The Virus of Fear: The Political Impact of Ebola in the United States

By Filipe Campante, Emilio Depetris-Chauvin, and Ruben Durante

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2024

We study how public anxiety over the threat of a disease outbreak can affect voter behavior by looking at the Ebola scare that hit the United States in 2014. Exploiting timing and locations of the four cases diagnosed in the country, we show that heighten...

The Marginal Returns to Distance Education: Evidence from Mexico's Telesecundarias

By Emilio Borghesan and Gabrielle Vasey

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2024

This paper analyzes a large-scale and long-running distance education program in Mexico. We estimate marginal treatment effects (MTEs) for learning in math and Spanish in telesecundarias relative to traditional Mexican secondary schools using an empirical...

The Value of Leisure Synchronization

By Simon Georges-Kot, Dominique Goux, and Eric Maurin

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2024

This paper explores the extent to which workers are willing to trade hours worked for leisure time shared with their spouse. We use the fact that the number and timing of paid vacation days to which French employees are entitled vary in a quasi-random way...

What Impacts Can We Expect from School Spending Policy? Evidence from Evaluations in the United States

By C. Kirabo Jackson and Claire L. Mackevicius

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2024

We conduct meta-analysis on a comprehensive set of studies of the impacts of US K-12 public school spending on student outcomes—estimating average marginal impacts and heterogeneity across contexts. On average, a policy increasing spending by $1,000 per...

2023 in Featured Charts

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Economists addressed issues related to immigration, social identity, infrastructure costs, and more.

Estimating the Distaste for Price Gouging with Incentivized Consumer Reports

By Justin Holz, Rafael Jiménez-Durán, and Eduardo Laguna-Müggenburg

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2024

Thirty-four states prohibit price increases during emergencies, and individuals take costly actions to report violators. We measure experimentally the willingness to pay to report sellers who increase prices of personal protective equipment. Over 75 perce...

AEASTAT: 2024 Annual Meeting

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Sessions for AEA Committee on Economic Statistics, 2024 ASSA meetings

Front Matter

American Economic Review, January 2024

Market Power and Innovation in the Intangible Economy

By Maarten De Ridder

American Economic Review, January 2024

This paper offers a unified explanation for the slowdown of productivity growth, the decline in business dynamism, and the rise of market power. Using a quantitative framework, I show that the rise of intangible inputs, such as software, can explain these...

The Economic Impact of Depression Treatment in India: Evidence from Community-Based Provision of Pharmacotherapy

By Manuela Angelucci and Daniel Bennett

American Economic Review, January 2024

This study evaluates the impact of depression treatment on economic behavior in Karnataka, India. We cross-randomize pharmacotherapy and livelihoods assistance among 1,000 depressed adults and evaluate impacts on depression severity, socioeconomic outcome...

Disentangling Moral Hazard and Adverse Selection

By Henrique Castro-Pires, Hector Chade, and Jeroen Swinkels

American Economic Review, January 2024

While many real-world principal-agent problems have both moral hazard and adverse selection, existing tools largely analyze only one at a time. Do the insights from the separate analyses survive when the frictions are combined? We develop a simple methodâ...

Propagation and Insurance in Village Networks

By Cynthia Kinnan, Krislert Samphantharak, Robert Townsend, and Diego Vera-Cossio

American Economic Review, January 2024

Firms in developing countries are embedded in supply chains and labor networks. These linkages may propagate or attenuate shocks. Using panel data from Thai villages, we document three facts: as households facing idiosyncratic shocks adjust their producti...

Universal Basic Income: A Dynamic Assessment

By Diego Daruich and Raquel Fernández

American Economic Review, January 2024

Universal basic income (UBI) is an increasingly popular policy proposal, but there is no evidence regarding its longer-term consequences. We find that UBI generates large welfare losses in a general equilibrium model with imperfect capital markets, labor ...

Retirement Consumption and Pension Design

By Jonas Kolsrud, Camille Landais, Daniel Reck, and Johannes Spinnewijn

American Economic Review, January 2024

This paper analyzes consumption to evaluate the distributional effects of pension reforms. Using Swedish administrative data, we show that on average, workers who retire earlier consume less while retired and experience larger drops in consumption around ...

The Ends of 27 Big Depressions

By Martin Ellison, Sang Seok Lee, and Kevin Hjortshøj O'Rourke

American Economic Review, January 2024

How did countries recover from the Great Depression? In this paper, we explore the argument that leaving the gold standard helped by boosting inflationary expectations, lowering real interest rates, and stimulating interest-sensitive expenditures. We do s...

Competing to Commit: Markets with Rational Inattention

By Carlo M. Cusumano, Francesco Fabbri, and Ferdinand Pieroth

American Economic Review, January 2024

Two homogeneous-good firms compete for a consumer's unitary demand. The consumer is rationally inattentive and pays entropy costs to process information about firms' offers. Compared to a collusion benchmark, competition produces two effects. As in standa...

ASSA 2024 General Information

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Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2024

Wage Rigidity and Employment Outcomes: Evidence from Administrative Data

By Gabriel Ehrlich and Joshua Montes

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2024

This paper examines the relationship between downward nominal wage rigidity and employment outcomes using linked employer-employee data. Wage rigidity prevents 27.1 percent of counterfactual wage cuts, with a standard deviation of 19.2 percent across esta...

Government Borrowing and Crowding Out

By Yasin Kürşat Önder, Sara Restrepo-Tamayo, Maria Alejandra Ruiz-Sanchez, and Mauricio Villamizar-Villegas

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2024

We investigate the impact of fiscal expansions on firm investment by exploiting firms with multiple banking relationships. Further, we conduct a localized approach and compare the lending behavior of banks that barely met and missed the criteria of being ...