Economics after Neoliberalism: Introducing the EfIP Project

By Suresh Naidu, Dani Rodrik, and Gabriel Zucman

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

The tools of contemporary economics are critical to developing a policy framework for "inclusive prosperity," which requires that we consider the whole distribution of outcomes and human prosperity broadly, including health, climate change, political righ...

Shrinking Capitalism

By Samuel Bowles and Wendy Carlin

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

A defining feature of capitalism is that work using privately owned capital goods under the control of an owner or manager in return for wages produces goods to be sold for profit. The domain in which this system of production works tolerably well is shri...

The Political Limits of Economics

By Luigi Zingales

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

We economists do not apply economic tools to analyze our own discipline. If we were to do so, we would discover that we have self-motivated explanations for why political systems fail, explanations that entitle us to impose our views on elected representa...

Competing with Robots: Firm-Level Evidence from France

By Daron Acemoglu, Claire Lelarge, and Pascual Restrepo

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

We study the firm-level implications of robot adoption in France. Of 55,390 firms in our sample, 598 adopted robots between 2010 and 2015, but these firms accounted for 20 percent of manufacturing employment. Adopters experienced significant declines in l...

Firm-Level Automation: Evidence from the Netherlands

By James Bessen, Maarten Goos, Anna Salomons, and Wiljan van den Berge

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

Studying firm-level adjustments is important for understanding the economic effects of workplace automation. So far, emerging firm-level evidence is focused on robotics and the manufacturing sector. In this paper, we document that the adoption of automati...

Within-Occupation Changes Dominate Changes in What Workers Do: A Shift-Share Decomposition, 2005–2015

By Richard B. Freeman, Ina Ganguli, and Michael J. Handel

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

This paper measures aggregate changes in job characteristics in the United States from 2005 to 2015 and decomposes those changes into components representing shifts within occupations and changes in occupational employment shares. Per our title, within-oc...

Artificial Intelligence in Health Care? Evidence from Online Job Postings

By Avi Goldfarb, Bledi Taska, and Florenta Teodoridis

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

This paper documents a puzzle. Despite the numerous popular press discussions of artificial intelligence (AI) in health care, there has been relatively little adoption. Using data from Burning Glass Technologies on millions of online job postings, we find...

The Impact of Parental Wealth on College Degree Attainment: Evidence from the Housing Boom and Bust

By Rucker C. Johnson

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

This study provides new evidence on the impact of parental wealth on college degree attainment. Using geocoded data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (1968–2017) linked to local housing price data from the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the empir...

Wealth Stratification and Portfolio Choice

By Karl David Boulware and Kenneth N. Kuttner

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

This paper investigates the past decade's increase in wealth inequality along racial and ethnic lines. Using a new measure of wealth stratification based on data from the Survey of Consumer Finances, we find that stratification increased significantly for...

The Impact of School Finance Reforms on Local Tax Revenues

By Patrick Bayer, Peter Q. Blair, and Kenneth Whaley

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

For many applications in public finance, it is difficult to find a source of exogeneous variation in local taxes. In this paper we use an event study design to show that the school finance reforms are one potential source of exogenous variation in taxes. ...

Do Immigration Raids Deter Head Start Enrollment?

By Robert Santillano, Stephanie Potochnick, and Jade Jenkins

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

We investigate the local deterrence effect of immigration raids on Hispanic Head Start enrollment. Using a nationwide panel of raids from 2006 to 2008, a time of intensified immigration enforcement across communities in the US, we find robust evidence tha...

The Role of Broad-Based Employee Ownership Opportunities in Prisoner Reentry

By Robynn Cox

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

This research investigates the relationship between Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs) and criminal participation as measured by arrests, conviction, and incarceration among formerly incarcerated individuals. Using the 1997 National Longitudinal Surve...

Immigration Enforcement, Deterrence, and Crime

By Sandra Orozco-Aleman and Heriberto Gonzalez-Lozano

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

Does interior enforcement selectively deter Mexican migration? Our study shows that more aggressive enforcement increases the likelihood of having immigrants with US work experience and with jobs secured in the United States before their migration. We als...

A Look Ahead at the 2020 US Elections: The Role of Candidate Diversity in Political Participation

By Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes and Jose R. Bucheli

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

An increasingly diverse population in the United States has given rise to a growing body of literature that analyzes the causes and consequences of descriptive representation. Using individual-level representative data on registration and voting for the e...

Hispanic and Asian Earnings Inequality: New Workers and Immigrants

By Randall Akee, Maggie R. Jones, Sonya R. Porter, and Emilia Simeonova

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

Using confidential-use, individual-level Internal Revenue Service and US Census data, we follow the earnings of Hispanics and Asians between the ages of 18–45 with panel data that spans the years 2005–2014. These two groups represent the largest immig...

Disparities in Police Award Nominations: Evidence from Chicago

By Nayoung Rim, Bocar Ba, and Roman Rivera

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

This study provides evidence of racial and gender disparities among police officers by examining a key metric of internal recognition: departmental award nominations. Using a novel dataset on Chicago police officers, we find that black (female) officers a...

Do Nuisance Ordinances Increase Eviction Risk?

By Sarah Kroeger and Giulia La Mattina

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

We estimate the causal impact of criminal activity nuisance ordinances on tenant evictions and eviction filings. These ordinances penalize property owners when certain types of illegal activity occur on or near their property, reported primarily through 9...

Queens of the Desert: Convictism and Marital Attitudes across Australia

By Victoria Baranov, Ralph De Haas, and Pauline Grosjean

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

We merge data on spatial variation in the presence of convicts across eighteenth and nineteenth century Australia with results from the country's 2017 poll on same-sex marriage and with household survey data. These combined data allow us to identify the l...

Banking Panics as Endogenous Disasters and the Welfare Gains from Macroprudential Policy

By Mark Gertler, Nobuhiro Kiyotaki, and Andrea Prestipino

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

We study the welfare effects of macroprudential policy in a macroeconomic model of banking instability. Banking panics are endogenous economic disasters caused by banks' excessive leverage during credit booms. The model matches the frequency and severity ...

NKV: A New Keynesian Model with Vulnerability

By Tobias Adrian, Fernando Duarte, Nellie Liang, and Pawel Zabczyk

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

We present a New Keynesian model with endogenous risk. The conditional output gap volatility depends on the price of risk, giving rise to a vulnerability channel of monetary policy. Lower interest rates not only shift consumption intertemporally but also ...