ASSA 2021 Live-Streamed Sessions

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Selected sessions from the annual meeting will be live-streamed on Youtube.

Front Matter

American Economic Review, January 2021

Equilibrium Technology Diffusion, Trade, and Growth

By Jesse Perla, Christopher Tonetti, and Michael E. Waugh

American Economic Review, January 2021

We study how opening to trade affects economic growth in a model where heterogeneous firms can adopt new technologies already in use by other firms in their home country. We characterize the growth rate using a summary statistic of the profit distribution...

Lumpy Investment, Business Cycles, and Stimulus Policy

By Thomas Winberry

American Economic Review, January 2021

I study the aggregate implications of micro-level lumpy investment in a model consistent with the empirical dynamics of the real interest rate. The elasticity of aggregate investment with respect to shocks is procyclical because more firms are likely to m...

Lack of Selection and Limits to Delegation: Firm Dynamics in Developing Countries

By Ufuk Akcigit, Harun Alp, and Michael Peters

American Economic Review, January 2021

Delegating managerial tasks is essential for firm growth. Most firms in developing countries, however, do not hire outside managers but instead rely on family members. In this paper, we ask if this lack of managerial delegation can explain why firms in po...

Asymmetric Consumption Smoothing

By Brian Baugh, Itzhak Ben-David, Hoonsuk Park, and Jonathan A. Parker

American Economic Review, January 2021

Analyzing account-level data from an account aggregator, we find that households increase consumption when they receive expected tax refunds, as if they face liquidity constraints. However, these same households smooth consumption when making payments in ...

Politically Feasible Reforms of Nonlinear Tax Systems

By Felix J. Bierbrauer, Pierre C. Boyer, and Andreas Peichl

American Economic Review, January 2021

We study reforms of nonlinear income tax systems from a political economy perspective. We present a median voter theorem for monotonic tax reforms, reforms so that the change in the tax burden is a monotonic function of income. We also provide an empirica...

Job Seekers' Perceptions and Employment Prospects: Heterogeneity, Duration Dependence, and Bias

By Andreas I. Mueller, Johannes Spinnewijn, and Giorgio Topa

American Economic Review, January 2021

This paper uses job seekers' elicited beliefs about job finding to disentangle the sources of the decline in job-finding rates by duration of unemployment. We document that beliefs have strong predictive power for job finding, but are not revised downward...

Going Negative at the Zero Lower Bound: The Effects of Negative Nominal Interest Rates

By Mauricio Ulate

American Economic Review, January 2021

After the Great Recession several central banks started setting negative nominal interest rates in an expansionary attempt, but the effectiveness of this measure remains unclear. Negative rates can stimulate the economy by lowering the rates that commerci...

Using Models to Persuade

By Joshua Schwartzstein and Adi Sunderam

American Economic Review, January 2021

We present a framework where "model persuaders" influence receivers' beliefs by proposing models that organize past data to make predictions. Receivers are assumed to find models more compelling when they better explain the data, fixing receivers' prior b...

2020 in Research Highlights

[Research Highlight]

December 17, 2020

Economists tackled racial discrimination, border walls, collusion, and more.

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2021

Gambling, Saving, and Lumpy Liquidity Needs

By Sylvan Herskowitz

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2021

I present evidence that unmet liquidity needs for indivisible, "lumpy," expenditures increase demand for betting as a second-best method of liquidity generation in the presence of financial constraints. With a sample of 1,708 sports bettors in Kampala, Ug...

The Black-White Gap in Noncognitive Skills among Elementary School Children

By Todd Elder and Yuqing Zhou

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2021

Using two nationally representative datasets, we find large differences between Black and White children in teacher-reported measures of noncognitive skills. We show that teacher reports understate true Black-White skill gaps because of reference bias: te...

Turbulence, Firm Decentralization, and Growth in Bad Times

By Philippe Aghion, Nicholas Bloom, Brian Lucking, Raffaella Sadun, and John Van Reenen

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2021

What is the optimal form of firm organization during "bad times"? The greater turbulence following macro shocks may benefit decentralized firms because the value of local information increases (the "localist" view). On the other hand, the need to make t...

A Dose of Managed Care: Controlling Drug Spending in Medicaid

By David Dranove, Christopher Ody, and Amanda Starc

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2021

We study the effect of privatizing Medicaid drug benefits on drug prices and utilization. Drug spending would decrease by 21.3 percent if private insurers administered all drug benefits. One-third of the decrease is driven by private insurers' ability to ...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2021

Are We Approaching an Economic Singularity? Information Technology and the Future of Economic Growth

By William D. Nordhaus

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2021

What are the prospects for long-run economic growth? One prominent line of economic thinking is the trend toward stagnation. Stagnationism has a long history in economics, beginning prominently with Malthus and occasionally surfacing in different guises. ...

Consumption Insurance against Wage Risk: Family Labor Supply and Optimal Progressive Income Taxation

By Chunzan Wu and Dirk Krueger

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2021

We show that a calibrated life cycle two-earner household model with endogenous labor supply can rationalize the extent of consumption insurance against shocks to male and female wages, as estimated empirically by Blundell, Pistaferri, and Saporta-Ekste...

Optimal Positive Capital Taxes at Interior Steady States

By Jess Benhabib and Bálint Szőke

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2021

We generalize recent results of Bassetto and Benhabib (2006 ) and Straub and Werning (2019 ) in a neoclassical model with endogenous labor-leisure choice where all agents are allowed to save and accumulate capital. We provide a sufficient condition under ...