Family Health Behaviors

By Itzik Fadlon and Torben Heien Nielsen

American Economic Review, September 2019

We study how health behaviors are shaped through family spillovers. We leverage administrative data to identify the effects of health shocks on family members' consumption of preventive care and health-related behaviors, constructing counterfactuals for a...

Paternalism against Veblen: Optimal Taxation and Non-respected Preferences for Social Comparisons

By Thomas Aronsson and Olof Johansson-Stenman

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2018

This paper compares optimal nonlinear income tax policies of welfarist and paternalist governments, where the latter does not respect individual preferences regarding relative consumption. Consistent with previous findings, relative consumption concerns t...

Ten Years after the Financial Crisis: What Have We Learned from the Renaissance in Fiscal Research?

[Symposium: Fiscal Policy]

By Valerie A. Ramey

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2019

This paper takes stock of what we have learned from the "Renaissance" in fiscal research in the ten years since the financial crisis. I first discuss the new innovations in methodology and various strengths and weaknesses of the main approaches to estimat...

Compensation and Incentives in the Workplace

[Symposium: Incentives in the Workplace]

By Edward P. Lazear

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2018

Labor is supplied because most of us must work to live. Indeed, it is called "work" in part because without compensation, the overwhelming majority of workers would not otherwise perform the tasks. The theme of this essay is that incentives affect behavio...

Policy Evolution under the Clean Air Act

[Symposium: Fiftieth Anniversary of the Clean Air and Water Acts]

By Richard Schmalensee and Robert N. Stavins

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2019

The US Clean Air Act, passed in 1970 with strong bipartisan support, was the first environmental law to give the federal government a serious regulatory role, established the architecture of the US air pollution control system, and became a model for su...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2018

The Effects of Rent Control Expansion on Tenants, Landlords, and Inequality: Evidence from San Francisco

By Rebecca Diamond, Tim McQuade, and Franklin Qian

American Economic Review, September 2019

Using a 1994 law change, we exploit quasi-experimental variation in the assignment of rent control in San Francisco to study its impacts on tenants and landlords. Leveraging new data tracking individuals' migration, we find rent control limits renters' mo...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, February 2018

Federal Coal Program Reform, the Clean Power Plan, and the Interaction of Upstream and Downstream Climate Policies

By Todd D. Gerarden, W. Spencer Reeder, and James H. Stock

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2020

Can supply-side environmental policies that limit the extraction of fossil fuels reduce CO2 emissions? This paper studies interactions between a specific supply-side policy—a carbon surcharge on federal coal royalties—and regulation of emis...

Coercive Trade Policy

By Vincent Anesi and Giovanni Facchini

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2019

Coercion is used by one government (the "sender") to influence the trade practices of another (the "target"). We build a two-country trade model in which coercion can be exercised unilaterally or channeled through a "weak" international organization witho...

Quantifying Information and Uncertainty

By Alexander Frankel and Emir Kamenica

American Economic Review, October 2019

We examine ways to measure the amount of information generated by a piece of news and the amount of uncertainty implicit in a given belief. Say a measure of information is valid if it corresponds to the value of news in some decision problem. Say a measur...

Heterogeneity, Inattention, and Bayesian Updates

By Raffaella Giacomini, Vasiliki Skreta, and Javier Turen

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2020

We formulate a theory of expectations updating that fits the dynamics of accuracy and disagreement in a new survey of professional forecasters. We document new stylized facts, including the puzzling persistence of disagreement as uncertainty resolves. Our...

Credibility of Crime Allegations

By Frances Xu Lee and Wing Suen

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2020

The lack of hard evidence in allegations about sexual misconduct makes it difficult to separate true allegations from false ones. We provide a model in which victims and potential libelers face the same costs and benefits from making an allegation, but th...

Time Discounting and Wealth Inequality

By Thomas Epper, Ernst Fehr, Helga Fehr-Duda, Claus Thustrup Kreiner, David Dreyer Lassen, Søren Leth-Petersen, and Gregers Nytoft Rasmussen

American Economic Review, April 2020

This paper documents a large association between individuals' time discounting in incentivized experiments and their positions in the real-life wealth distribution derived from Danish high-quality administrative data for a large sample of middle-aged indi...

Nowcasting Gentrification: Using Yelp Data to Quantify Neighborhood Change

By Edward L. Glaeser, Hyunjin Kim, and Michael Luca

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Data from digital platforms have the potential to improve our understanding of gentrification, both by predicting gentrification and by characterizing the local economy of gentrifying neighborhoods. To explore, we identify gentrifying neighborhoods using ...

Environmental Justice: The Economics of Race, Place, and Pollution

By Spencer Banzhaf, Lala Ma, and Christopher Timmins

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2019

The grassroots movement that placed environmental justice issues on the national stage around 1980 was soon followed up by research documenting the correlation between pollution and race and poverty. This work has established inequitable exposure to nui...

What Is the Impact of Food Stamps on Prices and Products Variety? The Importance of the Supply Response

By Xavier Jaravel

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Comparing US states that implemented policies generating state-specific variation in the take-up rate for food stamps, I find that food stamp eligible households experienced lower inflation and a faster increase in product variety in states with a larger ...

WTO Accession and Performance of Chinese Manufacturing Firms: Corrigendum

By Loren Brandt, Johannes Van Biesebroeck, Luhang Wang, and Yifan Zhang

American Economic Review, April 2019

A Method to Link Advances in Artificial Intelligence to Occupational Abilities

By Edward W. Felten, Manav Raj, and Robert Seamans

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Prior episodes of automation have led to economic growth and also to many changes in the workplace. We expect the same from artificial intelligence (AI). The link between AI and labor is complex, however. To assist researchers and policymakers, we provide...

On the Relationship between Cognitive Ability and Risk Preference

[Symposium: Risk in Economics and Psychology]

By Thomas Dohmen, Armin Falk, David Huffman, and Uwe Sunde

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2018

This paper will focus on the relationship between cognitive ability and decision-making under risk and uncertainty. Taken as a whole, this research indicates that cognitive ability is associated with risk-taking behavior in various contexts and life dom...