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Bootstrap Inference for Quantile Treatment Effects in Randomized Experiments with Matched Pairs The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2024-03-19 Liang Jiang, Xiaobin Liu, Peter C. B. Phillips, Yichong Zhang
This paper examines methods of inference concerning quantile treatment effects (QTEs) in randomized experiments with matched-pairs designs (MPDs). Standard multiplier bootstrap inference fails to capture the negative dependence of observations within each pair and is therefore conservative. Analytical inference involves estimating multiple functional quantities that require several tuning parameters
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Personal Bests and Gender The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2024-03-19 Julio González-Díaz, Ignacio Palacios-Huerta, José M. Abuín
We connect two large bodies of scientific inquiry. First, important theories in the social sciences establish that human preferences are reference-dependent. Second, a separate field of research documents substantial differences in preferences and attitudes across genders. Specifically, we examine the universe of official classic chess games (more than 250,000 subjects and 22 million games). This allows
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Violence and Financial Decisions: Evidence from Mobile Money in Afghanistan The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2024-03-19 Joshua E. Blumenstock, Michael Callen, Tarek Ghani, Robert Gonzalez
We provide evidence that violence reduces the adoption and use of mobile money in three separate empirical settings in Afghanistan. First, analyzing nationwide mobile money transaction logs, we find that users exposed to violence reduce use of mobile money. Second, using panel survey data from a field experiment, we show that subjects expecting violence are significantly less likely to respond to random
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Understanding the Rise in Life Expectancy Inequality The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2024-03-19 Gordon B. Dahl, Claus Thustrup Kreiner, Torben Heien Nielsen, Benjamin Ly Serena
We provide a novel decomposition of changing gaps in life expectancy between rich and poor into differential changes in age-specific mortality rates and differences in “survivability.” Declining age-specific mortality rates increases life expectancy, but the gain is small if the likelihood of living to this age is small (ex ante survivability) or if the expected remaining lifetime is short (ex post
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Anti-Muslim Voting and Media Coverage of Immigrant Crimes The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2024-03-19 Mathieu Couttenier, Sophie Hatte, Mathias Thoenig, Stephanos Vlachos
We study how news coverage of immigrant criminality impacts voting in one of the most controversial referendums in recent years—the 2009 Swiss minaret ban. We combine a comprehensive crime detection data set with detailed information on newspaper coverage. We first document a large upward distortion in media reporting of immigrant crime during the prereferendum period. Exploiting quasi-random variations
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How Sticky Is Retirement Behavior in the United States? The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2024-03-19 Manasi Deshpande, Itzik Fadlon, Colin Gray
We study how increases in the U.S. Social Security full retirement age (FRA) affect benefit-claiming behavior and retirement behavior separately. Using long panels of Social Security administrative data, we implement complementary research designs of a traditional cohort analysis and a regression-discontinuity design. We find that while claiming ages strongly and immediately shift in response to increases
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Financial Constraints and Propagation of Shocks in Production Networks The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2024-03-19 Banu Demir, Beata Javorcik, Tomasz K. Michalski, Evren Ors
We examine the propagation of a small unexpected supply shock through a production network and the role financial constraints play in its transmission. Using data on almost all Turkish supplier-customer links, we exploit the heterogeneous impact of an unexpected import-tax increase for identification. We find that this relatively minor shock had a nontrivial economic impact on exposed firms and propagated
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Playing Hide and Seek: How Lenders Respond to Borrower Protection The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2024-03-19 Youssef Benzarti
This paper uses the universe of mortgage contracts to estimate the response of high-interest lenders to borrower protection regulations aimed at simplifying and making loan terms more transparent. Using a quasi-experimental design, I find that lenders substantially reduce interest rates—by an average of 10%—in order to avoid being subject to borrower protection, without reducing amounts loaned or the
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Transmission of Income Variations to Consumption Variations: The Role of the Firm The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2024-03-19 Miao Jin, Yu-Jane Liu, Juanjuan Meng, Yu Zhang
We use matched employer-employee data to study the role of the firm in the transmission of income growth into consumption growth. We find that growth in income relative to the firm average (the within-firm component) translates significantly less into consumption than growth in firm average income (the between-firm component). These findings are explained by the lower persistence of the within-firm
