Misunderstanding Nonlinear Prices: Evidence from a Natural Experiment on Residential Electricity Demand

By Blake Shaffer

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2020

This paper examines how consumers respond to nonlinear prices. Exploiting a natural experiment with electricity consumers in British Columbia, I find evidence that some households severely misunderstand nonlinear prices—incorrectly perceiving that the m...

Adopt or Innovate: Understanding Technological Responses to Cap-and-Trade

By Raphael Calel

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2020

One important motivation for creating cap-and-trade programs for carbon emissions is the expectation that they will stimulate much-needed low-carbon innovation. I construct a new panel of British firms to investigate this hypothesis, finding that the Euro...

The Perils of High-Powered Incentives: Evidence from Colombia's False Positives

By Daron Acemoglu, Leopoldo Fergusson, James Robinson, Dario Romero, and Juan F. Vargas

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2020

We investigate the use of high-powered incentives for the Colombian military and show that this practice produced perverse side effects. Innocent civilians were killed and misrepresented as guerillas (a phenomenon known in Colombia as "false positives"). ...

Price-Linked Subsidies and Imperfect Competition in Health Insurance

By Sonia Jaffe and Mark Shepard

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2020

Policymakers subsidizing health insurance often face uncertainty about future market prices. We study the implications of one policy response: linking subsidies to prices to target a given postsubsidy premium. We show that these price-linked subsidies wea...

Long-Term Care Insurance: Information Frictions and Selection

By M. Martin Boyer, Philippe De Donder, Claude Fluet, Marie-Louise Leroux, and Pierre-Carl Michaud

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2020

This paper conducts a stated-choice experiment where respondents are asked to rate various insurance products aimed to protect against financial risks associated with long-term care needs. Using exogenous variation in prices from the survey design and ind...

Peer Effects in Residential Water Conservation: Evidence from Migration

By Bryan Bollinger, Jesse Burkhardt, and Kenneth T. Gillingham

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2020

Social interactions are widely understood to influence consumer decisions in many choice settings. This paper identifies causal peer effects in residential water conservation during the summer using variation from movers. We classify high-resolution remot...

Patient Cost-Sharing and Healthcare Utilization in Early Childhood: Evidence from a Regression Discontinuity Design

By Hsing-Wen Han, Hsien-Ming Lien, and Tzu-Ting Yang

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2020

This paper estimates the price elasticity of healthcare utilization in early childhood. We employ a regression discontinuity design by exploiting a subsidy that reduces patient cost-sharing for children under age 3 in Taiwan. Using longitudinal medical cl...

The spillover effects of trade wars

[Research Highlight]

July 21, 2020

The 2018 tariffs caused price spikes to products that weren't even protected.

The Production Relocation and Price Effects of US Trade Policy: The Case of Washing Machines

By Aaron Flaaen, Ali Hortaçsu, and Felix Tintelnot

American Economic Review, July 2020

We estimate the price effect of US import restrictions on washers. The 2012 and 2016 antidumping duties against South Korea and China were accompanied by downward or minor price movements along with production relocation to other export platform countries...

Letter to AEA Members regarding proposed bylaw amendment

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JOE Network for Employers

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Personal property as corporate collateral

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How much do changing house prices affect business investment?

Data Set Not Yet Available

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Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2020

Place-Based Policies and Spatial Disparities across European Cities

[Symposium: Place-Based Policies]

By Maximilian v. Ehrlich and Henry G. Overman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2020

Spatial disparities in income levels and worklessness in the European Union are profound, persistent and may be widening. We describe disparities across metropolitan regions and discuss theories and empirical evidence that help us understand what causes t...

Urbanization in the Developing World: Too Early or Too Slow?

[Symposium: Cities in Developing Countries]

By J. Vernon Henderson and Matthew A. Turner

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2020

We describe patterns of urbanization in the developing world and the extent to which they differ from the developed world. We consider the extent to which urbanization in the developing world can be explained by conventional models of spatial equilibriu...

Urban-Rural Gaps in the Developing World: Does Internal Migration Offer Opportunities?

[Symposium: Cities in Developing Countries]

By David Lagakos

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2020

This article provides an overview of the growing literature on urban-rural gaps in the developing world. I begin with recent evidence on the size of the gaps as measured by consumption, income, and wages, and argue that the gaps are real rather than just ...

How You Can Work to Increase the Presence and Improve the Experience of Black, Latinx, and Native American People in the Economics Profession

By Amanda Bayer, Gary A. Hoover, and Ebonya Washington

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2020

Recently in economics there has been discussion of how to increase diversity in the profession and how to improve the work life of diverse peoples. We conducted surveys and interviews with Black, Latinx and Native American people. These groups have long b...

Facts and Myths about Misperceptions

By Brendan Nyhan

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2020

Misperceptions threaten to warp mass opinion and public policy on controversial issues in politics, science, and health. What explains the prevalence and persistence of these false and unsupported beliefs, which seem to be genuinely held by many people?...

Venture Capital's Role in Financing Innovation: What We Know and How Much We Still Need to Learn

By Josh Lerner and Ramana Nanda

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2020

Venture capital is associated with some of the most high-growth and influential firms in the world. Academics and practitioners have effectively articulated the strengths of the venture model. At the same time, venture capital financing also has real li...