A Bias of Screening

By David Lagziel and Ehud Lehrer

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2019

This paper deals with the issue of screening. It focuses on a decision maker who, based on noisy unbiased assessments, screens elements from a general set. Our analysis shows that stricter screening not only reduces the number of accepted elements, but po...

How Elastic is the Demand for Tax Havens? Evidence from the US Possessions Corporations Tax Credit

By Daniel Garrett and Juan Carlos Suárez Serrato

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Why do some firms adopt certain tax havens, and how sensitive is the demand for tax havens? We address these questions by studying how the repeal of section 936 tax credits affected firms with affiliates in Puerto Rico. We first describe the characteristi...

Salary Delays and Overdrafts in Rural Ghana

By Niklas Buehren, Virginia Ceretti, Ervin Dervisevic, Markus Goldstein, Leora Klapper, Tricia Koroknay-Palicz, and Simone Schaner

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Checking overdrafts are an expensive yet common way for bank account holders to obtain short-term credit when faced with unexpected shocks. In developing countries, one common shock that many salaried workers face is late or erratic payment from their emp...

Gendered Language on the Economics Job Market Rumors Forum

By Alice H. Wu

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

This paper examines the existence of an unwelcoming or stereotypical culture using evidence on how women and men are portrayed in anonymous discussions on the Economics Job Market Rumors forum (EJMR). I use a Lasso-Logistic model to measure gendered langu...

Blockchains, Coordination, and Forks

By Bruno Biais, Christophe Bisière, Matthieu Bouvard, and Catherine Casamatta

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Blockchains are distributed ledgers. Their protocol aims at ensuring that the miners in charge of recording transactions reach a consensus about a unique ledger. In this paper, we highlight that the game induced by the blockchain proof-of-work protocol ge...

The Child Left Behind: Parental Incarceration and Adult Human Capital in the United States

By Laura E. Henkhaus

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Exposure to parental incarceration is particularly prevalent in the United States, where about 7 percent of children have lived with a parent who was incarcerated. In this paper, I use nationally representative US data and apply partial identification met...

Challenges in the Measurement of Leakage Risk

By Meredith Fowlie and Mar Reguant

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Concerns about emissions leakage, i.e., the increase in emissions in foreign jurisdictions induced by a domestic emissions regulation, loom large in debates about unilateral climate change policy. Correctly identifying the kinds of economic activities mos...

Parental Aspirations for Children's Education: Is There a "Girl Effect"? Experimental Evidence from Rural Ethiopia

By Tanguy Bernard, Stefan Dercon, Kate Orkin, and Alemayehu Seyoum Taffesse

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We report on an experiment with poor rural households in Ethiopia, which aimed to boost aspirations for a better future through exposure to documentaries featuring local male and female role models. We explore effects on parents' educational aspirations...

Connecting across disciplines

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Other fields in the social sciences have been increasingly citing economics research. Has economics become more outward-looking, too?

Disenfranchisement and Economic Inequality: Downstream Effects of Shelby County v. Holder

By Abhay P. Aneja and Carlos F. Avenancio-León

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

The 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) is considered by many to be the most effective civil rights law ever passed. In 2013, the Supreme Court struck down important provisions from the VRA in Shelby County v. Holder. This paper first discusses how the ...

Some Principles for Regulating Cyber Risk

By Anil K. Kashyap and Anne Wetherilt

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We explain why cyber risk differs from other operational risks in the financial sector. The form of cyber shocks differs because of their intent, probability of success, possibility of a hidden phase, and evolving form of the risks. The impact differs bec...

Currency Substitution under Transaction Costs

By Linda M. Schilling and Harald Uhlig

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We consider a setting where agents can choose between two currencies to conduct their goods purchases. The usage of either currency comes with currency-specific transactions costs. For example, purchasing some goods with cryptocurrencies rather than dolla...

Challenges of Monitoring Tax Compliance by Multinational Firms: Evidence from Chile

By Sebastián Bustos, Dina Pomeranz, José Vila-Belda, and Gabriel Zucman

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

This paper reviews common challenges of taxing multinational firms, using Chile as a case study. We briefly describe key international tax avoidance methods: profit shifting to low-tax jurisdictions through transfer pricing and debt shifting. We discuss t...

China versus the United States: IMS Meets IPS

By Emmanuel Farhi and Matteo Maggiori

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Currently both the International Monetary System (IMS) and the International Price Systems (IPS) are dominated by the United States. The emergence of China, both as reserve currency and as a currency of invoicing, is likely to disrupt this status quo. We ...

Macroprudential Policy: What We've Learned, Don't Know, and Need to Do

By Kristin J. Forbes

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Over the last decade, macroprudential policy has made important advances and become more widely used. We have a better understanding of its goals and tools, and are accumulating evidence that it can be effective on its direct targets, albeit often with un...

On the Heterogeneity in Family Earnings and Income Dynamics in the PSID

By Dmytro Hryshko and Iourii Manovskii

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

A large body of knowledge on income dynamics in the United States is based on data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). We find two sets of households in the PSID that differ dramatically in the dynamics of their income. Households headed by th...

Measuring Productivity: Lessons from Tailored Surveys and Productivity Benchmarking

By David Atkin, Amit K. Khandelwal, and Adam Osman

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We use tailored surveys and benchmarking in the flat-weave rug industry to better understand the shortcomings of standard productivity measures. Quantity-based productivity (TFPQ) performs poorly because of variation in product specifications across firms...

Mastering Panel Metrics: Causal Impact of Democracy on Growth

By Shuowen Chen, Victor Chernozhukov, and Iván Fernández-Val

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We revisit the panel data analysis of Acemoglu et al. (forthcoming) on the relationship between democracy and economic growth using state-of-the-art econometric methods. We argue that panel data settings are high-dimensional, resulting in estimators to be...

Optimal Payment Areas or Optimal Currency Areas?

By Patrick Bolton and Haizhou Huang

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

We use the Optimal Capital Structure of Nations framework in Bolton and Huang (2018) to develop a new theory of Optimum Currency Areas. Whether two economically integrated nations should form an optimal currency area depends on a trade-off between financi...

Indoor Air Pollution and Infant Mortality: A New Approach

By Imelda

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

I propose a new approach to estimate the impact of changes in indoor air quality on infant mortality. I use a quasi-experimental design, leveraging the largest kerosene to liquid petroleum gas (LPG) conversion program implemented in a developing country. ...