Offshore Profit Shifting and Aggregate Measurement: Balance of Payments, Foreign Investment, Productivity, and the Labor Share

By Fatih Guvenen, Raymond J. Mataloni Jr., Dylan G. Rassier, and Kim J. Ruhl

American Economic Review, June 2022

We show how offshore profit shifting by US multinational enterprises affects several key measures of the US economy. Profits shifted out of the United States grew rapidly from the mid-1990s to 2010 and have since waned. From 1982–2016, on average, 38 pe...

Migrants and Firms: Evidence from China

By Clement Imbert, Marlon Seror, Yifan Zhang, and Yanos Zylberberg

American Economic Review, June 2022

How does rural-urban migration shape urban production in developing countries? We use longitudinal data on Chinese manufacturing firms between 2000 and 2006, and exploit exogenous variation in rural-urban migration induced by agricultural income shocks fo...

Concentration Thresholds for Horizontal Mergers

By Volker Nocke and Michael D. Whinston

American Economic Review, June 2022

Concentration-based thresholds for horizontal mergers, such as those in the US Horizontal Merger Guidelines, play a central role in merger analysis but their basis remains unclear. We show that there is both a theoretical and an empirical basis for focusi...

Screening Inattentive Buyers

By Jeffrey Mensch

American Economic Review, June 2022

Information plays a crucial role in mechanism design problems. A potential complication is that buyers may be inattentive, and so their information may endogenously and flexibly depend on the offered mechanism. I show that it is without loss of generality...

Spreading Gangs: Exporting US Criminal Capital to El Salvador

By Maria Micaela Sviatschi

American Economic Review, June 2022

This paper shows how deportation policies can backfire by disseminating not only ideas between countries but also criminal networks, spreading gangs, in this case, across El Salvador, and spurring migration back to the United States. In 1996, the US Illeg...

Efficient Matching in the School Choice Problem

By Philip J. Reny

American Economic Review, June 2022

Stable matchings in school choice needn't be Pareto efficient and can leave thousands of students worse off than necessary. Call a matching μ priority-neutral if no matching can make any student whose priority is violated by μ better off without violati...

Bargaining with Mechanisms

By Marcin Pęski

American Economic Review, June 2022

Two players bargain over a single indivisible good and a transfer, with one-sided incomplete information about preferences. Both players can offer arbitrary mechanisms to determine the allocation. We show that there is a unique perfect Bayesian equilibriu...

The returns to an economics degree

[Research Highlight]

May 26, 2022

Zachary Bleemer discusses why studying economics in college can lead to significantly higher career earnings.

Call for Papers: Monetary Policy: Heterogeneity, Communication and Subjective Inflation Expectations

[News]

May 31, 2022

The deadline for submissions is July 31, 2022.

Call for Papers: 2022 PCAOB Conference on Auditing and Capital Markets

[News]

May 31, 2022

The deadline for submissions is July 15, 2022.

Econopalooza Summer Networking Event

[Page]

Call for Submissions for the 2022 TIAA Paul A. Samuelson Award

[News]

May 31, 2022

The submission deadline is September 9, 2022.

Police Force Size and Civilian Race

By Aaron Chalfin, Benjamin Hansen, Emily K. Weisburst, and Morgan C. Williams Jr.

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2022

We report novel empirical estimates of the race-specific effects of larger police forces in the United States. Each additional police officer abates approximately 0.1 homicides. In per capita terms, effects are twice as large for Black versus White victim...

Top of the Batch: Interviews and the Match

By Federico Echenique, Ruy González, Alistair J. Wilson, and Leeat Yariv

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2022

Most doctors in the National Resident Matching Program (NRMP) match with one of their most preferred internship programs. However, surveys indicate doctors' preferences are similar, suggesting a puzzle: how can so many doctors match with their top choices...

The Liquidity Sensitivity of Healthcare Consumption: Evidence from Social Security Payments

By Tal Gross, Timothy J. Layton, and Daniel Prinz

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2022

Insurance is typically viewed as a mechanism for transferring resources from good to bad states. However, insurance may also transfer resources from high-liquidity periods to low-liquidity periods. We test for this type of transfer from health insurance b...

Insurance Design and Pharmaceutical Innovation

By Leila Agha, Soomi Kim, and Danielle Li

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2022

This paper studies how insurance coverage policies impact pharmaceutical innovation. In the United States, most patients obtain prescription drugs through insurance plans administered by Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs). Beginning in 2012, PBMs began refu...

Robust Predictions in Coasian Bargaining

By Heng Liu

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2022

This paper studies robust predictions when players may have additional information in an otherwise standard seller-offer bargaining with private values. Players' extra information gives rise to higher-order uncertainties about the underlying surplus. We s...

Unequal Jury Representation and Its Consequences

By Shamena Anwar, Patrick Bayer, and Randi Hjalmarsson

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2022

We analyze the extent and consequences of unequal representation on juries in Harris County, Texas. We first document that residents from predominantly White and high-income neighborhoods are substantially overrepresented on juries. Using quasirandom vari...

A Global Version of Samuelson's Dictum

By Yaqing Xiao, Hongjun Yan, and Jinfan Zhang

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2022

Samuelson's Dictum refers to the conjecture that there is more informational inefficiency at the aggregate stock market level than at the individual stock level. Our paper recasts it in a global setup: there should be more informational inefficiency at th...

The Commitment Benefit of Consols in Government Debt Management

By Davide Debortoli, Ricardo Nunes, and Pierre Yared

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2022

We consider optimal government debt maturity in a deterministic economy in which the government can issue any arbitrary debt maturity structure and in which bond prices are a function of the government's current and future primary surpluses. The governmen...