Race and the Mismeasure of School Quality

By Joshua Angrist, Peter Hull, Parag A. Pathak, and Christopher R. Walters

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2024

In large urban districts, schools enrolling more White students tend to have higher performance ratings. We use an instrumental variables strategy leveraging centralized school assignment to explore this relationship. Estimates from Denver and New York Ci...

Interest Rates and the Spatial Polarization of Housing Markets

By Francisco Amaral, Martin Dohmen, Sebastian Kohl, and Moritz Schularick

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2024

Rising within-country differences in house values are a much-debated trend in the United States and internationally. Using new long-run regional data for 15 advanced economies, we show that standard explanations linking growing price dispersion to rent di...

Wage Garnishment in the United States: New Facts from Administrative Payroll Records

By Anthony A. DeFusco, Brandon Enriquez, and Maggie Yellen

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2024

Wage garnishment allows creditors to deduct money from workers' paychecks to repay defaulted debts. We document new facts about wage garnishment between 2014 and 2019 using data from a large payroll processor that distributes paychecks to approximately 20...

Can Financial Incentives to Firms Improve Apprenticeship Training? Experimental Evidence from Ghana

By Gabriel Brown, Morgan Hardy, Isaac Mbiti, Jamie McCasland, and Isabelle Salcher

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2024

We use a field experiment to test whether financial incentives can improve the quality of apprenticeship training. Trainers (firm owners) in the treatment group participated in a tournament incentive scheme where they received a payment based on their app...

The Irrelevance of Fee Structures for Certification

By Martin Pollrich and Roland Strausz

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2024

In models of certification, possible restrictions on the nature of the fee structures are commonly analyzed. We show that they are irrelevant for the certifier's ability to maximize profits and trade efficiency. Our results establish that certification sc...

Steady-State Social Distancing and Vaccination

By Christopher Avery, Frederick Chen, and David McAdams

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2024

This paper analyzes an economic-epidemiological model of infectious disease where it is possible to become infected more than once and individual agents make endogenous choices of social distancing and vaccine adoption. Protective actions adopted by any o...

The Marginal Disutility from Corruption in Social Programs: Evidence from Program Administrators and Beneficiaries

By Arya Gaduh, Rema Hanna, and Benjamin A. Olken

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2024

Concerns about fraud in welfare programs are common arguments worldwide against such programs. We conducted a survey experiment with over 28,000 welfare program administrators and over 19,000 beneficiaries in Indonesia to elicit the "marginal disutility f...

Cash and Conflict: Large-Scale Experimental Evidence from Niger

By Patrick Premand and Dominic Rohner

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2024

Conflict undermines development, while adverse economic shocks, in turn, can increase conflict risk. Policy interventions such as cash transfers could attenuate conflict risk by raising poor households' opportunity costs. However, cash transfers may also ...

Front Matter

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2024

Immigrant Communities and Knowledge Spillovers: Danish Americans and the Development of the Dairy Industry in the United States

By Nina Boberg-Fazlić and Paul Sharp

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2024

Despite the growing literature on the impact of immigration, little is known about the role existing migrant settlements can play for knowledge transmission and the location of industry. We present a case that can illustrate this important mechanism and h...

Immigrant communities and economic development

[Research Highlight]

February 22, 2024

The effect of established Danish settlements on the US dairy industry.

Monetary Policy and Rational Asset Price Bubbles

By Jordi Galí

American Economic Review, March 2014

I examine the impact of alternative monetary policy rules on a rational asset price bubble, through the lens of an overlapping generations model with nominal rigidities. A systematic increase in interest rates in response to a growing bubble is shown to e...

Monetary Policy and Rational Asset Price Bubbles: Comment

By Jianjun Miao, Zhouxiang Shen, and Pengfei Wang

American Economic Review, May 2019

We revisit Galí’s (2014) analysis by extending his model to incorporate persistent bubble shocks. We find that, under adaptive learning, a stable bubbly steady state and the associated sunspot solutions under optimal monetary policy are not E-stable. W...

Advisory Committee on Editorial Appointments

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Front Matter

American Economic Review, March 2024

Mental Models and Learning: The Case of Base-Rate Neglect

By Ignacio Esponda, Emanuel Vespa, and Sevgi Yuksel

American Economic Review, March 2024

We experimentally document persistence of suboptimal behavior despite ample opportunities to learn from feedback in a canonical updating problem where people suffer from base-rate neglect. Our results provide insights on the mechanisms hindering learning ...

The Comparative Statics of Sorting

By Axel Anderson and Lones Smith

American Economic Review, March 2024

We create a general and tractable theory of increasing sorting in pairwise matching models with monetary transfers. The positive quadrant dependence partial order subsumes Becker (1973) as the extreme cases with most and least sorting and implies increasi...

Hub-and-Spoke Cartels: Theory and Evidence from the Grocery Industry

By Robert Clark, Ig Horstmann, and Jean-François Houde

American Economic Review, March 2024

Numerous recently uncovered cartels operated along the supply chain, with firms at one end facilitating collusion at the other—hub-and-spoke arrangements. These cartels are hard to rationalize because they induce double marginalization and higher costs....

The Effect of Macroeconomic Uncertainty on Household Spending

By Olivier Coibion, Dimitris Georgarakos, Yuriy Gorodnichenko, Geoff Kenny, and Michael Weber

American Economic Review, March 2024

We use randomized treatments that provide different types of information about the first and/or second moments of future economic growth to generate exogenous changes in the perceived macroeconomic uncertainty of treated households. The effects on their s...

Does the Squeaky Wheel Get More Grease? The Direct and Indirect Effects of Citizen Participation on Environmental Governance in China

By Mark T. Buntaine, Michael Greenstone, Guojun He, Mengdi Liu, Shaoda Wang, and Bing Zhang

American Economic Review, March 2024

We conducted a nationwide field experiment in China to evaluate the direct and indirect impacts of assigning firms to public or private citizen appeals when they violate pollution standards. There are three main findings. First, public appeals to the regu...