Front Matter

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2020

Incentivized Resume Rating: Eliciting Employer Preferences without Deception

By Judd B. Kessler, Corinne Low, and Colin D. Sullivan

American Economic Review, November 2019

We introduce a new experimental paradigm to evaluate employer preferences, called incentivized resume rating (IRR). Employers evaluate resumes they know to be hypothetical in order to be matched with real job seekers, preserving incentives while avoiding ...

Bringing Satellite-Based Air Quality Estimates Down to Earth

By Meredith Fowlie, Edward Rubin, and Reed Walker

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We use state-of-the-art, satellite-based PM 2.5 data products to assess the extent to which the Environmental Protection Agency's existing, monitor-based measurements over- or underestimate true exposure to PM 2.5 pollution. Treating satellite-based estim...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, August 2019

Research and the Approval Process: The Organization of Persuasion

By Emeric Henry and Marco Ottaviani

American Economic Review, March 2019

An informer sequentially collects and disseminates information through costly research to persuade an evaluator to approve an activity. Payoffs and control rights are split between informer and evaluator depending on the organizational rules governing the...

"Automation" of Manufacturing in the Late Nineteenth Century: The Hand and Machine Labor Study

[Symposium: Automation and Employment]

By Jeremy Atack, Robert A. Margo, and Paul W. Rhode

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2019

Recent advances in artificial intelligence and robotics have generated a robust debate about the future of work. An analogous debate occurred in the late nineteenth century when mechanization first transformed manufacturing. We analyze an extraordinary da...

Way Down in the Hole: Adaptation to Long-Term Water Loss in Rural India

By David Blakeslee, Ram Fishman, and Veena Srinivasan

American Economic Review, January 2020

Worsening environmental conditions threaten to undermine progress in reducing rural poverty. Little is known, however, about the prospects for farmer adaptations to mitigate this threat, in particular through opportunities for income diversification prese...

The Macrogenoeconomics of Comparative Development

By Quamrul H. Ashraf and Oded Galor

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2018

The importance of evolutionary forces for comparative economic performance across societies has been the focus of a vibrant literature, highlighting the roles played by the Neolithic Revolution as well as the prehistoric "out of Africa" migration of ana...

Rising Government Debt: Causes and Solutions for a Decades-Old Trend

[Symposium: Fiscal Policy]

By Pierre Yared

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2019

Over the past four decades, government debt as a fraction of GDP has been on an upward trajectory in advanced economies, approaching levels not reached since World War II. While normative macroeconomic theories can explain the increase in the level of d...

Report of the Editor: American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

By Johannes Hörner

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2019

Artificial Intelligence: The Ambiguous Labor Market Impact of Automating Prediction

[Symposium: Automation and Employment]

By Ajay Agrawal, Joshua S. Gans, and Avi Goldfarb

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2019

Recent advances in artificial intelligence are primarily driven by machine learning, a prediction technology. Prediction is useful because it is an input into decision-making. In order to appreciate the impact of artificial intelligence on jobs, it is imp...

Payroll Taxes, Firm Behavior, and Rent Sharing: Evidence from a Young Workers' Tax Cut in Sweden

By Emmanuel Saez, Benjamin Schoefer, and David Seim

American Economic Review, May 2019

This paper uses administrative data to analyze a large employer-borne payroll tax rate cut for young workers in Sweden. We find no effect on net-of-tax wages of young treated workers relative to slightly older untreated workers, and a 2–3 percentage poi...

Temperature and Decisions: Evidence from 207,000 Court Cases

By Anthony Heyes and Soodeh Saberian

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2019

We analyze the impact of outdoor temperature on high-stakes decisions (immigration adjudications) made by professional decision-makers (US immigration judges). In our preferred specification, which includes spatial, temporal, and judge fixed effects, and ...

The Changing (Dis-)utility of Work

[Symposium: Incentives in the Workplace]

By Greg Kaplan and Sam Schulhofer-Wohl

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2018

We study how changes in the distribution of occupations have affected the aggregate non-pecuniary costs and benefits of working. The physical toll of work is less now than in 1950, with workers shifting away from occupations in which people report experie...

Taxes and US Oil Production: Evidence from California and the Windfall Profit Tax

By Nirupama L. Rao

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2018

The recent boom in U.S. oil production has prompted debates on levying new taxes on oil. This paper uses new well-level production data and price variation from federal oil taxes and price controls to assess how taxes affected production. After-tax price ...

The Intensity of Job Search and Search Duration

By R. Jason Faberman and Marianna Kudlyak

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2019

We use online job application data to study the relationship between search intensity and search duration. The data allow us to control for job seeker composition and the evolution of available job openings over the duration of search. We find that, withi...

Economic Insecurity and the Causes of Populism, Reconsidered

[Symposium: Modern Populism]

By Yotam Margalit

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2019

Growing conventional wisdom holds that a chief driver of the populist vote is economic insecurity. I contend that this view overstates the role of economic insecurity as an explanation in several ways. First, it conflates the significance of economic in...

Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

By Nicholas Bloom, Charles I. Jones, John Van Reenen, and Michael Webb

American Economic Review, April 2020

Long-run growth in many models is the product of two terms: the effective number of researchers and their research productivity. We present evidence from various industries, products, and firms showing that research effort is rising substantially while re...

Industrial Espionage and Productivity

By Albrecht Glitz and Erik Meyersson

American Economic Review, April 2020

In this paper, we investigate the economic returns to industrial espionage. We show that the flow of information provided by East German informants in the West over the period 1970–1989 led to a significant narrowing of sectoral TFP gaps between West an...