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Inference on Conditional Quantile Processes in Partially Linear Models with Applications to the Impact of Unemployment Benefits The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2024-03-19 Zhongjun Qu, Jungmo Yoon, Pierre Perron
We propose methods to estimate and make inferences on conditional quantile processes for models with both nonparametric and (locally or globally) linear components. We derive their asymptotic properties, optimal bandwidths, and uniform confidence bands over quantiles allowing for robust bias correction. Our framework covers the sharp regression discontinuity design, which is used to study the effects
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Tracking Weekly State-Level Economic Conditions The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2024-03-19 Christiane Baumeister, Danilo Leiva-León, Eric Sims
This paper develops a novel dataset of weekly economic conditions indices for the 50 U.S. states going back to 1987 based on mixed-frequency dynamic factor models with weekly, monthly, and quarterly variables that cover multiple dimensions of state economies. We find considerable cross-state heterogeneity in the length, depth, and timing of business cycles. We illustrate the usefulness of these state-level
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Role Models in Movies: The Impact of Queen of Katwe on Students’ Educational Attainment The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2024-03-19 Emma Riley
This paper presents experimental evidence on the impact of a role model on secondary school students’ exam performance in Uganda. Students were individually randomized to see either a movie featuring a female role model, Queen of Katwe, or to see a placebo movie. I find that treatment with the role model immediately before an important national exam leads to students performing better on their exams
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Curriculum Reforms and Infant Health The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2024-03-19 Bahadir Dursun, Ozkan Eren, My Nguyen
This paper examines the effects of high school curriculum reforms on infant health by exploiting sharp and staggered changes across states in core course requirements for graduation. Our results suggest that curriculum reforms significantly reduced the incidence of low birthweight and prematurity for black mothers. For white mothers, the estimated effects are small and generally insignificant. We also
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Contracts and Firms' Inflation Expectations The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2024-01-09 Saten Kumar, Dennis Wesselbaum
We use novel survey data to study firms’ inventory contracts. We document facts about the usage of purchase and sale contracts. We find that firms purchase and sell inventory through three contractual arrangements: fixed price and quantity, fixed price only, and fixed quantity only. Those using fixed price and quantity hold the largest share of contracts. The average duration of purchase contracts
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Medical Worker Migration and Origin-Country Human Capital: Evidence from U.S. Visa Policy The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2024-01-09 Paolo Abarcar, Caroline Theoharides
We exploit changes in U.S. visa policies for nurses to measure the origin-country human capital response to international migration opportunities. Combining data on all migrant departures and postsecondary institutions in the Philippines, we show that nursing enrollment and graduation increased substantially in response to greater U.S. demand for nurses. The supply of nursing programs expanded. Nurse
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Judging under Public Pressure The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2024-01-09 Alma Cohen, Zvika Neeman, Florian Auferoth
We study the circumstances under which public pressure affects judging. We show that crowd pressure biases decisions in favor of the crowd for “subjective decisions” with respect to which the judge has more discretion but not for “objective decisions.” The bias is strengthened after a judge's error against the crowd and when errors are costlier to the crowd. We use data about referees' decisions and
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Do Academically Struggling Students Benefit from Continued Student Loan Access? Evidence from University and Beyond The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2024-01-09 Yu-Wei Luke Chu, Harold E. Cuffe
We estimate the effects of student loan access on educational attainment and labor market returns in New Zealand. We exploit the introduction of a national policy mandating a 50% pass rate for student loan renewals using a regression discontinuity design. Retaining loan access increases reenrollment for students around the threshold, and a majority eventually graduate with a bachelor's degree within
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Spending Response to a Predictable Increase in Mortgage Repayments: Evidence from Expiring Interest-Only Loans The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2024-01-09 Henrik Yde Andersen, Stine Ludvig Bech, Alessia De Stefani
We study how homeowners' consumption responds to a negative and anticipated disposable income shock: the beginning of the amortization period on interest-only mortgages. We identify spending behavior through an event study approach, by matching loan-level data that covers the universe of Danish mortgages to detailed administrative registries on borrowers. In response to an average increase in installments
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Jam-Barrel Politics The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2024-01-09 Leonardo Bonilla-Mejía, Juan S. Morales
