Learning to Coordinate: A Study in Retail Gasoline

By David P. Byrne and Nicolas de Roos

American Economic Review, February 2019

This paper studies equilibrium selection in the retail gasoline industry. We exploit a unique dataset that contains the universe of station-level prices for an urban market for 15 years, and that encompasses a coordinated equilibrium transition mid-sample...

Immigration, Employment Opportunities, and Criminal Behavior

By Matthew Freedman, Emily Owens, and Sarah Bohn

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2018

We take advantage of provisions of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), which granted legal resident status to long-time unauthorized residents but created new obstacles to employment for more recent immigrants, to explore how employment...

The Rise of Robots in China

[Symposium: Automation and Employment]

By Hong Cheng, Ruixue Jia, Dandan Li, and Hongbin Li

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2019

China is the world's largest user of industrial robots. In 2016, sales of industrial robots in China reached 87,000 units, accounting for around 30 percent of the global market. To put this number in perspective, robot sales in all of Europe and the Ame...

The Relative Importance of Aggregate and Sectoral Shocks and the Changing Nature of Economic Fluctuations

By Julio Garin, Michael J. Pries, and Eric R. Sims

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2018

A principal components decomposition of sectoral IP data reveals that the contribution of aggregate shocks to the variance of aggregate output declined from about 70 percent in the period 1967–1983 to about 30 percent after 1983. We develop an "isla...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2018

Morality, Policy, and the Brain

By Aldo Rustichini

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2018

The book Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap between Us and Them, by Joshua Greene, invites the reader to give a new look at the foundation of ethics and, by implication, to policy. Its specific strength is the systematic integration of new ...

Drilling Like There's No Tomorrow: Bankruptcy, Insurance, and Environmental Risk

By Judson Boomhower

American Economic Review, February 2019

This paper measures the effects of bankruptcy protection on industry structure and environmental outcomes in oil and gas extraction. Using administrative data from Texas, I exploit variation in an insurance requirement that reduced firms' ability to avoid...

Outside the Box: Unconventional Monetary Policy in the Great Recession and Beyond

[Symposium: Unconventional Monetary Policy]

By Kenneth N. Kuttner

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2018

In November 2008, the Federal Reserve faced a deteriorating economy and a financial crisis. The federal funds rate had already been reduced to virtually zero. Thus, the Federal Reserve turned to unconventional monetary policies. Through "quantitative easi...

Judicial Politics and Sentencing Decisions

By Alma Cohen and Crystal S. Yang

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2019

This paper investigates whether judge political affiliation contributes to racial and gender disparities in sentencing using data on over 500,000 federal defendants linked to sentencing judge. Exploiting random case assignment, we find that Republican-app...

Long-Run Effects of Temporary Incentives on Medical Care Productivity

By Pablo A. Celhay, Paul J. Gertler, Paula Giovagnoli, and Christel Vermeersch

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2019

We show that costs of adjustment as opposed to low perceived value may explain why improved quality care practices diffuse slowly in the medical industry. Using a randomized field experiment conducted in Argentina, we find that temporary financial incenti...

A Review Essay on Howard Bodenhorn's The Color Factor: The Economics of African-American Well-Being in the Nineteenth-Century South

By Allison Shertzer

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2018

In The Color Factor: The Economics of African-American Well-Being in the Nineteenth-Century South, Howard Bodenhorn investigates the origins, health, and socioeconomic performance of mixed-race people in the antebellum Southern United States. The c...

Newspapers in Times of Low Advertising Revenues

By Charles Angelucci and Julia Cagé

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2019

We model the consequences on newspapers' content and prices of a reduction in advertising revenues. Newspapers choose the size of their newsroom, and readers are heterogeneous in their ideal amount of journalistic-intensive content. We show that a reducti...

Market Share Contracts, Exclusive Dealing, and the Integer Problem

By Zhijun Chen and Greg Shaffer

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2019

This paper compares exclusive dealing and market share contracts in a model of naked exclusion. We discuss how the contracts work and identify a fundamental trade-off that arises: market share contracts are better at maximizing a seller's benefit from f...

Incentivizing Safer Sexual Behavior: Evidence from a Lottery Experiment on HIV Prevention

By Martina Björkman Nyqvist, Lucia Corno, Damien de Walque, and Jakob Svensson

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2018

We investigate the effect of a financial lottery program in Lesotho with relatively low expected payments but a chance to win a high prize conditional on negative test results for sexually transmitted infections. The intervention resulted in a 21.4 percen...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2019

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2019

Dynamic Mechanism Design: An Introduction

By Dirk Bergemann and Juuso Välimäki

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2019

We provide an introduction to the recent developments of dynamic mechanism design, with a primary focus on the quasilinear case. First, we describe socially optimal (or efficient) dynamic mechanisms. These mechanisms extend the well-known Vickrey–Clarkâ...

Dominant Currency Paradigm

By Gita Gopinath, Emine Boz, Camila Casas, Federico J. Díez, Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, and Mikkel Plagborg-Møller

American Economic Review, March 2020

We propose a "dominant currency paradigm" with three key features: dominant currency pricing, pricing complementarities, and imported inputs in production. We test this paradigm using a new dataset of bilateral price and volume indices for more than 2,5...

Internal Geography, Labor Mobility, and the Distributional Impacts of Trade

By Jingting Fan

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2019

I develop a spatial-equilibrium model to quantify the distributional impacts of international trade in an economy with intranational trade and migration costs. Focusing on China, I find that international trade increases both between-region inequality amo...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, June 2019