Energy Saving May Kill: Evidence from the Fukushima Nuclear Accident

By Guojun He and Takanao Tanaka

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2023

Following the Fukushima nuclear accident, Japan gradually shut down all its nuclear power plants, causing a countrywide power shortage. In response the government launched large-scale energy-saving campaigns to reduce electricity consumption. Exploiting t...

Do Thank-You Calls Increase Charitable Giving? Expert Forecasts and Field Experimental Evidence

By Anya Samek and Chuck Longfield

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2023

Calling to thank donors is considered a key fundraising strategy in the charitable giving industry. Yet the effectiveness of thank-you calls remains untested. We conduct field experiments with public television stations and a national nonprofit in which 5...

Income Segregation and the Rise of the Knowledge Economy

By Enrico Berkes and Ruben Gaetani

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2023

We analyze the effect of an increase in knowledge-intensive activities on spatial inequality in US cities. We leverage a predetermined network of patent citations to instrument for local innovation trends. Between 1990 and 2010, a one-standard-deviation i...

Pay Transparency and the Gender Gap

By Michael Baker, Yosh Halberstam, Kory Kroft, Alexandre Mas, and Derek Messacar

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2023

We examine the impact of public sector salary disclosure laws on university faculty salaries in Canada. The laws, which enable public access to the salaries of individual faculty if they exceed specified thresholds, were introduced in different provinces ...

A New Spatial Hedonic Equilibrium in the Emerging Work-from-Home Economy?

By Jan K. Brueckner, Matthew E. Kahn, and Gary C. Lin

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2023

This paper studies the impacts of work from home (WFH) in the housing market from both intercity and intracity perspectives. Our results confirm the theoretical prediction that WFH puts downward pressure on housing prices and rents in high-productivity co...

Emigration and Entrepreneurial Drain

By Massimo Anelli, Gaetano Basso, Giuseppe Ippedico, and Giovanni Peri

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2023

Emigration of young, highly educated individuals may deprive origin countries of entrepreneurs. We identify exogenous variation in emigration from Italy by interacting past diaspora networks and current economic pull factors in destination countries. We f...

Tax Refund Uncertainty: Evidence and Welfare Implications

By Sydnee Caldwell, Scott Nelson, and Daniel Waldinger

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2023

Transfers paid through annual tax refunds are a large but uncertain source of income for poor households. We document that low-income tax filers have substantial subjective uncertainty about these refunds. We investigate the determinants and consequences ...

When Externalities Collide: Influenza and Pollution

By Joshua Graff Zivin, Matthew Neidell, Nicholas J. Sanders, and Gregor Singer

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2023

Influenza and air pollution each pose significant health risks with global economic consequences. Their shared etiological pathways present a case of compounding health risk via interacting externalities. Using instrumental variables based on changing win...

Natural Resource Booms, Human Capital, and Earnings: Evidence from Linked Education and Employment Records

By Alina Kovalenko

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2023

Using administrative panel data on the universe of Texas public school students, I analyze how shocks to local economic conditions affect education and employment decisions. I find that high school students at the bottom of the academic ability distributi...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, April 2023

Mobility and Congestion in Urban India

By Prottoy Akbar, Victor Couture, Gilles Duranton, and Adam Storeygard

American Economic Review, April 2023

We develop a methodology to estimate robust city-level vehicular speed indices, exactly decomposable into uncongested speed and congestion. We apply it to 180 Indian cities using 57 million simulated trips measured by a web mapping service. We verify the ...

How to Use Natural Experiments to Estimate Misallocation

By David Sraer and David Thesmar

American Economic Review, April 2023

We propose a method to estimate the effect of firm policies (e.g., bankruptcy laws) on allocative efficiency using (quasi-)experimental evidence. Our approach takes general equilibrium effects into account and requires neither a structural estimation nor ...

Globalization and Pandemics

By Pol Antràs, Stephen J. Redding, and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg

American Economic Review, April 2023

We provide theory and evidence on the relationship between globalization and pandemics. Business travel facilitates trade and travel leads to human interactions that transmit disease. Trade-motivated travel generates an epidemiological externality across ...

The Long and Short (Run) of Trade Elasticities

By Christoph E. Boehm, Andrei A. Levchenko, and Nitya Pandalai-Nayar

American Economic Review, April 2023

When countries change most favored nation (MFN) tariffs, partners that trade on MFN terms experience plausibly exogenous tariff changes. Using this variation, we estimate the trade elasticity at short and long horizons with local projections. We find that...

The Matching Multiplier and the Amplification of Recessions

By Christina Patterson

American Economic Review, April 2023

This paper shows that the unequal incidence of recessions in the labor market amplifies aggregate shocks. Using administrative data from the United States, I document a positive covariance between workers' marginal propensities to consume (MPCs) and their...

Is There Too Much Benchmarking in Asset Management?

By Anil K Kashyap, Natalia Kovrijnykh, Jian Li, and Anna Pavlova

American Economic Review, April 2023

We propose a tractable model of asset management in which benchmarking arises endogenously, and analyze its welfare consequences. Fund managers' portfolios are not contractible and they incur private costs in running them. Incentive contracts for fund man...

Why Do Households Leave School Value Added on the Table? The Roles of Information and Preferences

By Robert Ainsworth, Rajeev Dehejia, Cristian Pop-Eleches, and Miguel Urquiola

American Economic Review, April 2023

Romanian households could choose schools with one standard deviation worth of additional value added. Why do households leave value added "on the table"? We study two possibilities: (i) information and (ii) preferences for other school traits. In an exper...

What Happens When Employers Can No Longer Discriminate in Job Ads?

By Peter Kuhn and Kailing Shen

American Economic Review, April 2023

When employers' explicit gender requests were unexpectedly removed from a Chinese job board overnight, pools of successful applicants became more integrated: women's (men's) share of callbacks to jobs that had requested men (women) rose by 61 (146) percen...

Webinar: Choosing Macroeconomics in Graduate School: A Conversation with Women in Macro

[News]

March 30, 2023

The webinar is scheduled for April 21, 2023 at 10:00 am EST.

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2023