This paper studies the executive-legislative exchange of centrally allocated benefits (jam) for legislative support in Colombia using data from road building projects, legislative roll-call votes, and a leaked database which uncovered the assignment of road contracts to individual legislators. We draw hypotheses from a model in which an executive spreads jam to sway legislators. We document that assigned
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Credible School Value-Added with Undersubscribed School Lotteries The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2024-01-09 Joshua Angrist, Peter Hull, Parag A. Pathak, Christopher Walters
We introduce two empirical strategies harnessing the randomness in school assignment mechanisms to measure school value-added. The first estimator controls for the probability of school assignment, treating take-up as ignorable. We test this assumption using randomness in assignments. The second approach uses assignments as instrumental variables (IVs) for low-dimensional models of value-added and
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How Green Is Sugarcane Ethanol? The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2024-01-09 Marcelo Sant'Anna
Biofuels offer one approach for reducing carbon emissions. However, the necessary agricultural expansion may endanger tropical forests. I use a dynamic model of land use to disentangle the roles of acreage and yields in the supply of sugarcane ethanol in Brazil. The model is estimated using remote sensing (satellite) information of sugarcane activities. Estimates imply that, at the margin, 92% of new
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How to Attract Physicians to Underserved Areas? Policy Recommendations from a Structural Model The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2024-01-09 Francisco Costa, Letícia Nunes, Fabio Miessi Sanches
This paper exploits location choices of all generalist physicians who graduated in Brazil between 2001 and 2013 to study policies aimed at increasing the supply of physicians in underserved areas. We set up and estimate a supply and demand model for physicians. We estimate physicians' locational preferences using a random coefficients discrete choice model. The demand has private establishments competing
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Intertemporal Income Shifting and the Taxation of Business Owner-Managers The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2024-01-09 Helen Miller, Thomas Pope, Kate Smith
We use newly linked tax records to show that the large responses of UK company owner-managers to personal taxes are due to intertemporal income shifting and not to reductions in real business activity. Around half of this shifting is short-term and helps prevent volatile incomes being taxed more heavily under progressive personal taxes. The remainder reflects systemic profit retention over long periods
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Gentrification and Pioneer Businesses The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2024-01-09 Kristian Behrens, Brahim Boualam, Julien Martin, Florian Mayneris
Little is known about where hotspots of gentrification emerge within a city and the role that some types of businesses play in the process. We develop a method to detect the sectors whose presence heralds the process of gentrification in a neighborhood. We show that these sectors, mostly found in cultural and creative industries, help to anticipate neighborhood change and that their predictive power
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School Closures during the 1918 Flu Pandemic The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2024-01-09 Philipp Ager, Katherine Eriksson, Ezra Karger, Peter Nencka, Melissa A. Thomasson
During the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic, many local authorities made the controversial decision to close schools. We use newly digitized data from newspaper archives on the length of school closures for 165 large U.S. cities during the 1918–1919 flu pandemic to assess the long-run consequences of closing schools on children. We find that the closures had no detectable impact on children's school attendance
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Cohesive Institutions and Political Violence The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2024-01-09 Thiemo Fetzer, Stephan Kyburz
Can revenue sharing of resource rents be a source of distributive conflict? Can cohesive institutions avoid such conflicts? We exploit exogenous variation in local government revenues and new data on local democratic institutions in Nigeria to study these questions. We find a strong link between rents and conflict. Conflicts are highly organized and concentrated in districts and time periods with unelected
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Strategic or Confused Firms? Evidence from “Missing” Transactions in Uganda The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2024-01-09 Miguel Almunia, Jonas Hjort, Justine Knebelmann, Lin Tian
Are firms sophisticated maximizers, or do they appear to make mistakes? Using transaction data from Ugandan value-added tax returns, we show that sellers and buyers report different amounts 79% of the time, despite invoices being easily cross-checked. Our estimates suggest that most firms are “advantageous misreporters,” but that 25% are “disadvantageous misreporters” who systematically overreport
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Same-Sex Marriage Recognition and Taxes: New Evidence about the Impact of Household Taxation The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2024-01-09 Leora Friedberg, Elliott Isaac
