2022 in Research Highlights

[Research Highlight]

December 13, 2022

Economists addressed the returns to an economics degree, why workers in bigger cities have higher wages, grade inflation, and more.

Front Matter

American Economic Review, January 2023

Conflict and Intergroup Trade: Evidence from the 2014 Russia-Ukraine Crisis

By Vasily Korovkin and Alexey Makarin

American Economic Review, January 2023

Does armed conflict reduce trade, even in noncombat areas, through the destruction of intergroup social capital? We analyze Ukrainian trade transactions before and after the 2014 Russia-Ukraine conflict. In a difference-in-differences framework, we find t...

What Caused Racial Disparities in Particulate Exposure to Fall? New Evidence from the Clean Air Act and Satellite-Based Measures of Air Quality

By Janet Currie, John Voorheis, and Reed Walker

American Economic Review, January 2023

This project links administrative census microdata to spatially continuous measures of particulate pollution (PM2.5) to first document and then decompose the key drivers of convergence in black-white pollution exposure differences. We use quantile regress...

Judging Judge Fixed Effects

By Brigham Frandsen, Lars Lefgren, and Emily Leslie

American Economic Review, January 2023

We propose a nonparametric test for the exclusion and monotonicity assumptions invoked in instrumental variable (IV) designs based on the random assignment of cases to judges. We show its asymptotic validity and demonstrate its finite-sample performance i...

Did US Politicians Expect the China Shock?

By Matilde Bombardini, Bingjing Li, and Francesco Trebbi

American Economic Review, January 2023

Information sets, expectations, and preferences of politicians are fundamental, but unobserved determinants of their policy choices. Employing repeated votes in the US House of Representatives on China's normal trade relations (NTR) status during the two ...

Retail Pharmacies and Drug Diversion during the Opioid Epidemic

By Aljoscha Janssen and Xuan Zhang

American Economic Review, January 2023

This study investigates the role of retail pharmacy ownership in the opioid epidemic. Using data of prescription opioid orders, we show that compared with chain pharmacies, independent pharmacies dispense 39.1 percent more opioids and 60.5 percent more Ox...

Multigenerational Impacts of Childhood Access to the Safety Net: Early Life Exposure to Medicaid and the Next Generation's Health

By Chloe N. East, Sarah Miller, Marianne Page, and Laura R. Wherry

American Economic Review, January 2023

We examine multigenerational impacts of positive in utero health interventions using a new research design that exploits sharp increases in prenatal Medicaid eligibility that occurred in some states. Our analyses are based on US Vital Statistics natality ...

Unobserved-Offers Bargaining

By Alexander Wolitzky

American Economic Review, January 2023

I study ultimatum bargaining with imperfectly observed offers. Imperfectly observed offers must be rejected with positive probability, even when the players' preferences are common knowledge. Noisier observations imply a greater risk of rejection. In repe...

Signaling and Discrimination in Collaborative Projects

By Paula Onuchic ⓡ Debraj Ray

American Economic Review, January 2023

We study collaborative work in pairs when potential collaborators are motivated by the reputational implications of (joint or solo) projects. In equilibrium, individual collaboration strategies both influence and are influenced by the public assignment of...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2023

Winners and Losers? The Effect of Gaining and Losing Access to Selective Colleges on Education and Labor Market Outcomes

By Sandra E. Black, Jeffrey T. Denning, and Jesse Rothstein

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2023

We use the introduction of the Texas Top Ten Percent rule to estimate the effect of access to a selective college on graduation and earnings outcomes for two groups of students. For highly ranked students at more disadvantaged high schools, who gained acc...

The Impact of Income-Driven Repayment on Student Borrower Outcomes

By Daniel Herbst

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2023

In the United States, most student loans follow a fixed payment schedule that falls early in borrowers' careers. This structure provides no insurance against earnings risk and may increase student loan defaults. Income-driven repayment (IDR) plans are des...

Employer Responses to Family Leave Programs

By Rita Ginja, Arizo Karimi, and Pengpeng Xiao

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2023

Search frictions make worker turnover costly to firms. A three-month parental leave expansion in Sweden provides exogenous variation that we use to quantify firms' adjustment costs upon worker absence. The reform increased women's leave duration and likel...

A Glimpse of Freedom: Allied Occupation and Political Resistance in East Germany

By Luis R. Martinez ⓡ Jonas Jessen ⓡ Guo Xu

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2023

This paper exploits the idiosyncratic line of contact separating Allied and Soviet troops within East Germany at the end of WWII to study political resistance in a non-democracy. When Nazi Germany surrendered, 40 percent of what would become the authorita...

Temperature, Worker Productivity, and Adaptation: Evidence from Survey Data Production

By Melissa LoPalo

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2023

This paper estimates the impact of daily weather on worker productivity by using household survey data to study interviewers. Using data from over 9,000 Demographic and Health Surveys interviewers in 46 countries, I find that interviewers complete 13.6 pe...

The Economic Incidence of Wildfire Suppression in the United States

By Patrick Baylis and Judson Boomhower

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2023

This study measures the degree to which public expenditures on wildfire protection subsidize development in harm's way. We use administrative data on firefighting expenditures to measure the causal effect of nearby homes on the amount spent to extinguish ...

Labor Supply and Directed Technical Change: Evidence from the Termination of the Bracero Program in 1964

By Shmuel San

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2023

This paper studies the impact of labor supply on the creation of new technology, exploiting a large exogenous shock to the US agricultural labor supply caused by the termination of the Bracero agreements between the US and Mexico at the end of 1964. Using...

The Employee Costs of Corporate Debarment in Public Procurement

By Christiane Szerman

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2023

This paper studies an anticorruption policy—corporate debarment, or blacklisting—to understand how disclosing illicit corporate practices and the sanctions for these practices affect firm and worker outcomes. Exploiting a policy change in Brazil that ...

Incentivized Peer Referrals for Tuberculosis Screening: Evidence from India

By Jessica Goldberg, Mario Macis, and Pradeep Chintagunta

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2023

We study whether and how peer referrals increase screening, testing, and identification of patients with tuberculosis, an infectious disease responsible for over one million deaths annually. In an experiment with 3,176 patients at 122 tuberculosis treatme...