Front Matter

American Economic Review, February 2019

Correcting for Misreporting of Government Benefits

By Nikolas Mittag

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2019

Data linkage studies often document, but do not remedy, severe survey errors. To improve survey estimates despite restricted linked data access, this paper develops a convenient and general estimation method that combines public use data with conditional ...

Government Spending Multipliers under the Zero Lower Bound: Evidence from Japan

By Wataru Miyamoto, Thuy Lan Nguyen, and Dmitriy Sergeyev

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2018

Using a rich dataset on government spending forecasts in Japan, we provide new evidence on the effects of unexpected changes in government spending when the nominal interest rate is near the zero lower bound (ZLB). The on-impact output multiplier is 1.5 i...

Neutral Bargaining in Financial Over-The-Counter Markets

By Jin Yeub Kim

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

I study bargaining over prices between two investors in financial over-the-counter markets with asymmetric information. I focus on environments in which an asset owner has private information about both her liquidity state and asset quality, and so a buye...

Randomizing Endowments: An Experimental Study of Rational Expectations and Reference-Dependent Preferences

By Annette Cerulli-Harms, Lorenz Goette, and Charles Sprenger

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2019

We test expectations-based reference dependence in market experiments with probabilistic forced exchange. Koszegi and Rabin (2006) predict that when the probability of forced exchange increases, individuals cannot expect to stick with the status quo, an...

Fairness and Frictions: The Impact of Unequal Raises on Quit Behavior

By Arindrajit Dube, Laura Giuliano, and Jonathan Leonard

American Economic Review, February 2019

We analyze how separations responded to arbitrary differences in own and peer wages at a large US retailer. Regression-discontinuity estimates imply large causal effects of own-wages on separations, and on quits in particular. However, this own-wage respo...

Teamwork as a Self-Disciplining Device

By Matthias Fahn and Hendrik Hakenes

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2019

We show that team formation can serve as an implicit commitment device to overcome problems of self-control. If individuals have present-biased preferences, effort that is costly today but rewarded at some later point in time is too low from the perspecti...

Do Credit Market Shocks Affect the Real Economy? Quasi-experimental Evidence from the Great Recession and "Normal" Economic Times

By Michael Greenstone, Alexandre Mas, and Hoai-Luu Nguyen

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2020

Using comprehensive data on bank lending and establishment-level outcomes from 1997–2010, this paper finds that small business lending is an unimportant determinant of small business and overall economic activity. A shift-share style research design is ...

Missing Growth from Creative Destruction

By Philippe Aghion, Antonin Bergeaud, Timo Boppart, Peter J. Klenow, and Huiyu Li

American Economic Review, August 2019

For exiting products, statistical agencies often impute inflation from surviving products. This understates growth if creatively-destroyed products improve more than surviving ones. If so, then the market share of surviving products should systematically ...

Physician Beliefs and Patient Preferences: A New Look at Regional Variation in Health Care Spending

By David Cutler, Jonathan S. Skinner, Ariel Dora Stern, and David Wennberg

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2019

There is considerable controversy about the causes of regional variations in health care expenditures. Using vignettes from patient and physician surveys linked to fee-for-service Medicare expenditures, this study asks whether patient demand-side factors ...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2018

The Violent Consequences of Trade-Induced Worker Displacement in Mexico

By Melissa Dell, Benjamin Feigenberg, and Kensuke Teshima

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2019

Mexican manufacturing job loss induced by competition with China increases cocaine trafficking and violence, particularly in municipalities with transnational criminal organizations. When it becomes more lucrative to traffic drugs because changes in local...

Immigration Restrictions as Active Labor Market Policy: Evidence from the Mexican Bracero Exclusion

By Michael A. Clemens, Ethan G. Lewis, and Hannah M. Postel

American Economic Review, June 2018

An important class of active labor market policy has received little impact evaluation: immigration barriers intended to raise wages and employment by shrinking labor supply. Theories of endogenous technical advance raise the possibility of limited or eve...

Labor Supply and the Value of Non-work Time: Experimental Estimates from the Field

By Alexandre Mas and Amanda Pallais

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2019

We estimate the marginal value of non-work time (MVT) using a field experiment. We offered job applicants randomized wage-hour bundles. Choices over these bundles yield estimates of the MVT as a function of hours, tracing out a labor supply relationship. ...

Leader Selection and Service Delivery in Community Groups: Experimental Evidence from Uganda

By Erika Deserranno, Miri Stryjan, and Munshi Sulaiman

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2019

In developing countries, NGOs and governments often rely on local groups for the delivery of financial and public services. This paper studies how the design of rules used for group leader selection affects leader identity and shapes service delivery. To ...

Capital Cities, Conflict, and Misgovernance

By Filipe R. Campante, Quoc-Anh Do, and Bernardo Guimaraes

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2019

We investigate the links between capital cities, conflict, and the quality of governance, starting from the assumption that incumbent elites are constrained by the threat of insurrection, and that the latter is rendered less effective by distance from the...

Climate Change: The Ultimate Challenge for Economics

By William Nordhaus

American Economic Review, June 2019

The Culture of Overconfidence

By V. Bhaskar and Caroline Thomas

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2019

Perceptions of overconfidence can exacerbate the tendency of reputationally concerned leaders to continue bad projects. Reputation concerns alone induce a bias toward inefficient continuation in a leader receiving information privately. When she is overco...

Can We Control Carbon Dioxide? (From 1975)

By William Nordhaus

American Economic Review, June 2019

Testing Efficient Risk Sharing with Heterogeneous Risk Preferences: Comment

By Aditya Shrinivas and Marcel Fafchamps

American Economic Review, October 2018

Mazzocco and Saini (2012) propose and implement a test of efficient risk sharing that allows for preference heterogeneity. They motivate their approach as yielding different results from those of standard efficiency test with homogeneous preferences. We s...