The Changing Face of Debt and Financial Fragility at Older Ages

By Annamaria Lusardi, Olivia S. Mitchell, and Noemi Oggero

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

We investigate changes in older individuals' financial fragility as they stand on the verge of retirement. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), we compare how debt has changed for successive cohorts of people age 56–61. Our analysis sh...

Familiarity Does Not Breed Contempt: Generosity, Discrimination, and Diversity in Delhi Schools

By Gautam Rao

American Economic Review, March 2019

I exploit a natural experiment in Indian schools to study how being integrated with poor students affects the social behaviors and academic outcomes of rich students. Using administrative data, lab and field experiments to measure outcomes, I find that ha...

Retrospectives: Adam Smith's Discovery of Trade Gravity

By Bruce Elmslie

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2018

The gravity equation is a current workhorse of empirical trade theory. It is generally acknowledged that this theory, which relates the extent of trade between countries to their respective sizes, distances, and relative trade barriers, was first develo...

How FinTech Enters China's Credit Market

By Harald Hau, Yi Huang, Hongzhe Shan, and Zixia Sheng

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

How does FinTech credit mitigate local credit supply frictions in China's segmented credit market? In our simple theoretical models, we show that FinTech credit (i) expands the extensive margin of credit to borrowers of lower credit scores and (ii) provid...

The Dynamics of Discrimination: Theory and Evidence

By J. Aislinn Bohren, Alex Imas, and Michael Rosenberg

American Economic Review, October 2019

We model the dynamics of discrimination and show how its evolution can identify the underlying source. We test these theoretical predictions in a field experiment on a large online platform where users post content that is evaluated by other users on the ...

Financing Constraints, Radical versus Incremental Innovation, and Aggregate Productivity

By Andrea Caggese

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2019

I provide new empirical evidence on the negative relationship between financial frictions and productivity growth over a firm's life cycle. I show that a model of firm dynamics with incremental innovation cannot explain this evidence. However, further inc...

Strategy Choice in the Infinitely Repeated Prisoner's Dilemma

By Pedro Dal Bó and Guillaume R. Fréchette

American Economic Review, November 2019

We use a novel experimental design to reliably elicit subjects' strategies in an infinitely repeated prisoner's dilemma experiment with perfect monitoring. We find that three simple strategies represent the majority of the chosen strategies: Always Defect...

Alternative Sources of the Gains from International Trade: Variety, Creative Destruction, and Markups

[Symposium: Does the US Really Gain From Trade?]

By Robert C. Feenstra

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2018

The modern theory of international trade identifies several additional sources of the gains from international trade beyond the gains from traditional comparative advantage. These are the gains from importing new product varieties; the gains from "creativ...

Good Cop, Bad Cop: Using Civilian Allegations to Predict Police Misconduct

By Kyle Rozema and Max Schanzenbach

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2019

In response to high-profile cases of police misconduct, reformers are calling for greater use of civilian allegations in identifying potential problem officers. This paper applies an Empirical Bayes framework to data on civilian allegations and civil righ...

Quantifying Economic Damages from Climate Change

[Symposium: Climate Change]

By Maximilian Auffhammer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2018

Climate scientists have spent billions of dollars and eons of supercomputer time studying how increased concentrations of greenhouse gases and changes in the reflectivity of the earth's surface affect dimensions of the climate system relevant to human soc...

Ending Global Poverty: Why Money Isn't Enough

[Symposium: Development and State Capacity]

By Lucy Page and Rohini Pande

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2018

Between 1981 and 2013, the share of the global population living in extreme poverty fell by 34 percentage points. This paper argues that such rapid reductions will become increasingly hard to achieve for two reasons. First, the majority of the poor now ...

Deliberately Stochastic

By Simone Cerreia-Vioglio, David Dillenberger, Pietro Ortoleva, and Gil Riella

American Economic Review, July 2019

We study stochastic choice as the outcome of deliberate randomization. We derive a general representation of a stochastic choice function where stochasticity allows the agent to achieve from any set the maximal element according to her underlying preferen...

Regulating Markups in US Health Insurance

By Steve Cicala, Ethan M. J. Lieber, and Victoria Marone

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2019

A health insurer's Medical Loss Ratio (MLR) is the share of premiums spent on medical claims, or the inverse markup over average claims cost. The Affordable Care Act introduced minimum MLR provisions for all health insurance sold in fully insured commerci...

The Returns to a Large Community College Program: Evidence from Admissions Lotteries

By Michel Grosz

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2020

This paper estimates the labor market returns to the associate's degree in nursing (ADN), which is one of the most popular community college programs. I use student-level academic and earnings records across two decades for all community college student...

Menu Costs, Aggregate Fluctuations, and Large Shocks

By Peter Karadi and Adam Reiff

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2019

We document that the aggregate price level responds flexibly and asymmetrically to large positive and negative value-added tax changes. We present a price-setting model with menu costs, trend inflation, and fat-tailed product-level shocks that is consiste...

JEL Classification System

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2010

Switching Costs and Competition in Retirement Investment

By Fernando Luco

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2019

How do different switching costs affect choices and competition in a private pension system? I answer this question in a setting in which variation in employment status allows me to identify two switching costs that jointly affect enrollees' decisions: th...

Endogenous Technology Adoption and R&D as Sources of Business Cycle Persistence

By Diego Anzoategui, Diego Comin, Mark Gertler, and Joseba Martinez

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2019

We examine the hypothesis that the slowdown in productivity following the Great Recession was in significant part an endogenous response to the contraction in demand that induced the downturn. We motivate, develop, and estimate a model with an endogenous ...

Will a Five-Minute Discussion Change Your Mind? A Countrywide Experiment on Voter Choice in France

By Vincent Pons

American Economic Review, June 2018

This paper provides the first estimate of the effect of door-to-door canvassing on actual electoral outcomes, via a countrywide experiment embedded in Francois Hollande's campaign in the 2012 French presidential election. While existing experiments random...

The Economic Consequences of Hospital Admissions

By Carlos Dobkin, Amy Finkelstein, Raymond Kluender, and Matthew J. Notowidigdo

American Economic Review, February 2018

We use an event study approach to examine the economic consequences of hospital admissions for adults in two datasets: survey data from the Health and Retirement Study, and hospitalization data linked to credit reports. For non-elderly adults with health ...