Supply Network Formation and Fragility

By Matthew Elliott, Benjamin Golub, and Matthew V. Leduc

American Economic Review, August 2022

We model the production of complex goods in a large supply network. Each firm sources several essential inputs through relationships with other firms. Individual supply relationships are at risk of idiosyncratic failure, which threatens to disrupt product...

All Eyes on Them: A Field Experiment on Citizen Oversight and Electoral Integrity

By Natalia Garbiras-Díaz and Mateo Montenegro

American Economic Review, August 2022

Can information and communication technologies help citizens monitor their elections? We analyze a large-scale field experiment designed to answer this question in Colombia. We leveraged Facebook advertisements sent to over 4 million potential voters to e...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2022

Housing Lock: Dutch Evidence on the Impact of Negative Home Equity on Household Mobility

By Asaf Bernstein and Daan Struyven

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2022

This paper employs Dutch administrative population data to test the "housing lock hypothesis": the conjecture that homeowners with negative home equity, low levels of financial assets, and restricted opportunities to borrow reduce their mobility. Variatio...

Human Trafficking and Regulating Prostitution

By Samuel Lee and Petra Persson

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2022

Certain markets are illicit because part of the supply is coerced, but little is known about the optimal regulation of such markets. We model a prostitution market with voluntary and coerced prostitutes and ask what regulation can restore the benchmark ou...

Centralized Admissions, Affirmative Action, and Access of Low-Income Students to Higher Education

By Ursula Mello

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2022

I analyze how two reforms, introduced to expand college access in Brazil, impacted enrollments of low-SES students. The first policy centralized applications in a nationwide platform (SISU), and the second expanded affirmative action quotas (AA) to a unif...

Child Marriage Bans and Female Schooling and Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from Natural Experiments in 17 Low- and Middle-Income Countries

By Nicholas Wilson

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2022

I measure the effect of child marriage bans on female educational attainment and employment using a difference-in-differences approach employing subnational spatial and cohort variation in a sample of over 250,000 female respondents from 17 low- and middl...

Out of the Woodwork: Enrollment Spillovers in the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment

By Adam Sacarny, Katherine Baicker, and Amy Finkelstein

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2022

We study the impact of expanded adult Medicaid eligibility on the enrollment of already-eligible children. We analyze the 2008 Oregon Medicaid lottery, in which some low-income uninsured adults were randomly selected to be allowed to apply for Medicaid. C...

Gini and Optimal Income Taxation by Rank

By Laurent Simula and Alain Trannoy

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2022

We solve the nonlinear income tax program for rank-dependent social welfare functions, expressing the trade-off between size and inequality using the Gini and related families of positional indices. Absent bunching, ranks in the actual and optimal allocat...

The Long-Run Effects of R&D Place-Based Policies: Evidence from Russian Science Cities

By Helena Schweiger, Alexander Stepanov, and Paolo Zacchia

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2022

We study the long-run effects of historical place-based R&D policies: the creation of Science Cities in Soviet Russia. We compare current demographic and economic characteristics of Science Cities with those of localities that were similar to them at the ...

Adaptation and Adverse Selection in Markets for Natural Disaster Insurance

By Katherine R. H. Wagner

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2022

This paper quantifies frictions in uptake, tests for adverse selection, and analyzes welfare effects of proposed reforms in natural disaster insurance markets. I find that willingness to pay is remarkably low. In high-risk flood zones, fewer than 60 perce...

Depreciating Licenses

By E. Glen Weyl and Anthony Lee Zhang

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2022

Many governments assign use licenses for natural resources, such as radio spectrum, fishing rights, and mineral extraction rights, through auctions or other market-like mechanisms. License design affects resource users' investment incentives as well as th...

The Long-Run Effects of Sports Club Vouchers for Primary School Children

By Jan Marcus, Thomas Siedler, and Nicolas R. Ziebarth

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2022

Childhood obesity is one of the most serious public health challenges of the twenty-first century. While small-scale experiments change behaviors among adults in the short run, we know little about the effectiveness of large-scale policies or the longer...

Does Virtual Advising Increase College Enrollment? Evidence from a Random-Assignment College Access Field Experiment

By Meredith Phillips and Sarah Reber

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2022

Although in-person college access programs can be effective, less is known about whether low-cost and scalable virtual interventions can achieve the same benefits. We evaluate two variants of a virtual college counseling program. Students randomly assigne...

How Much Are Public School Teachers Willing to Pay for Their Retirement Benefits? Comment

By Shawn Ni, Michael Podgursky, and Fangda Wang

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2022

In a widely cited study, Fitzpatrick (2015) found that more than one quarter of Illinois teachers were unwilling to pay 19 cents for pension enhancements worth one dollar in present value. We revisit this finding by tracking the same cohort of teachers to...

Checking and Sharing Alt-Facts

By Emeric Henry ⓡ Ekaterina Zhuravskaya ⓡ Sergei Guriev

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2022

During the 2019 European elections campaign, we exposed a random sample of French voting-age Facebook users to false statements by a far-right populist party. A randomly selected subgroup was also presented with fact-checking of these statements; another ...

Political Parties Do Matter in US Cities . . . for Their Unfunded Pensions

By Christian Dippel

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2022

This paper studies public sector pension obligations, the biggest fiscal challenge currently facing many US cities. Employing a regression discontinuity design around close elections, benefit payments out of a city's public sector pensions are shown to gr...

Childhood Housing and Adult Outcomes: A Between-Siblings Analysis of Housing Vouchers and Public Housing

By Henry O. Pollakowski ⓡ Daniel H. Weinberg ⓡ Fredrik Andersson ⓡ John C. Haltiwanger ⓡ Giordano Palloni ⓡ Mark J. Kutzbach

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2022

We create a national-level longitudinal dataset to analyze how children's participation in public and voucher-assisted housing affects age-26 earnings and adult incarceration. Naïve OLS estimates suggest that returns to subsidized housing participation a...

The far-reaching legacy of lynchings

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Does historical racial animus continue to influence the voting behavior of Blacks today?

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July 29, 2022