Distributional Impacts of the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement

By Brian K. Kovak and Peter M. Morrow

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

We examine the effects of the 1988 Canada-US Free Trade Agreement (FTA) on employment and earnings inequality among low-, medium-, and high-income Canadian workers initially employed in manufacturing. Although the FTA tariff cuts drove large changes in tr...

Labor Mobility and Unemployment over the Business Cycle

By Andrea Foschi, Christopher L. House, Christian Proebsting, and Linda L. Tesar

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

We estimate the responsiveness of net labor migration to regional differences in unemployment rates across the United States since the mid-1970s. Our baseline estimate suggests an elasticity of roughly -0.3. For typical labor force participation ratios, a...

Matching Pell Grants: Implications for College Debt and Parental Transfers

By Patricia Beeson, Daniele Coen-Pirani, Jessica LaVoice, and Marla Ripoll

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

We study the causal effect of the net price of college on student debt, schooling investment, and parental transfers by exploiting a natural experiment. A large public US university introduced a program to match Pell Grants in academic year 2019–2020. W...

The Effects of Higher Student Loan Limits on Access to High-Earnings Graduate Programs

By Jeffrey T. Denning and Lesley J. Turner

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

Graduate student debt is the predominant form of financial aid for postbaccalaureate students and represents almost half of outstanding student debt, yet little is known about the effect of publicly funded graduate loans on student outcomes. To fill this ...

The Insurance Implications of Government Student Loan Repayment Schemes

By Martin Gervais, Qian Liu, and Lance Lochner

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

We use new administrative data that link detailed information on Canadian student loan recipients with their repayment and income histories from the Canada Student Loans Program, income tax filings, and postsecondary schooling records to measure the exten...

Data Markets with Privacy-Conscious Consumers

By Rossella Argenziano and Alessandro Bonatti

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

We study data linkages among heterogeneous firms and examine how they shape the outcome of privacy regulation. A single consumer interacts sequentially with two firms: one firm collects data on consumer behavior, and the other firm leverages the data to s...

Privacy and the Value of Data

By Simone Galperti and Jacopo Perego

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

How does protecting consumers' privacy affect the value of their personal data? We model an intermediary that uses consumers' data to influence prices set by a seller. When privacy is protected, consumers choose whether to disclose their data to the inter...

Consumer Control and Privacy Policies

By S. Nageeb Ali, Greg Lewis, and Shoshana Vasserman

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

Firms use consumer data to price discriminate. In response, policymakers have pushed for consumers to have control over their data so that they choose what to share and with whom. We model consumer control and its effect on markets through the lens of vol...

The Short-Term Labor Supply Response to the Expanded Child Tax Credit

By Brandon Enriquez, Damon Jones, and Ernie Tedeschi

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

We estimate the extensive and intensive margin labor supply response to the monthly Child Tax Credit disbursed in 2021 as a part of the American Rescue Plan Act. Using Current Population Survey microdata, we compare labor supply outcomes among households ...

The Effects of the Monthly and Lump-Sum Child Tax Credit Payments on Food and Housing Hardship

By Zachary Parolin, Elizabeth Ananat, Sophie Collyer, Megan Curran, and Christopher Wimer

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

We investigate the effects of the expanded 2021 Child Tax Credit (CTC) on material hardship among households with children over April 2021–May 2022, using the Census Household Pulse Survey and difference-in-difference analyses of household types with di...

The 2021 Child Tax Credit: Who Received It and How Did They Spend It?

By Katherine Michelmore and Natasha V. Pilkauskas

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

In March of 2021, Congress passed a one-year expansion of the Child Tax Credit (CTC), creating a temporary, near-universal child benefit. Despite expanding eligibility to millions of previously ineligible children living in low-income households, only two...

The Impact of COVID-19 on Workers' Expectations and Preferences for Remote Work

By Yuting Chen, Patricia Cortes, Gizem Kosar, Jessica Pan, and Basit Zafar

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

We study how COVID-19 affected the prevalence, expectations, and attitudes toward remote work using specially designed surveys. The incidence of remote work remains higher than prepandemic levels, and both men and women expect this to persist postpandemic...

Selection Bias in Voluntary Random Testing: Evidence from a COVID-19 Antibody Study

By Deniz Dutz, Michael Greenstone, Ali Hortaçsu, Santiago Lacouture, Magne Mogstad, Danae Roumis, Azeem M. Shaikh, Alexander Torgovitsky, and Winnie van Dijk

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

We use data from a serological study that experimentally varied financial incentives for participation to detect and characterize selection bias. Participants are from neighborhoods with substantially lower COVID-19 risks. Existing methods to account for ...

Gendered Disparities during the COVID-19 Crisis in Sierra Leone

By Madison Levine, Niccolò F. Meriggi, Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak, Vasudha Ramakrishna, Maarten Voors, and Uday Wadehra

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

The COVID-19 outbreak had severe adverse impacts on the health and wealth of households in lower-income countries (LICs), and has affected even more severely female-headed households in LICs. Using high-frequency phone surveys in Sierra Leone, we show tha...

The Health of Democracies during the Pandemic: Results from a Randomized Survey Experiment

By Marcella Alsan, Luca Braghieri, Sarah Eichmeyer, Minjeong Joyce Kim, Stefanie Stantcheva, and David Y. Yang

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

Concerns have been raised about the "demise of democracy," possibly accelerated by pandemic-related restrictions. Using a survey experiment involving 8,206 respondents from 5 Western democracies, we find that subjects randomly exposed to information regar...

Homophily and Community Structure at Scale: An Application to a Large Professional Network

By Juan Nelson Martínez Dahbura, Shota Komatsu, Takanori Nishida, and Angelo Mele

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

Professional networks affect labor market outcomes, efficiency, and knowledge diffusion. We study a large business card exchange network from Eight, a contact and career management app popular in Japan. Our empirical analysis is guided by a structural mod...

Using Grouped Data to Estimate Revenue Heterogeneity in Online Advertising Auctions

By Nils A. Breitmar, Matthew Harding, and Carlos Lamarche

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

This paper estimates the heterogeneous impact of advertising networks from the perspective of a publisher who has access to limited information provided by the advertising platform in the form of grouped data over different auctions and users. The models ...

Born to Be (Sub)Prime: An Exploratory Analysis

By Helena Bach, Pietro Campa, Giacomo De Giorgi, Jaromir Nosal, and Davide Pietrobon

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

We study how inheriting parents' credit histories affects the initial credit scores, access to credit, and life cycle borrowing of young individuals entering the credit market. We establish that inherited histories significantly positively affect initial ...

Rising Markups, Rising Prices?

By Christopher Conlon, Nathan H. Miller, Tsolmon Otgon, and Yi Yao

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

The rise in markups and market power documented by De Loecker, Eeckhout, and Unger (2020) has recently generated much discussion in economics. We measure the correlation between the change in firm level markups and the change in industry level prices as m...

Terms of the Deal Were Not Announced: Accounting for Mergers with Unpublicized Values

By Thomas G. Wollmann

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

Most economy-wide studies of merger activity ignore deals whose terms are not announced. Using US data, I find that restricting attention to mergers with publicized values eliminates 60 percent or more of transactions. Exploiting a change in antitrust law...