Age Set vs. Kin: Culture and Financial Ties in East Africa

By Jacob Moscona and Awa Ambra Seck

American Economic Review

We study how social organization shapes patterns of economic interaction and the effects of national policy, focusing on the distinction between age-based and kin-based groups in sub-Saharan Africa. Motivated by ethnographic accounts suggesting that thi...

Investing in the Next Generation: The Long-Run Impacts of a Liquidity Shock

By Patrick Agte, Arielle Bernhardt, Erica Field, Rohini Pande, and Natalia Rigol

American Economic Review

Poor entrepreneurs must frequently choose between business investment and children's education. To examine this trade-off, we exploit experimental variation in short-run microenterprise growth among a sample of Indian households and track children's edu...

Digital Information Provision and Behavior Change: Lessons from Six Experiments in East Africa

By Raissa Fabregas, Michael Kremer, Matthew Lowes, Robert On, and Giulia Zane

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics

While some studies suggest mobile phone-based information programs change behavior, others find no effect. We evaluate six text{message agricultural extension programs, collectively covering 128,000 farmers. A meta-analysis finds a 1.22-fold increase in...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2024

The Impacts of Physician Payments on Patient Access, Use, and Health

By Diane Alexander and Molly Schnell

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2024

We examine how supply-side health insurance generosity affects patient access, use, and health. Exploiting large, exogenous changes in Medicaid reimbursement rates for physicians, we find that increasing payments for new patient office visits reduces repo...

Patient versus Provider Incentives in Long-Term Care

By Martin B. Hackmann, R. Vincent Pohl, and Nicolas R. Ziebarth

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2024

How do patient and provider incentives affect the provision of long-term care? Our analysis of 551,000 nursing home stays yields three main insights. First, due to limited cost-sharing, Medicaid-covered residents prolong their nursing home stays instead o...

Consumer Protection in an Online World: An Analysis of Occupational Licensing

By Chiara Farronato, Andrey Fradkin, Bradley J. Larsen, and Erik Brynjolfsson

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2024

We study the demand and supply implications of occupational licensing using transaction-level data from a large online platform for home improvement services. We find that demand is more responsive to a professional's reviews than to the professional's pl...

The Impact of Benefit Generosity on Workers' Compensation Claims: Evidence and Implications

By Marika Cabral and Marcus Dillender

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2024

Leveraging unique administrative data and a sharp increase in benefit generosity in a difference-in-differences research design, we estimate the impact of workers' compensation wage replacement benefits on individual behavior and program costs. We find th...

Spillovers without Social Interactions in Urban Sanitation

By Joshua W. Deutschmann, Molly Lipscomb, Laura Schechter, and Jessica Zhu

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2024

We run a randomized controlled trial coupled with lab-in-the-field social network experiments in urban Dakar. Decision spillovers and health externalities play a large role in determining uptake of sanitation technology, with decision spillovers being lar...

The Great Migration and Educational Opportunity

By Cavit Baran, Eric Chyn, and Bryan A. Stuart

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2024

This paper studies the impact of the First Great Migration on children. We use the complete-count 1940 census to estimate selection-corrected place effects on education for children of Black migrants. On average, Black children gained 0.8 years of schooli...

Fighting for Tyranny: State Repression and Combat Motivation

By Arturas Rozenas, Roya Talibova, and Yuri M. Zhukov

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2024

We utilize over 100 million declassified Red Army personnel records from World War II to study how state repression shapes soldiers' motivation to exert effort in fighting. Exploiting multiple complementary identification strategies, we find that soldiers...

Public Information Is an Incentive for Politicians: Experimental Evidence from Delhi Elections

By Abhijit Banerjee, Nils Enevoldsen, Rohini Pande, and Michael Walton

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2024

Two years prior to elections, two-thirds of Delhi municipal councillors learned they had been randomly chosen for a preelection newspaper report card. Treated councillors in high-slum areas increased pro-poor spending, relative both to control counterpart...

The Evolution of Local Labor Markets after Recessions

By Brad Hershbein and Bryan A. Stuart

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2024

This paper studies how US local labor markets respond to employment losses that occur during recessions. Following recessions from 1973 through 2009, we find areas that lose more jobs during the recession experience persistent relative declines in employm...

Persecution and Escape: Professional Networks and High-Skilled Emigration from Nazi Germany

By Sascha O. Becker, Volker Lindenthal, Sharun W. Mukand, and Fabian Waldinger

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2024

We study the role of professional networks in facilitating emigration of Jewish academics dismissed from their positions by the Nazi government. We use individual-level exogenous variation in the timing of dismissals to estimate causal effects. Academics ...

Civil Service Exams and Organizational Performance: Evidence from the Pendleton Act

By Diana Moreira and Santiago Pérez

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2024

We use newly digitized data to study the impacts of a historical reform that mandated exams for some employees in the largest US customs-collection districts. Although the reform improved targeted employees' professional backgrounds and reduced turnover, ...

Socioeconomic Disparities in Privatized Pollution Remediation: Evidence from Toxic Chemical Spills

By Justin Marion and Jeremy West

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2024

Governments often privatize the administration of regulations to third-party specialists paid for by the regulated parties. We study how the resulting conflict of interest can have unintended consequences for the distributional impacts of regulation. In M...

The Human Capital Effects of Access to Elite Jobs

By Huayu Xu and Achyuta Adhvaryu

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2024

We study the human capital effects of access to elite bureaucratic jobs in Taiwan, where performance on an examination determines entry into the civil service. Historically, quotas for successful applicants were set based on the 1948 populations of indivi...

Health Care Centralization: The Health Impacts of Obstetric Unit Closures in the United States

By Stefanie Fischer, Heather Royer, and Corey White

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2024

Over the last few decades, health care services in the United States have become more geographically centralized. We study how the loss of hospital-based obstetric units in over 400 counties affects maternal and infant health via a difference-in-differenc...

When Individual Politics Become Public: Do Civil Service Protections Insulate Government Workers?

By Morgan Foy

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2024

This paper examines whether the civil service system protected state bureaucrats from political interference following a recall petition against the governor of Wisconsin. I find that most classified workers, who were covered by the state civil service la...

The Everything Token: How NFTs and Web3 Will Transform the Way We Buy, Sell, and Create by Steve Kaczynski and Scott Duke Kominers

By Rakesh Vohra

Journal of Economic Literature