The U.S. income tax code encourages marriage for some and discourages marriage for others, but same-sex couples were only recently exposed to these incentives. We estimate marriage responses by exploiting variation in the recognition of same-sex marriages for tax purposes versus earlier papers leveraging smaller changes. Using the American Community Survey, which reports cohabitation and marriage,
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Incentivizing Demand for Supply-Constrained Care: Institutional Birth in India The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2024-01-09 Alison Andrew, Marcos Vera-Hernández
If overcrowding harms health care quality, the impacts of encouraging more people to use services are not obvious. Impacts will depend on whether marginal entrants benefit and whether they benefit enough to offset the congestion externalities imposed on inframarginal users. We develop a general-equilibrium model that formalizes these ideas. We examine them empirically by studying JSY, a program in
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Efficiency and Equilibrium in Network Games: An Experiment The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2023-11-17 Edoardo Gallo, Chang Yan
The tension between efficiency and equilibrium is a central feature of economic systems. We examine this tradeoff in a network game with a unique Nash equilibrium in which agents can achieve a higher payoff by following a “collaborative norm.” Subjects establish and maintain a collaborative norm in the circle, but the norm weakens with the introduction of one hub connected to everyone in the wheel
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Existence and Uniqueness of Solutions to Dynamic Models with Occasionally Binding Constraints The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2023-11-17 Tom D. Holden
Occasionally binding constraints (OBCs) like the zero lower bound (ZLB) can lead to multiple equilibria, and so to belief-driven recessions. To aid in finding policies that avoid this, we derive existence and uniqueness conditions for otherwise linear models with OBCs. Our main result gives necessary and sufficient conditions for such models to have a unique (“determinate”) perfect foresight solution
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Measuring the Output Gap using Large Datasets The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2023-11-17 Matteo Barigozzi, Matteo Luciani
We propose a new measure of the output gap based on a dynamic factor model that is estimated on a large number of U.S. macroeconomic indicators and which incorporates relevant stylized facts about macroeconomic data (comovements, nonstationarity, and the slow drift in long-run output growth over time). We find that (1) from the mid-1990s to 2008, the U.S. economy operated above its potential and (2)
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Motivation Crowding in Peer Effects: The Effect of Solar Subsidies on Green Power Purchases The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2023-11-17 Andrea La Nauze
I test whether economic incentives impact peer effects in public-good settings. I study how a visible and subsidized contribution to a public good (installing solar panels) affects peer contributions to the same good that are neither subsidized nor visible (electing green power). Exploiting spatial variation in the feasibility of installing solar panels, I find that on average panels increase voluntary
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Class Rank and Long-Run Outcomes The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2023-11-17 Jeffrey T. Denning, Richard Murphy, Felix Weinhardt
This paper considers an unavoidable feature of the school environment, class rank. What are the long-run effects of a student's ordinal rank in elementary school? Using administrative data on all public school students in Texas, we show that students with a higher third-grade academic rank, conditional on achievement and classroom fixed effects, have higher subsequent test scores, are more likely to
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Assortative Matching of Exporters and Importers The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2023-11-17 Yoichi Sugita, Kensuke Teshima, Enrique Seira
This paper studies how exporting and importing firms match based on their capability by investigating the change in such exporter-importer matching during trade liberalization. During the recent liberalization of the Mexico-U.S. textile and apparel trade, exporters and importers often switch their main partners as well as change trade volumes. We develop a many-to-many matching model of exporters and
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Parental Incarceration and Children's Educational Attainment The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2023-11-17 Carolina Arteaga
This paper presents new evidence showing that parental incarceration increases children's education. I collect criminal records for 90,000 low-income parents who have been convicted of a crime in Colombia, and link the educational attainment of their children. I exploit exogenous variation resulting from the random assignment of judges and extend the standard framework to incorporate both conviction
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Gender and Collaboration The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2023-11-17 Lorenzo Ductor, Sanjeev Goyal, Anja Prummer
We connect gender disparities in research output and collaboration patterns in economics. We first document large gender gaps in research output. These gaps persist across fifty years despite a significant increase in the fraction of women in economics during that time. We further show that output differences are closely related to differences in the coauthorship networks of men and women: women have
