The Political Economy of International Regulatory Cooperation

By Giovanni Maggi and Ralph Ossa

American Economic Review, August 2023

We examine international regulatory agreements that are negotiated under lobbying pressures from producer groups. The way in which lobbying influences the cooperative setting of regulatory policies, as well as the welfare impacts of international agreemen...

The Micro Anatomy of Macro Consumption Adjustments

By Rafael Guntin, Pablo Ottonello, and Diego J. Perez

American Economic Review, August 2023

We study crises characterized by large adjustments of aggregate consumption through their microlevel patterns. We document the cross-sectional patterns of consumption adjustment across the income distribution and find large adjustments for top-income hous...

Individuals and Organizations as Sources of State Effectiveness

By Michael Carlos Best, Jonas Hjort, and David Szakonyi

American Economic Review, August 2023

Bureaucrats implement policy. How important are they for a state's productivity? And do the trade-offs between policies depend on their effectiveness? Using data on 16 million public purchases in Russia, we show that 39 percent of the variation in prices ...

The Missing Intercept: A Demand Equivalence Approach

By Christian K. Wolf

American Economic Review, August 2023

I give conditions under which changes in private spending are accommodated in general equilibrium exactly like changes in aggregate fiscal expenditure. Under such demand equivalence, researchers can use time series evidence on fiscal multipliers to recove...

Pricing Carbon: Evidence from Expert Recommendations

By Moritz A. Drupp, Frikk Nesje, and Robert C. Schmidt

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

We study the variation of carbon price recommendations and their determinants using survey evidence from more than 400 experts across almost 40 countries. We quantify the extent of disagreement and reveal that a majority of experts can agree on short- ...

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Labor Market Effects of Workweek Restrictions: Evidence from the Great Depression

By Price Fishback, Chris Vickers, and Nicolas L. Ziebarth

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics

We study the effects of restrictions on the length of the workweek under the President’s Reemployment Agreement (PRA) of July 1933 and the National Industrial Recovery Act. We construct a model in which the equilibrium without such a workweek restrict...

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Call for Applications for Successfully Navigating Your Economics PhD: A Mentoring Workshop for 3rd and 4th Year Women/Non-Binary Economics PhD Students

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April 05, 2023

The application deadline is July 28, 2023.

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2023

Sin Taxes and Self-Control

By Renke Schmacker and Sinne Smed

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2023

According to theory, "sin taxes" are welfare improving if consumers with low self-control respond at least as much to the tax as consumers with high self-control. We investigate empirically if demand response to soft drink and fat tax variations in Denmar...

Special Economic Zones and Human Capital Investment: 30 Years of Evidence from China

By Fangwen Lu, Weizeng Sun, and Jianfeng Wu

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2023

By exploiting the large quantity and rich variety of special economic zones (SEZs) in China, this study investigates how such zones affect human capital investment. Results show that SEZs significantly increase the local high school enrollment rate, but t...

Common Practice: Spillovers from Medicare on Private Health Care

By Michael L. Barnett, Andrew Olenski, and Adam Sacarny

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2023

Efforts to raise US health-care productivity have proceeded slowly, potentially due to the fragmentation of payment across insurers. Each insurer's efforts to improve care could influence how doctors practice for other insurers, leading to unvalued extern...

Spending Responses to High-Frequency Shifts in Payment Timing: Evidence from the Earned Income Tax Credit

By Aditya Aladangady, Shifrah Aron-Dine, David Cashin, Wendy Dunn, Laura Feiveson, Paul Lengermann, Katherine Richard, and Claudia Sahm

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2023

This study explores the spending response to tax refunds for Earned Income Tax Credit recipients using a novel dataset combining transaction-based measures of retail spending with administrative IRS data on tax refunds. Our dataset allows us to exploit va...

How Social Security Reform Affects Retirement and Pension Claiming

By Rafael Lalive, Arvind Magesan, and Stefan Staubli

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2023

A reform increasing the full retirement age (FRA) by one year leads to larger than expected delays in pension claiming and retirement, while making late claiming more lucrative leads to a smaller than expected delay in pension claiming. Survey evidence sh...

Investing in Ex Ante Regulation: Evidence from Pharmaceutical Patent Examination

By Michael D. Frakes and Melissa F. Wasserman

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2023

We explore how the US Patent and Trademark Office may improve the quality of issued patents on "secondary" drug features by giving examiners more time to review drug patent applications. Our findings suggest that current time allocations are causing exami...

The Impact of Organizational Boundaries on Health Care Coordination and Utilization

By Leila Agha, Keith Marzilli Ericson, and Xiaoxi Zhao

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2023

We measure organizational concentration—the distribution of a patient's health care across organizations—to examine how firm boundaries affect health care efficiency. First, when patients move to regions where outpatient visits are typically concentra...

Corporate Tax Breaks and Executive Compensation

By Eric Ohrn

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2023

I analyze the effect of two corporate tax breaks, bonus depreciation and the Domestic Production Activities Deduction (DPAD), on executive compensation in publicly traded US firms. I find both tax breaks significantly increase executive compensation. For ...