M&A and Innovation: A New Classification of Patents

By Zhaoqi Cheng, Ginger Zhe Jin, Mario Leccese, Dokyun Lee, and Liad Wagman

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

Policymakers are increasingly concerned that incumbent acquisitions of small or young firms may slow down rather than speed up innovation, but it is difficult to identify which firms are related in the fast-changing space of technological innovation. This...

Mergers and Acquisitions under Common Ownership

By Miguel Antón, Florian Ederer, Mireia Giné, and Bruno Pellegrino

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

We provide new facts about the cross section and evolution of mergers and acquisitions for US public firms. Using a general equilibrium model with a hedonic demand system and data on institutional ownership, we document that mergers are increasingly conce...

Risk Rating without Information Provision

By Philip Mulder and Carolyn Kousky

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

We describe the initial impact of risk-based flood insurance pricing in the United States. More than two-thirds of National Flood Insurance Program policyholders are paying higher premiums under "Risk Rating 2.0" (RR2.0), and increases will continue in th...

Efficient Adaptation to Flood Risk

By Winston P. Hovekamp and Katherine R. H. Wagner

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

This paper studies whether private adaptation to flood risk is economically efficient. We estimate the return to elevating houses, one of the most significant private defensive investments against flooding, using two decades of microdata on the universe o...

Wildfire Insurance, Information, and Self-Protection

By Judson Boomhower, Meredith Fowlie, and Andrew J. Plantinga

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

Like other climate-related disasters, wildfires are intensifying. Property owners can reduce their vulnerability to wildfire losses but are not well informed about the costs and benefits of available self-protection investments. Technological advances mea...

A Disaggregated View of Household Production Trends

By Benjamin Bridgman

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

The shift of working time from the household to the market, or marketization, was one of the most important changes in the US economy. This paper estimates US household production (HP) by product and examines the marketization of these products. I find th...

A Model of Demand for Health and Caregiving Incorporating Marriage Markets

By Shoshana Grossbard and Lorena Hakak

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

According to the Grossman model, the demand for health-related goods or services varies with the costs of their substitutes produced in the household. This paper contributes to the literature on the demand for health-related products and home care by also...

Is All Caregiving Created Equal? A Comparison of Caregiving to Children and Adults

By Corina Mommaerts and Yulya Truskinovsky

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

In this paper, we compare patterns of family care provided to children and to adults, and discuss what these patterns suggest about how individuals make decisions over, and ultimately value, such care. We show that patterns of informal adult care do not r...

The Girly Economics of Care Work: Implications for Economic Statistics

By Misty L. Heggeness

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

Unpaid care is work. Yet, the field of economics struggles to acknowledge and measure its value. In modern home economics, the household is unitary and harmonious, time in the home is leisure, and power dynamics are unimportant. Even with the development ...

Why Did COVID-19 Vaccinations Lag in Low- and Middle-Income Countries? Lessons from Descriptive and Experimental Data

By Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

Two years after COVID-19 vaccine rollouts began, COVID-19 vaccination rates in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) continue to lag. Tracing individual country experiences with vaccine procurement in the early stages of the pandemic suggests that inte...

Does Childhood Immunization Rebound after Extreme Shocks? Evidence from Floods and Strikes in Pakistan

By Subhash Chandir, Rachel Glennerster, Maryiam Haroon, Edward Jee, and Danya Arif Siddiqi

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

In 2022, childhood immunization in the Sindh province of Pakistan was disrupted by the worst floods in Pakistan's history and by vaccinator strikes. We use weekly data on all vaccinations from 12 of the lowest immunization districts in Sindh, strike timin...

Government Trust and COVID-19 Vaccination: The Role of Supply Disruptions and Political Allegiances in Sierra Leone

By Anbar Aizenman, Fatu E. Conteh, Rachel Glennerster, Samantha Horn, Desmond M. Kangbai, Anne Karing, and Sarah Shaukat

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

We use data on the universe of COVID-19 vaccines in Sierra Leone to examine the relationship between COVID-19 vaccination take-up and support for the party in power and whether interruptions to vaccine supply reduced take-up of second doses. We find that ...

The Impact of Large-Scale Social Media Advertising Campaigns on COVID-19 Vaccination: Evidence from Two Randomized Controlled Trials

By Lisa Ho, Emily Breza, Abhijit Banerjee, Arun G. Chandrasekhar, Fatima C. Stanford, Renato Fior, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, Kelly Holland, Emily Hoppe, Louis- Maël Jean, Lucy Ogbu-Nwobodo, Benjamin A. Olken, Carlos Torres, Pierre-Luc Vautrey, Erica Warner, Esther Duflo, and Marcella Alsan

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

COVID-19 vaccines are widely available in wealthy countries, yet many remain unvaccinated. We report on two studies (United States and France) with millions of Facebook users that tested two strategies central to vaccination outreach: health professionals...

Mental Models and Transfer Learning

By Ignacio Esponda, Emanuel Vespa, and Sevgi Yuksel

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

Using a laboratory experiment, we investigate the extent to which learning is transferred between related problems in the context of an updating task. The updating principle we study requires updating positively after a positive signal and negatively afte...

Optimal Lending Contracts with Retrospective and Prospective Bias

By J. Aislinn Bohren and Daniel N. Hauser

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

Model misspecification is a common approach to model belief formation distortions. Misspecified models can be decomposed into two classes of distortions: prospective and retrospective biases (Bohren and Hauser 2023). Prospective biases correspond to disto...

News Media, Inflation, and Sentiment

By Alistair Macaulay and Wenting Song

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

We study the relationship between media portrayals of inflation and consumer sentiment. Using tools from natural language processing, we uncover two competing narratives in US news coverage of inflation: the first relates inflation to financial variables,...

Bank Loan Monitoring, Distance, and Delegation

By Amanda Rae Heitz, Christopher Martin, and Alexander Ufier

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

Using a proprietary transaction-level database of nearly 30,000 multiple-draw construction loans and their on-site inspection reports, we empirically examine the relationship between geographic distance and bank information acquisition over the course of ...

Control of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations

By Ian Appel and Jillian Grennan

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

Blockchain technology has facilitated the emergence of a new type of organizational form, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). In contrast to corporations and other types of business organizations, DAOs do not have managers or directors with for...

Stereotypes about Successful Entrepreneurs

By Victor Lyonnet and Léa Stern

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

What comes to mind when thinking about a successful entrepreneur? Belief formation models suggest that what comes to mind is an oversimplified picture of the characteristics of successful entrepreneurs—that is, stereotypes about successful entrepreneurs...

Can High School Counselors Help the Economics Pipeline?

By Melissa Gentry, Jonathan Meer, and Danila Serra

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

We evaluate the impact of an intervention aimed at informing high school counselors about the field of economics, with the aim of attracting a more diverse student population into the major. Our study involves 234 Texas high schools that send a large numb...