Voter Response to Peak and End Transfers: Evidence from a Conditional Cash Transfer Experiment

By Sebastian Galiani, Nadya Hajj, Patrick J. McEwan, Pablo Ibarrarán, and Nandita Krishnaswamy

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2019

In a Honduran field experiment, sequences of cash transfers to poor households varied in amount of the largest (peak) and last (end) transfers. Larger peak-end transfers increased voter turnout and the incumbent party's vote share in the 2013 presidential...

The road to the Industrial Revolution

[Research Highlight]

April 14, 2020

How did infrastructure accelerate economic growth in the UK?

Endogenous Infrastructure Development and Spatial Takeoff in the First Industrial Revolution

By Alex Trew

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2020

This paper develops a model in which the evolution of the transport sector occurs alongside the growth in trade and output of agricultural and manufacturing firms. Simulation output captures aspects of the historical record of England and Wales over 1710�...

Optimal Taxation with Risky Human Capital

By Marek Kapička and Julian Neira

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2019

We study optimal tax policies in a life-cycle economy with permanent ability differences and risky human capital investments that have both an unobservable component, learning effort, and an observable component, schooling. The optimal policies balance re...

Is Personal Initiative Training a Substitute or Complement to the Existing Human Capital of Women? Results from a Randomized Trial in Togo

By Francisco Campos, Michael Frese, Markus Goldstein, Leonardo Iacovone, Hillary C. Johnson, David McKenzie, and Mona Mensmann

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Personal initiative training—a psychology-based mindset training program—delivers lasting improvements for female business owners in Togo. Which types of women benefit most? Theories of dynamic complementarity would suggest training should work better...

Debt Traps? Market Vendors and Moneylender Debt in India and the Philippines

By Dean Karlan, Sendhil Mullainathan, and Benjamin N. Roth

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2019

A debt trap occurs when someone takes on a high-interest-rate loan and is barely able to pay back the interest, and thus perpetually finds themselves in debt (often by refinancing). Studying such practices is important for understanding financial decision...

Democratic Values and Institutions

By Timothy Besley and Torsten Persson

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2019

This paper builds a model of the two-way interaction between democratic values and institutions to bridge sociological research, focusing on values, with economics research, which studies strategic decisions. Some citizens hold values that make them prote...

Applying Generalized Pareto Curves to Inequality Analysis

By Thomas Blanchet, Bertrand Garbinti, Jonathan Goupille-Lebret, and Clara Martínez-Toledano

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

A generalized Pareto curve is defined as the curve of inverted Pareto coefficients b(p), where b(p) is the ratio between average income or wealth above rank p and the p-th quantile. We present this concept and show how it can be used to better estimate di...

The Persistent Power of Behavioral Change: Long-Run Impacts of Temporary Savings Subsidies for the Poor

By Simone Schaner

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2018

I use a field experiment in rural Kenya to study how temporary incentives to save impact long-run economic outcomes. Study participants randomly selected to receive large temporary interest rates on an individual bank account had significantly more income...

Corporate Income Tax, Legal Form of Organization, and Employment

By Daphne Chen, Shi Qi, and Don Schlagenhauf

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2018

A dynamic stochastic occupational choice model with heterogeneous agents is developed to evaluate the impact of a corporate income tax reduction on employment. In this framework, the key margin is the endogenous entrepreneurial choice of legal form of org...

Digital Economics

By Avi Goldfarb and Catherine Tucker

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2019

Digital technology is the representation of information in bits. This technology has reduced the cost of storage, computation, and transmission of data. Research on digital economics examines whether and how digital technology changes economic activity. I...

Fleeing a Lame Duck: Policy Uncertainty and Manufacturing Investment in US States

By Nathan Falk and Cameron A. Shelton

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2018

It is found that electorally-induced policy uncertainty decreases manufacturing investment in US states. In a state with average partisan polarization, the elasticity of election-year investment to a specific measure of policy uncertainty is -0.027. When ...

Caste and the Indian Economy

By Kaivan Munshi

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2019

Caste plays a role at every stage of an Indian's economic life, in school, university, the labor market, and into old age. The influence of caste extends beyond private economic activity into the public sphere, where caste politics determine access to p...

Partners in Crime

By Stephen B. Billings, David J. Deming, and Stephen L. Ross

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2019

Social interactions may explain the large variance in criminal activity across neighborhoods and time. We present direct evidence of social spillovers in crime using random variation in neighborhood residence along opposite sides of a newly drawn school b...

The Local Economic and Welfare Consequences of Hydraulic Fracturing

By Alexander W. Bartik, Janet Currie, Michael Greenstone, and Christopher R. Knittel

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2019

Exploiting geological variation and timing in the initiation of hydraulic fracturing, we find that fracking leads to sharp increases in oil and gas recovery and improvements in a wide set of economic indicators. There is also evidence of deterioration in ...

Multimarket Contact in the Hospital Industry

By Matt Schmitt

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2018

Hospitals in the United States increasingly belong to multihospital systems that operate in numerous geographic markets. A large literature in management and economics suggests that competition between firms may be softened as a result of multimarket cont...

The Neighborhood Impacts of Local Infrastructure Investment: Evidence from Urban Mexico

By Craig McIntosh, Tito Alegría, Gerardo Ordóñez, and René Zenteno

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2018

This paper reports on the results of a large infrastructure investment experiment in which $68 million in spending was randomly allocated across a set of low-income urban neighborhoods in Mexico. We show that the program resulted in substantial improvemen...

Medical Care Spending and Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from Workers' Compensation Reforms

By David Powell and Seth Seabury

American Economic Review, October 2018

Medical care represents an important component of workers' compensation benefits with the potential to improve health and post- injury labor outcomes, but little is known about the relationship between medical care spending and the labor outcomes of injur...

Carbon Taxes and CO₂ Emissions: Sweden as a Case Study

By Julius J. Andersson

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2019

This quasi-experimental study is the first to find a significant causal effect of carbon taxes on emissions, empirically analyzing the implementation of a carbon tax and a value-added tax on transport fuel in Sweden. After implementation, carbon dioxide e...

Independent Auditor's Report

American Economic Review, June 2018