Information Design and Strategic Communication

By Daniel Krähmer

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2021

I study sender-receiver games where the receiver can disclose information to the sender by designing an information structure. I show that by secretly randomizing over information structures, the receiver can virtually attain her complete information payo...

Internal Deadlines, Drug Approvals, and Safety Problems

By Lauren Cohen, Umit G. Gurun, and Danielle Li

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2021

Absent explicit quotas, incentives, reporting, or fiscal year-end motives, drug approvals around the world surge in December, at month-ends, and before respective major national holidays. Drugs approved before these informal deadlines are associated with ...

Trade Shocks and Labor Market Adjustment

By Ryan Kim and Jonathan Vogel

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2021

We develop a framework to analyze the impact of trade shocks on a range of labor market adjustment margins in economies with a large number of sectors and labor groups. We provide analytic results characterizing equilibria. We show that labor groups earni...

Front Matter

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2021

Job Loss, Credit, and Crime in Colombia

By Gaurav Khanna, Carlos Medina, Anant Nyshadham, Christian Posso, and Jorge Tamayo

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2021

We investigate the effects of job displacement, as a result of mass layoffs, on criminal arrests using a matched employer-employee crime dataset from Medellín, Colombia. Job displacement leads to immediate and persistent earnings losses and higher probab...

The unemployment insurance tax hangover

[Research Highlight]

February 25, 2021

A tax spike on companies after layoffs is discouraging them from rehiring when business turns around.

Unemployment Insurance Taxes and Labor Demand: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Administrative Data

By Andrew C. Johnston

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2021

To finance unemployment insurance, states raise payroll tax rates on employers who engage in layoffs. Tax rates are, therefore, highest for firms after downturns, potentially hampering labor-market recovery. Using full-population, administrative records f...

The globalization of American universities

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Foreign students are a growing presence on college campuses. Whether they stay in the United States after graduation largely depends on job opportunities back home.

Call for Papers on Inequality for the Statistics, Politics and Policy journal

[News]

March 02, 2021

The deadline for submission is August 1, 2021.

Supreme polarization

[Research Highlight]

February 26, 2021

University of Chicago law professor Daniel Hemel discusses whether the nation’s highest court is facing a legitimacy crisis and, if so, what to do about it.

Recorded sessions from the 2021 ASSA Annual Meeting are now available, compliments of the AEA.

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View research on a wide variety of economics topics presented by speakers from all areas of the discipline.

Good-bye Lenin (or Not?): The Effect of Communism on People's Preferences

By Alberto Alesina and Nicola Fuchs-Schündeln

American Economic Review, September 2007

Preferences for redistribution, as well as the generosity of welfare states, differ significantly across countries. This paper tests whether there exists a feedback process of the economic regime on individual preferences. We exploit the experiment of Ger...

Behavioral and Experimental Macroeconomics and Policy Analysis: A Complex Systems Approach

By Cars Hommes

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2021

This survey discusses behavioral and experimental macroeconomics, emphasizing a complex systems perspective. The economy consists of boundedly rational heterogeneous agents who do not fully understand their complex environment and use simple decision he...

Economic Inequality in Preindustrial Times: Europe and Beyond

By Guido Alfani

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2021

Recent literature has reconstructed estimates of wealth and income inequality for a range of preindustrial, mostly European, societies covering medieval and early modern times, occasionally reaching back to antiquity and even prehistory. These estimates...

Capital Controls: Theory and Evidence

By Bilge Erten, Anton Korinek, and José Antonio Ocampo

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2021

This paper synthesizes recent advances in the theoretical and empirical literature on capital controls. We start by observing that international capital flows have both benefits and costs, but some of these are not internalized by individual actors and ...

Directed Search and Competitive Search Equilibrium: A Guided Tour

By Randall Wright, Philipp Kircher, Benoît Julien, and Veronica Guerrieri

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2021

This essay surveys the literature on directed search and competitive search equilibrium, covering theory and a variety of applications. These models share features with traditional search theory, but also differ in important ways. They share features with...

Planning on the Potomac: A Review Essay on Jason E. Taylor's Deconstructing the Monolith: The Microeconomics of the National Industrial Recovery Act

By Joshua K. Hausman

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2021

Taylor (2019) details heterogeneity in the effects of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) across industries and across time. Through first the President's Reemployment Act (PRA) and then industry-specific "codes of fair competition," the NIRA rais...

Back to the Good—or Were They the Bad—Old Days of Antitrust? A Review Essay of Jonathan B. Baker's The Antitrust Paradigm: Restoring a Competitive Economy

By Clifford Winston

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2021

This essay reviews Jonathan Baker's important book, The Antitrust Paradigm: Restoring a Competitive Economy, to frame the debate over appropriate antitrust policy and enforcement. Baker argues that competition is inadequate in many US markets and...

Review of Russia's Crony Capitalism: The Path from Market Economy to Kleptocracy by Anders Åslund

By Michael Alexeev

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2021

Anders Åslund provides a comprehensive description of the main political and economic events of Vladimir Putin's 20 years at the helm of the country. In politics, Åslund shows how Putin skillfully maneuvered to destroy democracy in Russia. I argue that ...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2021