Regulation Design in Insurance Markets

By Dhruva Bhaskar, Andrew McClellan, and Evan Sadler

American Economic Review, October 2023

Regulators often impose rules that constrain the behavior of market participants. We study the design of regulatory policy in an insurance market as a delegation problem. A regulator restricts the menus of contracts an informed firm is permitted to offer,...

A Signal to End Child Marriage: Theory and Experimental Evidence from Bangladesh

By Nina Buchmann, Erica Field, Rachel Glennerster, Shahana Nazneen, and Xiao Yu Wang

American Economic Review, October 2023

Child marriage remains common even where female schooling and employment opportunities have grown. We experimentally evaluate a financial incentive to delay marriage alongside a girls' empowerment program in Bangladesh. While girls eligible for two years ...

Optimal Insurance: Dual Utility, Random Losses, and Adverse Selection

By Alex Gershkov, Benny Moldovanu, Philipp Strack, and Mengxi Zhang

American Economic Review, October 2023

We study a generalization of the classical monopoly insurance problem under adverse selection (see Stiglitz 1977) where we allow for a random distribution of losses, possibly correlated with the agent's risk parameter that is private information. Our mode...

Unequal growth in learning

[Page]

Was remote instruction a driver of the widening academic achievement gap between high- and low-poverty school districts during the pandemic?

Victor Fuchs (1924–2023)

[News]

September 21, 2023

The longtime Stanford University professor and former AEA president has passed away at the age of 99.

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2023

Improving Regulatory Effectiveness through Better Targeting: Evidence from OSHA

By Matthew S. Johnson, David I. Levine, and Michael W. Toffel

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2023

We study how a regulator can best target inspections. Our case study is a US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) program that randomly allocated some inspections. On average, each inspection led to 2.4 (9 percent) fewer serious injuries o...

Immigration, Crime, and Crime (Mis)Perceptions

By Nicolás Ajzenman, Patricio Dominguez, and Raimundo Undurraga

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2023

This paper studies the effects of immigration on crime and crime perceptions in Chile, where the foreign-born population tripled in less than ten years. We document null effects of immigration on crime but positive and significant effects on crime-related...

How Do Households Respond to Job Loss? Lessons from Multiple High-Frequency Datasets

By Asger Lau Andersen, Amalie Sofie Jensen, Niels Johannesen, Claus Thustrup Kreiner, Søren Leth-Petersen, and Adam Sheridan

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2023

How much and through which channels do households self-insure against job loss? Combining data from a large bank and from government sources, we quantify a broad range of responses to job loss in a unified empirical framework. Cumulated over a two-year pe...

Contagious Dishonesty: Corruption Scandals and Supermarket Theft

By Giorgio Gulino and Federico Masera

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2023

Is dishonest behavior contagious? We answer this question by studying whether corruption scandals affect the propensity of supermarket customers to steal while using a self-service checkout system. Crucially, this system allows shoppers to engage in disho...

How Cable News Reshaped Local Government

By Elliott Ash and Sergio Galletta

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2023

This paper shows that partisan cable news broadcasts have a causal effect on the size and composition of budgets in US localities. Using exogenous channel positioning as an instrument for viewership, we show that exposure to the conservative Fox News chan...

Hidden Income and the Perceived Returns to Migration

By Travis Baseler

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2023

In many developing economies, urban workers earn substantially more than rural workers with the same level of education. Why don't more rural workers migrate to cities? I use two field experiments in Kenya to show that low migration is partly due to under...

Collateralized Marriage

By Jeanne Lafortune and Corinne Low

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2023

Marriage rates have become increasingly stratified by homeownership. We investigate this in a household model where investments in public goods reduce future earnings and, thus, divorce risk creates inefficiencies. Access to a joint savings technology, li...

Coming Apart? Cultural Distances in the United States over Time

By Marianne Bertrand and Emir Kamenica

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2023

We analyze trends in cultural distances between groups in the United States defined by income, education, gender, race, and political ideology. We measure cultural distance as the ability to infer an individual's group based on media diet, consumer behavi...

Discrimination in Times of Crises and the Role of the Media

By Asaf Zussman

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2023

Can the extent of ethnic discrimination change quickly, and what circumstances and mechanisms make such changes possible? I address these questions by using scraped data to study the daily evolution of customer discrimination against Arab doctors in Israe...

Civil Liberties in Times of Crisis

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

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2023

We study people's willingness to trade off civil liberties for increased health security in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic by deploying representative surveys involving around 550,000 responses across 15 countries. We document significant heterogene...

Coordination and Bandwagon Effects: How Past Rankings Shape the Behavior of Voters and Candidates

By Riako Granzier, Vincent Pons, and Clemence Tricaud

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2023

Candidates' placements in polls and past elections can be powerful coordination devices for parties and voters. Using a regression discontinuity design in French two-round elections, we show that candidates who place first in the first round are more like...

Temporal Instability of Risk Preference among the Poor: Evidence from Payday Cycles

By Mika Akesaka, Peter Eibich, Chie Hanaoka, and Hitoshi Shigeoka

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2023

The poor live paycheck to paycheck and are repeatedly exposed to strong cyclical income fluctuations. We investigate whether such income fluctuations affect their risk preference. If risk preference temporarily changes around payday, optimal decisions mad...

The Effect of Hospital Postpartum Care Regulations on Breastfeeding and Maternal Time Allocation

By Emily C. Lawler and Katherine G. Yewell

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2023

We study the effects of state hospital regulations intended to increase breastfeeding by requiring certain standards of care during the immediate postpartum hospital stay. We find that these regulations significantly increased breastfeeding initiation by ...

Returns to International Migration: Evidence from a Bangladesh-Malaysia Visa Lottery

By Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak, Iffath Sharif, and Maheshwor Shrestha

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2023

South Asians traveling to richer Asian nations is the world's largest migration corridor. We track down applicants to a government lottery that randomly allocated visas to Bangladeshis for temporary labor contracts in Malaysia, five years later. Most lott...