Can Small Incentives Have Large Effects? The Impact of Taxes versus Bonuses on Disposable Bag Use

By Tatiana A. Homonoff

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2018

This paper examines a simple element of financial incentive design—whether the incentive takes the form of a fee for bad behavior or a reward for good behavior—to determine if the framing of the incentive influences the policy's effectiveness. I inves...

Student Debt and Labor Market Outcomes

By Gerald Eric Daniels Jr. and Andria Smythe

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We study the impact of student debt on various labor market outcomes, namely, income, hourly wages, and hours worked. Using the NLSY97 and a difference-in-difference approach, we find statistically significant differences in labor market outcomes for indi...

Elite Colleges and Upward Mobility to Top Jobs and Top Incomes

By Seth D. Zimmerman

American Economic Review, January 2019

This paper asks whether elite colleges help students outside of historically advantaged groups reach top positions in the economy. I combine administrative data on income and leadership teams at publicly traded firms with a regression discontinuity desi...

Modeling Automation

By Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Modeling automation as factor-augmenting technological change has unappealing implications. Instead, modeling it as the process of machines replacing tasks previously performed by labor is both descriptively realistic and leads to distinct and plausible p...

Investment tax cuts and jobs

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How much does a tax deduction on capital purchases stimulate employment?

The Effects of Micro-entrepreneurship Programs on Labor Market Performance: Experimental Evidence from Chile

By Claudia Martínez A., Esteban Puentes, and Jaime Ruiz-Tagle

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2018

We investigate the impact of a program providing asset transfers and business training to low income individuals in Chile, and asked whether a larger asset transfer would magnify the program's impact. We randomly assigned participation in a large scale, p...

A Model of Trading in the Art Market

By Stefano Lovo and Christophe Spaenjers

American Economic Review, March 2018

We present an infinite-horizon model of endogenous trading in the art auction market. Agents make purchase and sale decisions based on the relative magnitude of their private use value in each period. Our model generates endogenous cross-sectional and tim...

Report of the Editor: American Economic Review

By Esther Duflo

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Property Rights and Gender Bias: Evidence from Land Reform in West Bengal

By Sonia Bhalotra, Abhishek Chakravarty, Dilip Mookherjee, and Francisco J. Pino

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2019

We examine intra-household gender-differentiated effects of property rights securitisation following West Bengal's tenancy registration program, using two independently gathered datasets. In both samples, higher program implementation increased male child...

Supporting Community College Students from Start to Degree Completion: Long-Term Evidence from a Randomized Trial of CUNY's ASAP

By Michael J. Weiss, Alyssa Ratledge, Colleen Sommo, and Himani Gupta

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2019

Nationwide, graduation rates at community colleges are discouragingly low. This randomized experiment provides evidence that graduation rates can be increased dramatically. The City University of New York's (CUNY) Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (...

Expecting the Unexpected: Emissions Uncertainty and Environmental Market Design

By Severin Borenstein, James Bushnell, Frank A. Wolak, and Matthew Zaragoza-Watkins

American Economic Review, November 2019

We study potential equilibria in California's cap-and-trade market for greenhouse gases (GHGs) based on information available before the market started. We find large ex ante uncertainty in business-as-usual emissions and in the abatement that might resul...

Reconsidering the Consequences of Worker Displacements: Firm versus Worker Perspective

By Aaron Flaaen, Matthew D. Shapiro, and Isaac Sorkin

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2019

Prior literature has established that displaced workers suffer persistent earnings losses by following workers in administrative data after mass layoffs. This literature assumes that these are involuntary separations owing to economic distress. This paper...

The Sound of Silence: A Review Essay of Nancy MacLean's Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America

By Jean-Baptiste Fleury and Alain Marciano

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2018

This essay reviews Nancy MacLean's Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America, which triggered a huge controversy that virally spread on the internet and in various journals. We will evaluate MacLean's...

Does Managed Care Widen Infant Health Disparities? Evidence from Texas Medicaid

By Ilyana Kuziemko, Katherine Meckel, and Maya Rossin-Slater

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2018

Medicaid programs increasingly finance competing, capitated managed care plans rather than administering fee-for-service (FFS) programs. We study how the transition from FFS to managed care affects high- and low-cost infants (blacks and Hispanics, respect...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2019

Monetary Policy Strategies for a Low-Rate Environment

By Ben S. Bernanke, Michael T. Kiley, and John M. Roberts

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

In low-rate environments, policy strategies that involve holding rates "lower for longer" (L4L) may mitigate the effects of the effective lower bound (ELB). However, these strategies work in part by managing the public's expectations, which is not always ...

Pass-Through as a Test for Market Power: An Application to Solar Subsidies

By Jacquelyn Pless and Arthur A. van Benthem

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2019

We formalize pass-through over-shifting as a simple yet underutilized test for market power. We apply this test in the market for solar energy. Specifically, we estimate the pass-through of solar subsidies to solar system prices using rich micro-level tra...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2014

Does Helping John Help Sue? Evidence of Spillovers in Education

By Isaac M. Opper

American Economic Review, March 2019

Does the impact of teachers extend beyond the students in their classroom? Using the natural transitions of students from multiple elementary schools into a single middle school, this paper provides a new method for isolating and quantifying peer spillove...

New Perspectives on the Decline of US Manufacturing Employment

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

By Teresa C. Fort, Justin R. Pierce, and Peter K. Schott

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2018

We use relatively unexplored dimensions of US microdata to examine how US manufacturing employment has evolved across industries, firms, establishments, and regions. These data provide support for both trade- and technology-based explanations of the overa...