Innovation, Reallocation, and Growth

By Daron Acemoglu, Ufuk Akcigit, Harun Alp, Nicholas Bloom, and William Kerr

American Economic Review, November 2018

We build a model of firm-level innovation, productivity growth, and reallocation featuring endogenous entry and exit. A new and central economic force is the selection between high- and low-type firms, which differ in terms of their innovative capacity. W...

Backward Induction in the Wild? Evidence from Sequential Voting in the US Senate

By Jörg L. Spenkuch, B. Pablo Montagnes, and Daniel B. Magleby

American Economic Review, July 2018

In the US Senate, roll calls are held in alphabetical order. We document that senators early in the order are less likely to vote with the majority of their own party than those whose last name places them at the end of the alphabet. To speak to the mecha...

Exports and Invoicing: Evidence from the 2015 Swiss Franc Appreciation

By Raphael Auer, Ariel Burstein, Katharina Erhardt, and Sarah M. Lein

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Do differences in border price adjustment by currency of invoicing carry over to allocations? We document the cross-industry variation in the response of Swiss export prices and export values by currency of invoicing of border prices in the aftermath of t...

Loss in the Time of Cholera: Long-Run Impact of a Disease Epidemic on the Urban Landscape

By Attila Ambrus, Erica Field, and Robert Gonzalez

American Economic Review, February 2020

How do geographically concentrated income shocks influence the long-run spatial distribution of poverty within a city? We examine the impact on housing prices of a cholera epidemic in one neighborhood of nineteenth century London. Ten years after the epid...

The Problem of Bigness: From Standard Oil to Google

[Symposium: Issues in Antitrust]

By Naomi R. Lamoreaux

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2019

This article sets recent expressions of alarm about the monopoly power of technology giants such as Google and Amazon in the long history of Americans' response to big business. I argue that we cannot understand that history unless we realize that Ameri...

Digital Financial Services Go a Long Way: Transaction Costs and Financial Inclusion

By Pierre Bachas, Paul Gertler, Sean Higgins, and Enrique Seira

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Debit cards reduce the travel distance to access bank accounts and can increase financial inclusion. We show that in Mexico, cash transfer beneficiaries who already received their transfers in bank accounts and subsequently received debit cards reduce the...

Extreme Inequality: Evidence from Brazil, India, the Middle East, and South Africa

By Lydia Assouad, Lucas Chancel, and Marc Morgan

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

This paper presents new findings about inequality dynamics in Brazil, India, the Middle East, and South Africa from the World Inequality Database (WID.world). We combine tax data, household surveys, and national accounts in a systematic manner to produce ...

Optimal Information Design for Search Goods

By Michael Choi, Kyungmin Kim, and Marilyn Pease

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We consider a monopoly pricing problem in which a consumer with an uncertain valuation of a search good receives a signal of value before deciding whether to visit the seller. She discovers her true value upon visiting and before purchase. We characterize...

The Impact of Big Data on Firm Performance: An Empirical Investigation

By Patrick Bajari, Victor Chernozhukov, Ali Hortaçsu, and Junichi Suzuki

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We examine the impact of "big data" on firm performance in the context of forecast accuracy using proprietary retail sales data obtained from Amazon. We measure the accuracy of forecasts in two relevant dimensions: the number of products (N), and the numb...

Women's Empowerment, the Gender Gap in Desired Fertility, and Fertility Outcomes in Developing Countries

By Matthias Doepke and Michèle Tertilt

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

We document evidence on preferences for childbearing in developing countries. Across countries, men usually desire larger families than women do. Within countries, we find wide dispersion in spouses' desired fertility: there are many couples whose ideal f...

A Reason to Wait: The Effect of Legal Status on Teen Pregnancy

By Elira Kuka, Na'ama Shenhav, and Kevin Shih

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Although teen pregnancy has been on the decline in the United States, it remains among the highest within developed countries. Hispanics, who are more likely to be undocumented immigrants, lead this trend, yet the role of legal status has yet to be consid...

Trade and Income—Exploiting Time Series in Geography

By James Feyrer

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2019

Establishing a robust causal relationship between trade and income has been difficult. Frankel and Romer (1999) uses a geographic instrument to identify a positive effect of trade on income. Rodriguez and Rodrik (2001) shows that these results are not r...

Minimum Wages, Morality, and Efficiency: A Choice Experiment

By Conor Lennon, Jose Fernandez, Stephan Gohmann, and Keith Teltser

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We use a choice experiment to examine public support for minimum wages. We first elicit respondents' moral assessment of two labor market systems: one with a minimum wage and one without. Then, we present four pairs of hypothetical employment outcomes and...

Narrative Sign Restrictions for SVARs

By Juan Antolín-Díaz and Juan F. Rubio-Ramírez

American Economic Review, October 2018

We identify structural vector autoregressions using narrative sign restrictions. Narrative sign restrictions constrain the structural shocks and/or the historical decomposition around key historical events, ensuring that they agree with the established na...

Efficient Child Care Subsidies

By Christine Ho and Nicola Pavoni

American Economic Review, January 2020

We study the design of child care subsidies in an optimal welfare problem with heterogeneous private market productivities. The optimal subsidy schedule is qualitatively similar to the existing US scheme. Efficiency mandates a subsidy on formal child care...

The Evolution of Work in the United States

By Enghin Atalay, Phai Phongthiengtham, Sebastian Sotelo, and Daniel Tannenbaum

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2020

Using the text from job ads, we introduce a new dataset to describe the evolution of work from 1950 to 2000. We show that the transformation of the US labor market away from routine cognitive and manual tasks and toward nonroutine interactive and analytic...

Competition and Strategic Incentives in the Market for Credit Ratings: Empirics of the Financial Crisis of 2007

By Chenghuan Sean Chu and Marc Rysman

American Economic Review, October 2019

We study the market for ratings agencies in the commercial mortgage backed securities sector leading up to and including the financial crisis of 2007–2008. Using a structural model adapted from the auctions literature, we characterize the incentives of ...

Forward Guidance and Heterogeneous Beliefs

By Philippe Andrade, Gaetano Gaballo, Eric Mengus, and Benoît Mojon

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2019

Central banks' announcements that rates are expected to remain low could signal either a weak macroeconomic outlook, which would slow expenditures, or a more accommodative stance, which may stimulate economic activity. We use the Survey of Professional Fo...

Ethnolinguistic Favoritism in African Politics

By Andrew Dickens

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2018

African political leaders have a tendency to favor members of their own ethnic group. Yet for all other ethnic groups in a country, it is unclear whether having a similar ethnicity to the leader is beneficial. To shed light on this issue, I use a continuo...

Doctoral Dissertations in Economics

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2018