Ending Rent Control Reduced Crime in Cambridge

By David H. Autor, Christopher J. Palmer, and Parag A. Pathak

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Using detailed location-specific criminal incident-level data, we find that sudden rent decontrol in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1995 caused overall crime to fall by 16 percent—approximately 1,200 crimes annually. We estimate that this annual direct ben...

Media Bias in China

By Bei Qin, David Strömberg, and Yanhui Wu

American Economic Review, September 2018

This paper examines whether and how market competition affected the political bias of government-owned newspapers in China from 1981 to 2011. We measure media bias based on coverage of government mouthpiece content (propaganda) relative to commercial cont...

Does Electoral Competition Curb Party Favoritism?

By Marta Curto-Grau, Albert Solé-Ollé, and Pilar Sorribas-Navarro

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2018

We study whether incumbents facing uncontested elections channel public spending towards co-partisan officials more than is the case of incumbents that are worried about reelection. We draw on data on capital transfers allocated by Spanish regions to loca...

Cash-Flow Taxes in an International Setting

By Alan J. Auerbach and Michael P. Devereux

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2018

We model the effects of cash-flow taxes, differing according to the location of the tax, on the behavior of a multinational producing and selling in two countries with three sources of economic rent: a fixed basic-production factor (located with initial p...

How Efficient Is Dynamic Competition? The Case of Price as Investment

By David Besanko, Ulrich Doraszelski, and Yaroslav Kryukov

American Economic Review, September 2019

We study industries where the price that a firm sets serves as an investment into lower cost or higher demand. We assess the welfare implications of the ensuing competition for the market using analytical and numerical approaches to compare the equilibria...

Bank Networks and Systemic Risk: Evidence from the National Banking Acts

By Haelim Anderson, Mark Paddrik, and Jessie Jiaxu Wang

American Economic Review, September 2019

The National Banking Acts (NBAs) of 1863–1864 established rules governing the amounts and locations of interbank deposits, thereby reshaping the bank networks. Using unique data on bank balance sheets and detailed interbank deposits in 1862 and 1867 in ...

In Search of Labor Demand

By Paul Beaudry, David A. Green, and Ben M. Sand

American Economic Review, September 2018

We propose and estimate a novel specification of labor demand which encompasses search frictions and the role of entrepreneurs in new firm creation. Using city-industry variation over four decades, we estimate the wage elasticity of employment demand to b...

Employment Adjustment and Part-Time Work: Lessons from the United States and the United Kingdom

By Daniel Borowczyk-Martins and Etienne Lalé

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2019

We document that fluctuations in part-time employment play a major role in movements in hours per worker during cyclical swings in the labor market. Building on this result, we develop a stock-flow framework to describe the dynamics of part-time employmen...

Approximating the Cost-of-Living Index for a Storable Good

By Matthew Osborne

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2018

This paper estimates a cost-of-living index using a dynamic structural model for two storable product categories. In each category, regime shifts to higher or lower retail prices are observed. Fixed-base indexes do a poor job of capturing changes in welfa...

Moved to Opportunity: The Long-Run Effects of Public Housing Demolition on Children

By Eric Chyn

American Economic Review, October 2018

This paper provides new evidence on the effects of moving out of disadvantaged neighborhoods on the long-run outcomes of children. I study public housing demolitions in Chicago, which forced low-income households to relocate to less disadvantaged neighbor...

Bond Convenience Yields and Exchange Rate Dynamics

By Rosen Valchev

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2020

This paper proposes a new explanation for the failure of Uncovered Interest Parity (UIP) that rationalizes both the classic UIP puzzle and the evidence that the puzzle reverses direction at longer horizons. In the model, excess currency returns arise as c...

The Decline, Rebound, and Further Rise in SNAP Enrollment: Disentangling Business Cycle Fluctuations and Policy Changes

By Peter Ganong and Jeffrey B. Liebman

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2018

One-in-seven Americans received benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program in 2011, an all-time high. We analyze changes in program enrollment over the past two decades, quantifying the contributions of unemployment and state policy chang...

Spatial Misallocation and Rent Controls

By Guillaume Chapelle, Etienne Wasmer, and Pierre-Henri Bono

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

In many global cities the rental housing market is partially regulated. We document that the Paris housing market is dual: a flexible rent sector coexists with a large controlled rent sector. The two sectors have very different rent gradients towards the ...

The Effect of Public Pension Wealth on Saving and Expenditure

By Marta Lachowska and Michał Myck

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2018

This paper examines the degree of substitution between public pension wealth and private saving by studying Poland's 1999 pension reform. The analysis identifies the effect of pension wealth on private saving using cohort-by-time variation in pension weal...

Lerner Symmetry: A Modern Treatment

By Arnaud Costinot and Iván Werning

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2019

Which policies are protectionist and which ones are not? The Lerner Symmetry Theorem establishes that import tariffs and export taxes are equally protectionist. In this paper we provide a modern treatment of this classical result, highlighting the importa...

Export Markets and Labor Allocation in a Low-Income Country

By Brian McCaig and Nina Pavcnik

American Economic Review, July 2018

We study the effects of a positive export shock on labor allocation between the informal, microenterprise sector and the formal firm sector in a low-income country. The United States-Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement led to large reductions in US tariffs ...

The Effect of House Prices on Household Borrowing: A New Approach

By James Cloyne, Kilian Huber, Ethan Ilzetzki, and Henrik Kleven

American Economic Review, June 2019

We investigate the effect of house prices on household borrowing using administrative mortgage data from the United Kingdom and a new empirical approach. The data contain household-level information on house prices and borrowing in a panel of homeowners, ...

The Causal Effect of Competition on Prices and Quality: Evidence from a Field Experiment

By Matias Busso and Sebastian Galiani

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2019

This paper provides experimental evidence on the effect of increased competition on prices and quality in the retail sector. We randomized the entry of 61 firms into 72 markets serving the beneficiaries of a conditional cash transfer program in the Domini...

The Formation of Expectations, Inflation, and the Phillips Curve

By Olivier Coibion, Yuriy Gorodnichenko, and Rupal Kamdar

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2018

This paper argues for a careful (re)consideration of the expectations formation process and a more systematic inclusion of real-time expectations through survey data in macroeconomic analyses. While the rational expectations revolution has allowed for g...

Citations in Economics: Measurement, Uses, and Impacts

By Daniel S. Hamermesh

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2018

I describe and compare sources of data on citations in economics and the statistics derived from them. Constructing data sets of the post-publication citation histories of articles published in the "top five" journals in the 1970s and 2000s, I examine dis...