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Anatomy of the Beginning of the Housing Boom across U.S. Metropolitan Areas The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2023-11-17 Fernando Ferreira, Joseph Gyourko
We provide novel estimates of the location, timing, magnitude, and determinants of the start of the previous U.S. housing boom. The housing cycle cannot be interpreted as a single, national event, as different markets began to boom across a decade-long period, some of them multiple times. A fundamental factor, income of prospective buyers, can account for half of the initial jump in price growth, while
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An Experimental Study on the Effects of Communication, Credibility, and Clustering in Network Games The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2023-11-17 Gary Charness, Francesco Feri, Miguel A. Meléndez-Jiménez, Matthias Sutter
We examine how preplay communication and clustering affect play in a challenging hybrid experimental game on networks. Free-form chat is impressively effective in achieving the nonequilibrium efficient outcome, but restricted communication has little effect. We support this result with a model about the credibility of cheap-talk messages. We also offer a model of message diffusion that correctly predicts
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Positive Spillovers from Infrastructure Investment: How Pipeline Expansions Encourage Fuel Switching The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2023-11-17 Jonathan B. Scott
This paper studies the role of the U.S. pipeline infrastructure in the country's transition from coal to natural gas energy. I leverage the Environmental Protection Agency's Mercury and Air Toxics Standards as a plausibly exogenous intervention, which encouraged many coal plants to convert to natural gas. Combining this quasi-experimental variation with a plant's preexisting proximity to the pipeline
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The Impact of Short-Term Employment for Low-Income Youth: Experimental Evidence from the Philippines The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2023-11-17 Emily A. Beam, Stella Quimbo
We use a randomized field experiment to test the causal impact of short-term work experience on employment and school enrollment among disadvantaged, in-school youth in the Philippines. This experience leads to a 4.4 percentage point (79%) increase in employment eight to twelve months later. Although we find no aggregate increase in enrollment, we also do not find that the employment gains push youth
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Electoral Violence and Supply Chain Disruptions in Kenya's Floriculture Industry The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2023-11-17 Christopher Ksoll, Rocco Macchiavello, Ameet Morjaria
Violent conflicts, particularly at election times in Africa, are a common cause of instability and economic disruption. This paper studies how firms react to electoral violence using the case of Kenyan flower exporters during the 2008 postelection violence as an example. The violence induced a large negative supply shock that reduced exports primarily through workers' absence and had heterogeneous
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Strategic Complements or Substitutes? The Case of Adopting Health Information Technology by U.S. Hospitals The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2023-09-13 Jianjing Lin
This paper explores the adoption choice of electronic medical records by U.S. hospitals, which could exhibit strategic complements or substitutes. I find complementarities in adoption through a reduced-form analysis with instruments for unobserved market characteristics. I further develop a dynamic oligopoly model to allow for strategic timing incentives that are missing in the static model. Adopting
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Regime Stability and the Persistence of Traditional Practices The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2023-09-13 Michael Poyker
I examine why the harmful tradition of female genital mutilation (FGM) persists in certain countries but in others it has been eradicated. People are more willing to abandon their traditions if they are confident that the government is durable enough to set up long-term replacements for them. Using a country-ethnicity panel data set spanning 23 countries from 1970 to 2013 and artificial partition of
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Commuting, Labor, and Housing Market Effects of Mass Transportation: Welfare and Identification The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2023-09-13 Christopher Severen
I study Los Angeles Metro Rail's effects using panel data on bilateral commuting flows, a quantitative spatial model, and historically motivated quasi-experimental research designs. The model separates transit's commuting effects from local productivity or amenity effects, and spatial shift-share instruments identify inelastic labor and housing supply. Metro Rail connections increase commuting by 16%
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Asymmetric Demand Response When Prices Increase and Decrease: The Case of Child Health Care The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2023-09-13 Toshiaki Iizuka, Hitoshi Shigeoka
This study tests whether demand responds symmetrically to price increases and decreases—a seemingly obvious proposition under conventional demand theory that has not been rigorously tested. Exploiting the rapid expansion in Japanese municipal subsidies for child health care in a difference-in-differences framework, we find evidence against conventional demand theory: when coinsurance, our price measure
