Media Competition and News Diets

By Charles Angelucci, Julia Cagé, and Michael Sinkinson

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2024

Technological innovations like broadcast television and the internet challenge local newspapers' business model of bundling their local content with third-party content, such as wire national news. We examine how the entry of television affected newspaper...

(Reverse) Price Discrimination with Information Design

By Dong Wei and Brett Green

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2024

A seller markets a good to a customer whose willingness to pay depends on his private type and the good's quality. The seller designs a screening mechanism that specifies both transfers and information revealed about quality. We show that the optimal mech...

Equity Concerns Are Narrowly Framed

By Christine L. Exley and Judd B. Kessler

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2024

Distributional decisions regularly involve multiple payoff components. In a series of experiments, we show that individuals sometimes exhibit narrow equity concerns: applying fairness preferences narrowly on a specific component of payoffs rather than on ...

Consumer Search and Product Returns in E-Commerce

By Maarten Janssen and Cole Williams

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2024

E-commerce has led to a surge in products being returned after purchase. We analyze product returns as resulting from a trade-off between the social waste of returns and the search efficiency gains of being able to inspect a product's value after purchase...

The Negative Consequences of Loss-Framed Performance Incentives

By Lamar Pierce, Alex Rees-Jones, and Charlotte Blank

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

Behavioral economists have proposed that incentive contracts result in higher productivity when bonuses are “loss framed”—prepaid then clawed back if targets are unmet. We test this claim by randomizing the pre- or post-payment of sales bonuses a...

Soviet Mathematics and Economic Theory in the Past Century: A Historical Reappraisal

By Ivan Boldyrev

Journal of Economic Literature

What are the effects of authoritarian regimes on scholarly research in economics? And how might economic theory survive ideological pressures? The article addresses these questions by focusing on the mathematization of economics over the past century and ...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, May 2024

Household Labor Supply and the Value of Social Security Survivors Benefits

By David Coyne, Itzik Fadlon, Shanthi P. Ramnath, and Patricia K. Tong

American Economic Review, May 2024

We combine quasi-experimental variation in spousal death and age eligibility for survivors benefits using US tax records to study the effects on American households' labor supply and the design of social security's survivors insurance. Benefit eligibility...

Creating Moves to Opportunity: Experimental Evidence on Barriers to Neighborhood Choice

By Peter Bergman, Raj Chetty, Stefanie DeLuca, Nathaniel Hendren, Lawrence F. Katz, and Christopher Palmer

American Economic Review, May 2024

Low-income families often live in low-upward-mobility neighborhoods. We study why by using a randomized trial with housing voucher recipients that provided information, financial support, and customized search assistance to move to high-opportunity neighb...

From Fog to Smog: The Value of Pollution Information

By Panle Jia Barwick, Shanjun Li, Liguo Lin, and Eric Yongchen Zou

American Economic Review, May 2024

In 2013, China launched a landmark program to monitor air quality and disclose real-time data, significantly increasing the public's access to and awareness of pollution information. The program triggered cascading behavioral changes such as stronger avoi...

Shocks, Frictions, and Inequality in US Business Cycles

By Christian Bayer, Benjamin Born, and Ralph Luetticke

American Economic Review, May 2024

We show how a heterogeneous agent New Keynesian (HANK) model with incomplete markets and portfolio choice can be estimated in state space using a Bayesian approach. To render estimation feasible, the structure of the economy can be exploited and the dimen...

Resisting Social Pressure in the Household Using Mobile Money: Experimental Evidence on Microenterprise Investment in Uganda

By Emma Riley

American Economic Review, May 2024

I examine whether changing the form of disbursement of a microfinance loan enables female microfinance borrowers to overcome intra-household sharing pressure and grow their businesses. Using a field experiment with 3,000 borrowers in Uganda, I compare the...

A Framework for Economic Growth with Capital-Embodied Technical Change

By Benjamin F. Jones and Xiaojie Liu

American Economic Review, May 2024

Technological advance is often embodied in capital inputs, like computers, airplanes, and robots. This paper builds a framework where capital inputs advance through (i) increased automation and (ii) increased productivity. The interplay of these two innov...

On Binscatter

By Matias D. Cattaneo, Richard K. Crump, Max H. Farrell, and Yingjie Feng

American Economic Review, May 2024

Binscatter is a popular method for visualizing bivariate relationships and conducting informal specification testing. We study the properties of this method formally and develop enhanced visualization and econometric binscatter tools. These include estima...

Information Cascades and Social Learning

By Sushil Bikhchandani, David Hirshleifer, Omer Tamuz, and Ivo Welch

Journal of Economic Literature

Social learning is the updating of beliefs based on observation of others. Such observation can lead to efficient aggregation of information, but also to inaccurate decisions, fragility of mass behaviors, and, in the case of information cascades, to compl...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2024

Racial and Ethnic Representation in Local Government

By Brian Beach, Daniel B. Jones, Tate Twinam, and Randall Walsh

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2024

Does the presence of underrepresented racial/ethnic groups in a legislative body differentially impact outcomes for members of those groups? We study close elections between White and non-White candidates for California city council and the corresponding ...

The Returns to STEM Programs for Less-Prepared Students

By Kevin Ng and Evan Riehl

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2024

The returns to selective STEM programs depend on whether students complete these programs, earnings conditional on completion, and counterfactual schooling choices. Much research has focused on only one of these margins, potentially leading to an incomple...

The Returns to Public Library Investment

By Gregory Gilpin, Ezra Karger, and Peter Nencka

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2024

Local governments spend over $12 billion annually funding the operation of 15,427 public libraries in the United States, yet we know little about their effects. We use data describing the near universe of public libraries to show that public library capit...

Do Family Policies Reduce Gender Inequality? Evidence from 60 Years of Policy Experimentation

By Henrik Kleven, Camille Landais, Johanna Posch, Andreas Steinhauer, and Josef Zweimüller

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2024

Do family policies reduce gender inequality in the labor market? We contribute to this debate by investigating the joint impact of parental leave and childcare, using administrative data covering Austrian workers over more than half a century. We start by...