaries trade capital assets on behalf of households, but must retain an equity stake to align incentives. Financial regulation is necessary because intermediaries...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2018

How Do Patents Affect Follow-On Innovation? Evidence from the Human Genome

By Bhaven Sampat and Heidi L. Williams

American Economic Review, January 2019

We investigate whether patents on human genes have affected follow-on scientific research and product development. Using administrative data on successful and unsuccessful patent applications submitted to the US Patent and Trademark Office, we link the ex...

Strategyproof Choice of Social Acts

By Eric Bahel and Yves Sprumont

American Economic Review, February 2020

We model uncertain social prospects as acts mapping states of nature to (social) outcomes. A social choice function (or SCF) assigns an act to each profile of subjective expected utility preferences over acts. An SCF is strategyproof if no agent ever ha...

Aggregation and the Gravity Equation

By Stephen J. Redding and David E. Weinstein

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

One of the most successful empirical relationships in international trade is the gravity equation. A key decision for researchers in estimating this relationship is the level of aggregation, since the gravity equation is log linear, whereas aggregation in...

Trends and Disparities in Leave Use under California's Paid Family Leave Program: New Evidence from Administrative Data

By Sarah Bana, Kelly Bedard, and Maya Rossin-Slater

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

We use novel administrative data to study trends and disparities in usage of California's first-in-the-nation paid family leave (PFL) program. We show that take-up for both bonding with a new child and caring for an ill family member increased over 2005â€...

Investment Strategy and Selection Bias: An Equilibrium Perspective on Overoptimism

By Philippe Jehiel

American Economic Review, June 2018

Investors implement projects based on idiosyncratic signal observations, without knowing how signals and returns are jointly distributed. The following heuristic is studied: investors collect information on previously implemented projects with the same si...

Report of the Editor: American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

By Matthew D. Shapiro

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

When Work Disappears: Manufacturing Decline and the Falling Marriage Market Value of Young Men

By David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2019

We exploit the gender-specific components of large-scale labor demand shocks stemming from rising international manufacturing competition to test how shifts in the relative economic stature of young men versus young women affected marriage, fertility, and...

Promotion Signaling and Human Capital Investments

By Michael Waldman and Ori Zax

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2020

In a world characterized by asymmetric learning, promotions can serve as signals of worker ability, and this, in turn, can result in inefficient promotion decisions. If the labor market is competitive, the result will be practices that reduce this distort...

Demand and Supply of Infrequent Payments as a Commitment Device: Evidence from Kenya

By Lorenzo Casaburi and Rocco Macchiavello

American Economic Review, February 2019

Despite extensive evidence that preferences are often time-inconsistent, there is only scarce evidence of willingness to pay for commitment. Infrequent payments for frequently provided goods and services are a common feature of many markets and they may n...

Disentangling the Effects of a Banking Crisis: Evidence from German Firms and Counties

By Kilian Huber

American Economic Review, March 2018

Lending cuts by banks directly affect the firms borrowing from them, but also indirectly depress economic activity in the regions in which they operate. This paper moves beyond firm-level studies by estimating the effects of an exogenous lending cut by a ...

A Cross-Country Comparison of Dynamics in the Large Firm Wage Premium

By Emanuele Colonnelli, Joacim TÃ¥g, Michael Webb, and Stefanie Wolter

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

We provide stylized facts on the existence and dynamics over time of the large firm wage premium for four countries. We examine matched employer-employee micro-data from Brazil, Germany, Sweden, and the UK, and find that the large firm premium exists in a...

Ramsey Strikes Back: Optimal Commodity Tax and Redistribution in the Presence of Salience Effects

By Hunt Allcott, Benjamin Lockwood, and Dmitry Taubinsky

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

An influential result in modern optimal tax theory, the Atkinson and Stiglitz (1976) theorem, holds that for a broad class of utility functions, all redistribution should be carried out through labor income taxation, rather than differential taxes on co...

Gender Norms and Relative Working Hours: Why Do Women Suffer More Than Men from Working Longer Hours Than Their Partners?

By Sarah Fleche, Anthony Lepinteur, and Nattavudh Powdthavee

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Constraints that prevent women from working longer hours are argued to be important drivers of the gender wage gap in the United States. We provide evidence that in couples where the wife's working hours exceed the husband's, the wife reports lower life s...

The Rise of the Gig Economy: Fact or Fiction?

By Katharine G. Abraham, John Haltiwanger, Kristin Sandusky, and James Spletzer

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Gig work mediated through online platforms has received much recent attention. We find only one sector—the transportation services sector—in which there is unambiguous evidence of substantial and rapidly growing gig activity. A challenge for tracking ...

Long-Term Treatment Effects of Job Search Assistance and Training: A Summary of Recent Evidence

By Day Manoli and Ankur Patel

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

This paper presents a summary of recent evidence on long-term treatment effects from job search assistance and training services on labor market outcomes. The evidence is based on merging program data from three randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to admi...