Intangibles, Investment, and Efficiency

By Nicolas Crouzet and Janice Eberly

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Recent work on macroeconomic trends has emphasized slowing capital investment, but strong business profits and valuations. The retail sector is a microcosm of these trends, and accounts for a large share of the increase in aggregate business concentration...

Police Use of Force as an Extension of Arrests: Examining Disparities across Civilian and Officer Race

By Emily K. Weisburst

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

The United States is embroiled in an important debate about police use of force tactics. I find that black civilians are disproportionately likely to be involved in a use of force incident during an arrest, examining data from Dallas, Texas. However, this...

Intergenerational Human Capital Spillovers: Indonesia's School Construction and Its Effects on the Next Generation

By Bhashkar Mazumder, Maria Rosales-Rueda, and Margaret Triyana

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We analyze the effects of increased access to education in one generation on human capital outcomes in the next generation. Using longitudinal data, we exploit the geographical and cohort variations in exposure to a massive primary school construction pro...

A Practical Method to Reduce Privacy Loss When Disclosing Statistics Based on Small Samples

By Raj Chetty and John N. Friedman

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Building on insights from the differential privacy literature, we develop a simple noise-infusion method to reduce privacy loss when disclosing statistics such as OLS regression estimates based on small samples. Although our method does not offer a formal...

Time and Money: Social Security Benefits and Intergenerational Transfers

By Anita Mukherjee

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

I examine the relationship between Social Security benefits, a major component of income in older age, and intergenerational transfers of financial help and caregiving. I find that the net pass-through rate of Social Security benefits from parents to chil...

Dollar Invoicing and the Heterogeneity of Exchange Rate Pass-Through

By Emine Boz, Gita Gopinath, and Mikkel Plagborg-Møller

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We show empirically that the variation across country pairs in exchange rate pass-through and trade elasticity is meaningfully explained by the dollar's dominance as invoicing currency. We use a hierarchical Bayesian approach to directly and flexibly mode...

Just Starting Out: Learning and Equilibrium in a New Market

By Ulrich Doraszelski, Gregory Lewis, and Ariel Pakes

American Economic Review, March 2018

We document the evolution of the new market for frequency response within the UK electricity system over a six-year period. Firms competed in price while facing considerable initial uncertainty about demand and rival behavior. We show that prices stabiliz...

Exchange Rates and the Working Capital Channel of Trade Fluctuations

By Valentina Bruno, Se-Jik Kim, and Hyun Shin

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Exchange rates affect the economy not only through the competitiveness of exports but also through a financial channel. The financial channel goes in the opposite direction to the competitiveness channel in that a stronger currency goes hand-in-hand with ...

Does Maternal Education Decrease Female Genital Cutting?

By Elisabetta De Cao and Giulia La Mattina

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Female genital cutting (FGC) affects more than 200 million women globally. Education is often depicted as an effective instrument for abandoning the practice, but causal evidence is scant. This paper uses the introduction of the Universal Primary Educatio...

Wealth Redistribution after Exchange Rate Devaluations

By Andres Drenik, Gustavo Pereira, and Diego J. Perez

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

We document that the likelihood of having assets in foreign currency is increasing in households' income within many emerging economies. This pattern leads to heterogeneous exposures of wealth to exchange rate movements. We analyze the redistribution of l...

The Effect of Parental Education on Children's Drug and Alcohol Use

By Aaron Chalfin and Monica Deza

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

This research is the first to uncover evidence of an intergenerational effect of education on substance use in the United States. Using data from the NLSY79 and variation in education induced by changes in compulsory schooling laws, we study the effect of...

Ensemble Methods for Causal Effects in Panel Data Settings

By Susan Athey, Mohsen Bayati, Guido Imbens, and Zhaonan Qu

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

In many prediction problems researchers have found that combinations of prediction methods ("ensembles") perform better than individual methods. In this paper we apply these ideas to synthetic control type problems in panel data. Here a number of conceptu...

Unequal Rewards to Firms: Stock Market Responses to the Trump Election and the 2017 Corporate Tax Reform

By Alexander F. Wagner, Richard J. Zeckhauser, and Alexandre Ziegler

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Massive dollars shuttled back and forth among firms on the twisted path to and passage of the 2017 tax reform. Prices of individual stocks responded to the difference between initial and revised expectations. From the bill's initiation in the House to fin...

Escaping Malthus: Economic Growth and Fertility Change in the Developing World

By Shoumitro Chatterjee and Tom Vogl

American Economic Review, June 2018

Following mid-twentieth century predictions of Malthusian catastrophe, fertility in the developing world more than halved, while living standards more than doubled. We analyze how fertility change related to economic growth during this episode, using data...

Differentiated Durable Goods Monopoly: A Robust Coase Conjecture

By Francesco Nava and Pasquale Schiraldi

American Economic Review, May 2019

The paper analyzes a durable goods monopoly problem in which multiple varieties can be sold. A robust Coase conjecture establishes that the market eventually clears, with profits exceeding static optimal market-clearing profits and converging to this lowe...

Does Elite Capture Matter? Local Elites and Targeted Welfare Programs in Indonesia

By Vivi Alatas, Abhijit Banerjee, Rema Hanna, Benjamin A. Olken, Ririn Purnamasari, and Matthew Wai-Poi

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

This paper investigates how elite capture affects the welfare gains from targeted government transfer programs in Indonesia, using both a high-stakes field experiment that varied the extent of elite influence and nonexperimental data on a variety of exist...

Cream Skimming and Information Design in Matching Markets

By Gleb Romanyuk and Alex Smolin

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2019

Short-lived buyers arrive to a platform over time and randomly match with sellers. The sellers stay at the platform and decide whether to accept incoming requests. The platform designs what buyer information the sellers observe before deciding to form a m...

Beyond the Flipped Class: The Impact of Research-Based Teaching Methods in a Macroeconomics Principles Class

By Austin Boyle and William L. Goffe

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Cognitive scientists have identified fundamental principles influencing learning: deliberate practice, interleaving, retrieval practice, spacing, metacognition, desirable difficulties, limited working memory, curse of knowledge, schema generation, and con...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2018

Price Theory

By E. Glen Weyl

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2019

I argue that there exists a coherent and relevant tradition in economic thought that I label "price theory." I define it as neoclassical microeconomic analysis that reduces rich and often incompletely specified models into "prices" (approximately) suffi...