Money well spent

[Research Highlight]

February 15, 2022

Jason Baron discusses the effects of different types of school spending on student outcomes.

Quarters vs. semesters

[Research Highlight]

February 09, 2022

How does switching to a different academic calendar impact students?

Semesters or Quarters? The Effect of the Academic Calendar on Postsecondary Student Outcomes

By Valerie Bostwick, Stefanie Fischer, and Matthew Lang

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2022

There exists a long-standing debate in higher education on which academic calendar is optimal. Using panel data on the near universe of four-year nonprofit institutions and leveraging quasi-experimental variation in calendars across institutions and years...

The impact of the Affordable Care Act on hospital revenue

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How did the Medicaid expansion affect the finances of health care facilities in California?

Immigration and Entrepreneurship in the United States

By Pierre Azoulay, Benjamin F. Jones, J. Daniel Kim, and Javier Miranda

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2022

Immigrants can expand labor supply and compete for jobs with native-born workers. But immigrants may also start new firms, expanding labor demand. This paper uses US administrative data and other data sources to study the role of immigrants in entrepreneu...

Risk Exposure and Acquisition of Macroeconomic Information

By Christopher Roth, Sonja Settele, and Johannes Wohlfart

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2022

We conduct an experiment with a representative sample from the United States to study households' demand for macroeconomic information. Respondents who learn of a higher personal exposure to unemployment risk during recessions increase their demand for an...

Gotta Have Money to Make Money? Bargaining Behavior and Financial Need of Microentrepreneurs

By Morgan Hardy, Gisella Kagy, and Lena Song

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2022

Bargaining over real prices with microenterprise owners in Ghana, we show that sellers with less per capita household liquidity agree to lower sale prices. This relationship is robust across firms and within firms over time, even after controlling for a p...

Forward Guidance and Durable Goods Demand

By Alisdair McKay and Johannes F. Wieland

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2022

We study the monetary transmission mechanism in a quantitative fixed-cost model of durable goods demand. We show that aggregate demand is substantially more sensitive to contemporaneous interest rates than to forward guidance about future interest rates. ...

Motivated Beliefs and Anticipation of Uncertainty Resolution

By Christoph Drobner

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2022

Manipulating subjects' expectations about the resolution of uncertainty, I show that subjects update beliefs about ego-relevant information optimistically when they expect no resolution of uncertainty but neutrally when they expect immediate uncertainty r...

Persuasion with Correlation Neglect: A Full Manipulation Result

By Gilat Levy, Inés Moreno de Barreda, and Ronny Razin

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2022

We consider an information design problem in which a sender tries to persuade a receiver that has "correlation neglect," i.e., fails to understand that signals might be correlated. We show that a sender with unlimited number of signals can fully manipulat...

Centralized Matching with Incomplete Information

By Marcelo Ariel Fernandez, Kirill Rudov, and Leeat Yariv

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2022

We study the impacts of incomplete information on centralized one-to-one matching markets. We focus on the commonly used Deferred Acceptance mechanism (Gale and Shapley 1962). We show that many complete-information results are fragile to a small infusion ...

Front Matter

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2022

Can Technology Solve the Principal-Agent Problem? Evidence from China's War on Air Pollution

By Michael Greenstone, Guojun He, Ruixue Jia, and Tong Liu

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2022

We examine the introduction of automatic air pollution monitoring to counter suspected tampering at the local level, a central feature of China's "war on pollution." Exploiting 654 regression discontinuity designs based on city-level variation in the day ...

Summer Economics Fellows Program Sponsors

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A directory of the Summer Economics Fellows Program Sponsors

Front Matter

American Economic Review, March 2022

Employer Incentives and Distortions in Health Insurance Design: Implications for Welfare and Costs

By Nicholas Tilipman

American Economic Review, March 2022

This paper studies employer incentives in designing health insurance provider networks and whether observed offerings reflect preferences that are aligned with employees. I estimate a model of supply and demand where I endogenize employer health plan offe...

Estimating Social Preferences and Gift Exchange at Work

By Stefano DellaVigna, John A. List, Ulrike Malmendier, and Gautam Rao

American Economic Review, March 2022

We design three field experiments to estimate how workers' social preferences toward their employer motivates their work effort. We vary the pay rates offered to workers, the return to the employer, and employer generosity demonstrated via unexpected gift...

State-Dependent Effects of Monetary Policy: The Refinancing Channel

By Martin Eichenbaum, Sergio Rebelo, and Arlene Wong

American Economic Review, March 2022

This paper studies how the impact of monetary policy depends on the distribution of savings from refinancing mortgages. We show that the efficacy of monetary policy is state dependent, varying in a systematic way with the pool of potential savings from re...

Designing Deadlines

By Erik Madsen

American Economic Review, March 2022

I study how an organization should manage a project of uncertain scope, when it is advised by a privately informed expert who prefers to prolong his employment. The optimal long-term contract combines a deadline for project completion and incentive paymen...

Targeting High Ability Entrepreneurs Using Community Information: Mechanism Design in the Field

By Reshmaan Hussam, Natalia Rigol, and Benjamin N. Roth

American Economic Review, March 2022

Identifying high-growth microentrepreneurs in low-income countries remains a challenge due to a scarcity of verifiable information. With a cash grant experiment in India we demonstrate that community knowledge can help target high-growth microentrepreneur...