Just what the doctor ordered?

[Research Highlight]

June 22, 2022

Bradley Shapiro discusses the costs and benefits of directly advertising prescription drugs to consumers.

Agent-Based Modeling in Economics and Finance: Past, Present, and Future

By Robert L. Axtell and J. Doyne Farmer

Journal of Economic Literature

Agent-based modeling (ABM) is a novel computational methodology for representing the behavior of individuals in order to study social phenomena. Its use is rapidly growing in many fields. We review ABM in economics and finance and highlight how it can be ...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2022

African American Intergenerational Economic Mobility since 1880

By William J. Collins and Marianne H. Wanamaker

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2022

We document the intergenerational mobility of Black and White American men from 1880 through 2000 by building new historical datasets for the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and combining them with modern data to cover the middle and late twen...

Breastfeeding and Child Development

By Emla Fitzsimons and Marcos Vera-Hernández

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2022

We show that children who are born at or just before the weekend are less likely to be breastfed, owing to poorer breastfeeding support services in hospitals at weekends. We use this variation to estimate the effect of breastfeeding on children's developm...

Assortative Matching at the Top of the Distribution: Evidence from the World's Most Exclusive Marriage Market

By Marc Goñi

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2022

Using novel data on peerage marriages in Britain, I find that low search costs and marriage-market segregation can generate sorting. Peers courted in the London Season, a matching technology introducing aristocratic bachelors to debutantes. When Queen Vic...

The Impact of Health on Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from a Large-Scale Health Experiment

By Melvin Stephens Jr. and Desmond Toohey

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2022

While economists have posited that health investments increase earnings, isolating the causal effect of health is challenging due to reverse causality and unobserved heterogeneity. We examine the labor market effects of a randomized controlled trial, the ...

The Side Effects of Immunity: Malaria and African Slavery in the United States

By Elena Esposito

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2022

This paper documents the role of malaria in the diffusion of African slavery in the United States. The novel empirical evidence reveals that the introduction of malaria triggered a demand for malaria-resistant labor, which led to a massive expansion of Af...

Historical Lynchings and the Contemporary Voting Behavior of Blacks

By Jhacova Williams

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2022

This paper analyzes the extent to which the political participation of Blacks can be traced to historical lynchings that took place from 1882 to 1930. Using county-level voter registration data, I show that Blacks who reside in southern counties that expe...

Do Doctors Improve the Health Care of Their Parents? Evidence from Admission Lotteries

By Elisabeth Artmann, Hessel Oosterbeek, and Bas van der Klaauw

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2022

To assess the importance of unequal access to medical expertise and services, we estimate the causal effects of having a child who is a doctor on parents' mortality and health care use. We use data from parents of almost 22,000 participants in admission l...

Emotions and Risk Attitudes

By Armando N. Meier

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2022

Previous work has shown that preferences are not always stable across time, but surprisingly little is known about the reasons for this instability. I examine whether variation in people's emotions over time predicts changes in risk attitudes. Using a lar...

Neighbors' Effects on University Enrollment

By Andrés Barrios-Fernández

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2022

This paper combines detailed geographic information and individual educational records in Chile to provide causal evidence that close neighbors significantly influence enrollment in university. I exploit the quasi-random variation generated by student loa...

Peer Effects in Product Adoption

By Michael Bailey, Drew Johnston, Theresa Kuchler, Johannes Stroebel, and Arlene Wong

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2022

We use de-identified data from Facebook to study the nature of peer effects in the market for cell phones. To identify peer effects, we exploit variation in friends' new phone acquisitions resulting from random phone losses. A new phone purchase by a frie...

The Roots of Health Inequality and the Value of Intrafamily Expertise

By Yiqun Chen, Petra Persson, and Maria Polyakova

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2022

In the context of Sweden, we show that having a doctor in the family raises preventive health investments throughout the life cycle, improves physical health, and prolongs life. Two quasi-experimental research designs—medical school admission lotteries ...

The Impact of School Facility Investments on Students and Homeowners: Evidence from Los Angeles

By Julien Lafortune and David Schönholzer

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2022

We study school facility investments using administrative records from Los Angeles. Exploiting quasi-random variation in the timing of new facility openings and using a residential assignment instrument, we find positive impacts on test scores, attendance...

The Long-Run Evolution of Absolute Intergenerational Mobility

By Yonatan Berman

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2022

This paper combines cross-sectional and longitudinal income data to present the evolution of absolute intergenerational income mobility in ten advanced economies in the twentieth century. Absolute mobility decreased during the second half of the twentieth...

Intrahousehold Consumption Allocation and Demand for Agency: A Triple Experimental Investigation

By Uzma Afzal, Giovanna d'Adda, Marcel Fafchamps, and Farah Said

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2022

We conduct lab experiments to investigate demand for consumption agency in married couples from Pakistan. Most subjects are no better at guessing their spouse's preferences than those of a stranger, suggesting that individual executive agency has instrume...

And Yet It Moves: Intergenerational Mobility in Italy

By Paolo Acciari, Alberto Polo, and Giovanni L. Violante

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2022

We estimate intergenerational income mobility in Italy using administrative data from tax returns. Our estimates of mobility are higher than prior work using survey data and indirect methods. The rank-rank slope of parent-child income is 0.22, compared to...

Adam Smith: Critical Theorist?

By Keith Tribe

Journal of Economic Literature, June 1999

The bicentenary of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations in 1976 was marked by the publication of a new complete edition of his works and correspondence, bringing together for the first time all extant published and unpublished writings. A basis was thereby prov...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2010