The Economics of Viral Outbreaks

By Imran Rasul

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

The frequency and complexity of viral outbreaks is increasing over time. The economic costs of outbreaks are severe; this is not only because of increased morbidity and mortality but also because viral outbreaks—representing aggregate health shocks—ca...

Advance Market Commitments: Insights from Theory and Experience

By Michael Kremer, Jonathan Levin, and Christopher M. Snyder

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

Ten years ago, donors committed $1.5 billion to a pilot Advance Market Commitment (AMC) to help purchase pneumococcal vaccine for low-income countries. The AMC aimed to encourage the development of such vaccines, ensure distribution to children in low-inc...

Administration above Administrators: The Changing Technology of Health Care Management

By Abe Dunn, Joshua D. Gottlieb, and Adam Hale Shapiro

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

This paper measures the costs and types of administrative inputs in health care. We use data on labor and nonlabor inputs by industry and categorize them as administrative or not. We find that nonlabor inputs are a critical part of administrative spending...

Provider Discretion and Variation in Resource Allocation: The Case of Triage Decisions

By David C. Chan and Jonathan Gruber

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

One of the most challenging environments in health care is the emergency department (ED) A key decision-maker in that context is triage nurses, who assess patient illness severity and influence wait times for medical attention. We gather novel data on the...

Time Dependency in Physician Decision-Making

By Lawrence Jin, Rui Tang, Han Ye, Junjian Yi, and Songfa Zhong

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

Using data on more than 250,000 emergency department (ED) visits, we study the time-of-day effect on physician decision-making and patient outcomes. After controlling for patient characteristics, physician fixed effects, and work hours, we find that cases...

A Test of Enhancing Learning in Economics through Nudges

By Rita Balaban and Patrick Conway

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

We test for the importance of nudges in improving student performance in introductory economics courses at UNC-Chapel Hill. We use a randomized controlled trial to test the effectiveness of nudges in encouraging use of academic supports and (jointly) the ...

Diagnosing the Learning Environment for Diverse Students in Introductory Economics: An Analysis of Relevance, Belonging, and Growth Mindsets

By Amanda Bayer, Syon P. Bhanot, Erin T. Bronchetti, and Stephen A. O'Connell

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

Using administrative and survey data, we diagnose the learning environment in an introductory economics course. Relative to men from overrepresented groups, women and underrepresented minority students finish the course reporting significantly lower measu...

A Pareto-Improving Way to Teach Principles of Economics: Evidence from the University of Toronto

By Dwayne Benjamin, Avi J. Cohen, and Gillian Hamilton

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

University of Toronto undergraduates can choose between conventional and literacy-targeted (LT) principles of economics courses. We compare demographics and performance in subsequent courses for 13,000 students over 11 years and find that LT courses attra...

How Often Does Active Learning Actually Occur? Perception versus Reality

By Brandon J. Sheridan and Ben Smith

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

Substantial evidence suggests active learning pedagogies are superior to lecturing, but little evidence exists on the prevalence of such methods. Watts and Schaur (2011) find, based on self-reported data, the median instructor lectures 83 percent of the t...

Linguistic Traits and Human Capital Formation

By Oded Galor, Ömer Özak, and Assaf Sarid

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

This research establishes the influence of linguistic traits on human behavior. Exploiting variations in the languages spoken by children of migrants with identical ancestral countries of origin, the analysis indicates that the presence of periphrastic fu...

The Cost of Being Too Patient

By Paola Giuliano and Paola Sapienza

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

We study the cost of being too patient on happiness. We find that the relationship between patience and various measures of subjective well-being is hump-shaped: there exists an optimal amount of patience that maximizes happiness. Beyond this optimal leve...

Ancient Origins of the Global Variation in Economic Preferences

By Anke Becker, Benjamin Enke, and Armin Falk

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

This paper shows that contemporary population-level heterogeneity in risk aversion, time preference, altruism, positive reciprocity, negative reciprocity, and trust partly traces back to the structure of the migration patterns of our very early ancestors....

The Polarization of Reality

By Alberto Alesina, Armando Miano, and Stefanie Stantcheva

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

Americans are polarized not only in their views on policy issues and attitudes toward government and society but also in their perceptions of the same factual reality. We conceptualize how to think about the "polarization of reality" and review recent pap...

Diversity, Immigration, and Redistribution

By Alberto Alesina and Stefanie Stantcheva

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

This paper provides a simple conceptual framework that captures how different perceptions, attitudes, and biases about immigrants or minorities can shape preferences for redistribution and reviews the empirical evidence on the effects of increasing racial...

Rationing as a Determinant of Immigrant Composition and Outcomes

By Edward P. Lazear

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

Willingness to migrate is a necessary but not sufficient condition for migration from an origin to destination country. For the United States and other countries with an excess supply of immigrants, the slot-rationing rule is a key determinant of immigran...

Discrimination and the Returns to Cultural Assimilation in the Age of Mass Migration

By Ran Abramitzky, Leah Boustan, Katherine Eriksson, and Stephanie Hao

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

We document that, in the early twentieth century, children of immigrants who were given more-foreign first names completed fewer years of schooling, earned less, and married less assimilated spouses. However, we find few differences in the adult outcomes ...

Extending the Race between Education and Technology

By David Autor, Claudia Goldin, and Lawrence F. Katz

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

The race between education and technology provides a canonical framework that does a remarkable job of explaining US wage structure changes across the twentieth century. The framework involves secular increases in the demand for more-educated workers from...

College Attainment, Income Inequality, and Economic Security: A Simulation Exercise

By Brad Hershbein, Melissa S. Kearney, and Luke W. Pardue

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

We conduct an empirical simulation exercise that gauges the plausible impact of increased rates of college attainment on a variety of measures of income inequality and economic insecurity. Using two different methodological approaches⁠—a distributiona...

Unpacking Skill Bias: Automation and New Tasks

By Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

We extend the canonical model of skill-biased technical change by modeling the allocation of tasks to factors and allowing for automation and the creation of new tasks. In our model, factor prices depend on the set of tasks they perform. Automation can re...

Structural Increases in Demand for Skill after the Great Recession

By Peter Q. Blair and David J. Deming

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

In this paper, we use detailed job vacancy data to estimate changes in skill demand in the years since the Great Recession. The share of job vacancies requiring a bachelor's degree increased by more than 60 percent between 2007 and 2019, with faster growt...