Togetherness in the Household

By Sam Cosaert, Alexandros Theloudis, and Bertrand Verheyden

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2023

Spending time with a spouse is a major gain from marriage. We extend the classical collective model of the household to allow for togetherness between spouses. Togetherness takes the form of joint leisure and joint care for children. Using revealed prefer...

Kevin Roshak on technology and education

[Page]

Do online homework solutions lower student test scores?

Maya Mikdash on holding police officers accountable

[Page]

Do internal affairs investigations improve police officers' behavior?

Pablo Troncoso on pension reform in Chile

[Page]

How much did workers adjust their labor supply after Chile's 2008 pension reform?

Asiya Validova on inequality and COVID-19 mortality

[Page]

How much excess death during the first year of the pandemic was driven by income inequality?

CSWEP 2023 Carolyn Shaw Bell Award Speech

[Page]

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2023

The Employment Effects of Countercyclical Public Investments

By Lukas Buchheim and Martin Watzinger

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2023

This paper estimates the causal impact of a sizable German public investment program on employment at the county level. The program focused on improving the energy efficiency of school buildings, making it possible to use the number of schools as an instr...

Health Effects of Increasing Income for the Elderly: Evidence from a Chilean Pension Program

By Enrico Miglino, Nicolás Navarrete H., Gonzalo Navarrete H., and Pablo Navarrete H.

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2023

We estimate the effect of a permanent income increase on the health outcomes of the elderly poor. Our regression discontinuity design exploits an eligibility cutoff in a Chilean basic pension program that grants monthly payments to retirees without a cont...

Housing in Medicaid: Should It Really Change?

By Bertrand Achou

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2023

Housing is mostly exempted from Medicaid and Supplemental Social Insurance means tests. Reforms of this special treatment have been debated, but little is known about its costs, benefits, and redistributive implications. I estimate a life cycle model of s...

Exploring Residual Profit Allocation

By Sebastian Beer, Ruud de Mooij, Shafik Hebous, Michael Keen, and Li Liu

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2023

Residual profit allocation (RPA) schemes have come to prominence in discussions of international tax reform but with almost nothing known about their economic impact. These schemes tax multinationals by allocating their "routine" profits to source countri...

The Extension of Credit with Nonexclusive Contracts and Sequential Banking Externalities

By Giacomo De Giorgi, Andres Drenik, and Enrique Seira

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2023

Nonexclusive sequential borrowing can increase default and impose externalities on prior lenders. We document that sequential banking is pervasive with substantial effects. Using credit card applications from a large bank and data on the applicants' entir...

Implications of Tax Loss Asymmetry for Owners of S Corporations

By Lucas Goodman, Elena Patel, and Molly Saunders-Scott

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2023

We study tax loss asymmetry for S corporate owners. These owners use most losses contemporaneously, reducing the tax asymmetry compared to C corporations. However, these owners face distortions due to the progressive individual tax schedule. The value of ...

Tax Audits as Scarecrows: Evidence from a Large-Scale Field Experiment

By Marcelo Bergolo, Rodrigo Ceni, Guillermo Cruces, Matias Giaccobasso, and Ricardo Perez-Truglia

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2023

The canonical model of Allingham and Sandmo (1972) predicts that firms evade taxes by optimally trading off between the costs and benefits of evasion. However, there is no direct evidence that firms react to audits in this way. We conducted a large-scale ...

School Boards and Education Production: Evidence from Randomized Ballot Order

By Ying Shi and John D. Singleton

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2023

We examine the causal influence of educators elected to the school board on local education production. The key empirical challenge is that school board composition is endogenously determined through the electoral process. To overcome this, we develop a n...

Employed in a SNAP? The Impact of Work Requirements on Program Participation and Labor Supply

By Colin Gray, Adam Leive, Elena Prager, Kelsey Pukelis, and Mary Zaki

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2023

Work requirements are common in US safety net programs. Evidence remains limited, however, on the extent to which work requirements increase economic self-sufficiency or screen out vulnerable individuals. Using linked administrative data on food stamps (S...

Student Performance, Peer Effects, and Friend Networks: Evidence from a Randomized Peer Intervention

By Jia Wu, Junsen Zhang, and Chunchao Wang

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2023

We estimate the effects of an educational peer intervention in which previously high- and low-achieving students are randomly paired as deskmates in elementary schools in China. Our treatment boosts the mathematics scores of the low-achieving students. Mo...

The Effect of Early Childhood Education on Adult Criminality: Evidence from the 1960s through 1990s

By John Anders, Andrew C. Barr, and Alexander A. Smith

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2023

We compare the effects of early childhood education on adult criminal behavior across time periods, using administrative crime data that provide significant precision advantages over existing work. We find that improvements in early childhood education le...

SOEs and Soft Incentive Constraints in State Bank Lending

By Yiming Cao, Raymond Fisman, Hui Lin, and Yongxiang Wang

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2023

We study how Chinese state bank managers' lending incentives impact lending to state-owned enterprises (SOEs). We show lending quantity increases and quality decreases at month's end, indicating monthly lending targets that decrease lending standards. Inc...

Expanding Access to Clean Water for the Rural Poor: Experimental Evidence from Malawi

By Pascaline Dupas, Basimenye Nhlema, Zachary Wagner, Aaron Wolf, and Emily Wroe

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2023

Data from an 18-month randomized trial show large and sustained impacts on water purification and child health of a program providing monthly coupons for free water treatment solution to households with young children. The program is more effective and mu...