A Road to Efficiency through Communication and Commitment

By Ala Avoyan and João Ramos

American Economic Review, September 2023

We experimentally examine the efficacy of a novel pre-play institution in a well-known coordination game—the minimum-effort game—in which coordination failures are robust and persistent phenomena. This new institution allows agents to communicate whil...

Market Structure, Oligopsony Power, and Productivity

By Michael Rubens

American Economic Review, September 2023

I examine the effects of oligopsony power on allocative efficiency and income redistribution by studying a size regulation in the Chinese tobacco industry that led to ownership consolidation. I show that separate identification of input price markdowns, g...

The Macroeconomics of the Greek Depression

By Gabriel Chodorow-Reich, Loukas Karabarbounis, and Rohan Kekre

American Economic Review, September 2023

Greece experienced a boom until 2007, followed by a collapse of unprecedented magnitude and persistence. We assess the sources of the boom and the bust, using a rich estimated dynamic general equilibrium model. External demand and government consumption f...

Second-Best Fairness: The Trade-off between False Positives and False Negatives

By Alexander W. Cappelen, Cornelius Cappelen, and Bertil Tungodden

American Economic Review, September 2023

A main focus in economics is how to design optimal policies in second-best situations, which often requires a trade-off between giving some individuals more than they deserve, false positives, and others less than they deserve, false negatives. This paper...

Worth Your Weight: Experimental Evidence on the Benefits of Obesity in Low-Income Countries

By Elisa Macchi

American Economic Review, September 2023

I study the economic value of obesity—a status symbol in poor countries associated with raised health risks. Randomizing decision-makers in Kampala, Uganda to view weight-manipulated portraits, I find that obesity is perceived as a reliable signal of we...

Choice Screen Auctions

By Michael Ostrovsky

American Economic Review, September 2023

Choice screen auctions have been recently deployed in 31 European countries, allowing consumers to choose their preferred search engine on Google's Android platform instead of being automatically defaulted to Google's own search engine. I show that a seem...

Conferences, Events and Fellowships

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The Unequal Consequences of Job Loss across Countries

By Antoine Bertheau, Edoardo Maria Acabbi, Cristina Barceló, Andreas Gulyas, Stefano Lombardi, and Raffaele Saggio

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2023

We document the consequences of losing a job across countries using a harmonized research design applied to seven matched employer-employee datasets. Workers in Denmark and Sweden experience the lowest earnings declines following job displacement, while w...

A Characterization for Optimal Bundling of Products with Nonadditive Values

By Soheil Ghili

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2023

This paper studies the optimal bundling of products with nonadditive values. Under monotonic preferences and single-peaked profits, I show that a monopolist finds pure bundling optimal if and only if the optimal sales volume for the grand bundle is larger...

The Power of Certainty: Experimental Evidence on the Effective Design of Free Tuition Programs

By Elizabeth Burland, Susan Dynarski, Katherine Michelmore, Stephanie Owen, and Shwetha Raghuraman

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2023

Proposed "free college" policies vary widely in design. The simplest set tuition to zero for everyone. More targeted approaches limit free tuition to those who demonstrate need through an application process. We experimentally test the effects of these tw...

Reducing Frictions in Health Care Access: The ActionHealthNYC Experiment for Undocumented Immigrants

By Adrienne Sabety, Jonathan Gruber, Jin Yung Bae, and Rishi Sood

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2023

In 2016, New York City designed and implemented an intervention to reduce frictions in accessing safety net care: randomly making initial primary care appointments for 2,428 undocumented immigrants. We leverage a novel survey-administrative data linkage t...

The Educational Consequences of Remote and Hybrid Instruction during the Pandemic

By Dan Goldhaber, Thomas J. Kane, Andrew McEachin, Emily Morton, Tyler Patterson, and Douglas O. Staiger

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2023

Using testing data from over two million students in nearly 10,000 schools in 49 states (plus the District of Columbia), we investigate the role of remote and hybrid instruction in widening gaps in achievement by race and school poverty. We find that remo...

Finance, Managerial Inputs, and Misallocation

By Chaoran Chen, Ashique Habib, and Xiaodong Zhu

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2023

In standard macrofinance models, financial constraints mainly affect small or young firms but not large or old ones due to the self-financing mechanism, and the dispersion of marginal revenue product of capital (MRPK) of a firm cohort is less persistent t...

A Minimalist Model for the Ruble during the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

By Guido Lorenzoni and Iván Werning

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2023

This note isolates an overlooked economic force for the ruble to appreciate in response to international sanctions limiting exports to Russia. The intuition is that when Russians are unable to buy the mix of foreign goods they wish, foreign goods become l...

Decision Theory and Stochastic Growth

By Arthur Robson, Larry Samuelson, and Jakub Steiner

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2023

This paper examines connections between stochastic growth and decision problems. We use tools from the theory of large deviations to show that wishful thinking decision problems are equivalent to utility maximization problems, both of which are equivalent...

What is economics?

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Understanding the discipline

Planning for the Job Market

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Conducting Research

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CSWEP Board: Misty Heggeness

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Measuring Intergenerational Income Mobility: A Synthesis of Approaches

By Nathan Deutscher and Bhashkar Mazumder

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2023

The literature on intergenerational income mobility uses a diverse set of measures and there is limited knowledge about whether these measures provide similar information and yield similar conclusions. We provide a framework to highlight the key concept...