The Geography of Consumption and Local Economic Shocks: The Case of the Great Recession

By Abe Dunn and Mahsa Gholizadeh

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics

We estimate across-county spending flows between firms and consumers for every county in the United States, providing a new consumption link that has not been studied previously. We highlight the importance of this link by estimating the effect of chan...

Increasing Organ Donor Registration as a Means to Increase Transplantation: An Experiment With Actual Organ Donor Registrations

By Judd B. Kessler and Alvin E. Roth

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

The U.S. has a severe shortage of organs for transplant. Recently — inspired by research based on hypothetical choices — jurisdictions have tried to increase organ donor registrations by changing how the registration question is asked. We evaluate ...

Fiscal Backing for Price Stability in a Monetary Union

By Bartosz Maćkowiak and Sebastian Schmidt

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics

Fiscal backing is the idea that for the price level to be uniquely determined, fiscal policy must be active (as in Leeper, 1991) at least in some states of the world. We extend the fiscal theory of the price level to the case of a heterogenous monetary ...

Optimal Contract Regulation in Selection Markets

By Yehuda John Levy and André Veiga

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

We model competitive insurance markets with continuous cost-types. A regulator sets minimum and maximum coverage levels and a fee for non-buyers. Equilibrium is unique if the type distribution is log-concave. Increasing the non-purchase fee increases w...

Complementary bidding and the collusive arrangement: Evidence from an antitrust investigation

By Robert Clark, Decio Coviello, and Adriano De Leverano

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

Clustered bids and a missing mass of nearly tied bids have both been proposed as markers of collusion. We present causal empirical evidence from an actual pro- curement cartel that bidding involves both clustering and a gap around the winning bid. We s...

Marc Nerlove (1933–2024)

[News]

July 18, 2024

The economics profession is saddened by the loss of the University of Maryland professor and AEA Distinguished Fellow.

The distributional consequences of recessions

[Research Highlight]

July 15, 2024

How do local labor markets recover after economic shocks?

CSMGEP: Fenaba Addo

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CSMGEP: Fernando Lozano

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Childcare, Labor Supply, and Business Development: Experimental Evidence from Uganda

By Kjetil Bjorvatn, Denise Ferris, Selim Gulesci, Arne Nasgowitz, Vincent Somville, and Lore Vandewalle

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics

We randomly offered a childcare subsidy, an equivalent cash grant, or both to mothers of three-to-five-year-old children. The childcare subsidy substantially increased labor supply and earnings of single mothers, highlighting the importance of time cons...

Career earnings

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What economists can expect to earn in different fields.

Does Turnover Inhibit Specialization? Evidence from a Skill Survey in Peru

By Andrea Atencio-De-Leon, Munseob Lee, and Claudia Macaluso

American Economic Review: Insights

We design, pilot, and field a new survey of job skills in Peru, to investigate human capital differences between poor and rich countries. Peruvian jobs have markedly more uniform skill profiles than jobs in the US. On the other hand, matching frictions...

Financial Technology Adoption: Network Externalities of Cashless Payments in Mexico

By Sean Higgins

American Economic Review

Do coordination failures constrain financial technology adoption? Exploiting the Mexican government’s rollout of one million debit cards to poor households from 2009–2012, I examine responses on both sides of the market, and find important spillover...

Public Discourse and Socially Responsible Market Behavior

By Björn Bartling, Vanessa Valero, Roberto A. Weber, and Lan Yao

American Economic Review

We investigate the causal impact of public discourse on socially responsible market behavior. Across three laboratory experiments, having market participants engage in public discourse generally increases market social responsibility. These positive im...

Generalized Social Marginal Welfare Weights Imply Inconsistent Comparisons of Tax Policies

By Itai Sher

American Economic Review

This paper concerns Saez and Stantcheva’s (2016) generalized social marginal welfare weights, which aggregate losses and gains due to tax policies while incorporating non-utilitarian ethical considerations. The approach evaluates local tax changes wi...

Micro Risks and (Robust) Pareto Improving Policies

By Mark Aguiar, Manuel Amador, and Cristina Arellano

American Economic Review

We provide sufficient conditions for the feasibility of robust Pareto-improving (RPI) policies in the class of incomplete markets models of Bewley-Huggett-Aiyagari and when the interest rate is below the growth rate. We allow for arbitrary heterogeneity i...

CSMGEP: Contact the Committee

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For more information on CSMGEP, please contact

Institution Building without Commitment

By Marco Bassetto, Zhen Huo, and José-Víctor Ríos-Rull

American Economic Review

We propose a theory of gradualism in the implementation of good policies, suitable for environments featuring time consistency. We downplay the role of the initial period by allowing agents both to wait for future agents to start equilibrium play and t...

Polity Size and Local Government Performance: Evidence from India

By Veda Narasimhan and Jeffrey Weaver

American Economic Review

Developing countries have increasingly decentralized power to local governments. This paper studies the implications of a central element of decentralization – polity size – using population-based discontinuities that determine local government boun...

The Social Costs of Keystone Species Collapse: Evidence from the Decline of Vultures in India

By Eyal Frank and Anant Sudarshan

American Economic Review

Scientific evidence has documented that we are undergoing a mass extinction of species, caused by human activity. However, allocating conservation resources is difficult due to scarce evidence on damages from losing individual species. This paper studi...