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Health, Longevity, and Welfare Inequality of Older Americans The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2023-09-13 Ray Miller, Neha Bairoliya
We estimate the distribution of well-being among the older U.S. population using an expected utility framework that incorporates differences in consumption, leisure, health, and mortality. We find large disparities in welfare that have increased over time. Incorporating the cost of living with poor health into elderly welfare substantially increases the overall inequality. Disparity measures based
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Heterogeneous Innovation over the Business Cycle The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2023-09-13 Gustavo Manso, Benjamin Balsmeier, Lee Fleming
Schumpeter (1939) claims that recessions are periods of “creative destruction,” concentrating innovation that is useful for the long-term growth of the economy. However previous research finds that standard measures of firms’ innovation, such as R&D expenditures or raw patent counts, concentrate in booms. We argue that these measures do not capture shifts in firms’ innovative search strategies. We
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Impulse Purchases, Gun Ownership, and Homicides: Evidence from a Firearm Demand Shock The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2023-09-13 Christoph Koenig, David Schindler
Do firearm purchase delay laws reduce aggregate homicide levels? Using variation from a six-month countrywide gun demand shock in 2012/2013, we show that U.S. states with legislation preventing immediate handgun purchases experienced smaller increases in handgun sales. Our findings indicate that this is likely driven by comparatively lower purchases among impulsive consumers. We then demonstrate that
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Social Exclusion and Ethnic Segregation in Schools: The Role of Teachers' Ethnic Prejudice The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2023-09-13 Sule Alan, Enes Duysak, Elif Kubilay, Ipek Mumcu
Using data on primary school children and their teachers, we show that teachers who hold prejudicial attitudes towards an ethnic group create socially and spatially segregated classrooms. Leveraging a natural experiment where newly arrived refugee children are randomly assigned to teachers within schools, we find that teachers' ethnic prejudice, measured by an implicit association test, significantly
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Performance Pay in Insurance Markets: Evidence from Medicare The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2023-09-13 Michele Fioretti, Hongming Wang
Public procurement bodies increasingly resort to pay-for-performance contracts to promote efficient spending. We show that firm responses to pay-for-performance can widen the inequality in accessing social services. Focusing on the quality bonus payment initiative in Medicare Advantage, we find that higher quality-rated insurers responded to bonus payments by selecting healthier enrollees with premium
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Returns to Scale, Productivity, Measurement, and Trends in U.S. Manufacturing Misallocation The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2023-09-13 Dimitrije Ruzic, Sui-Jade Ho
Aggregate productivity suffers when workers and machines are not matched with their most productive uses. This paper builds a model that features industry-specific markups, industry-specific returns to scale, and establishment-specific distortions and uses it to measure the extent of this misallocation in the economy. Applying the model to restricted U.S. Census microdata on the manufacturing sector
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Congressional Elections and Union Officer Prosecutions The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2023-09-13 Mitch Downey
Politicizing the investigation of politically active groups is harmful for both the justice system and democratic accountability. I test whether members of the U.S. Congress affect the investigation and prosecution of politically active labor unions. Union officers are 1.5 percentage points more likely to be prosecuted when their supported candidate barely loses instead of barely wins (compared to
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Advancing the Agency of Adolescent Girls The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2023-07-11 Eric Edmonds, Ben Feigenberg, Jessica Leight
More than 98 million adolescent girls are not in school. Can girls influence their schooling without changes in their family's economic environment? In Rajasthan, India, we examine the impact of a school-based life skills program that seeks to address low aspirations, narrow societal roles for girls and women, restricted networks of social support, and limited decision-making power. We find the intervention
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The Four-Equation New Keynesian Model The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2023-07-11 Eric Sims, Jing Cynthia Wu, Ji Zhang
This paper develops a New Keynesian model featuring financial intermediation, short- and long-term bonds, credit shocks, and scope for unconventional monetary policy. The log-linearized model reduces to four equations: Phillips and IS curves, as well as policy rules for the short-term interest rate and the central bank's long-bond portfolio (QE). Credit shocks and QE appear in both the IS and Phillips
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Relaxed Optimization: How Close Is a Consumer to Satisfying First-Order Conditions? The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2023-07-11 Geoffroy de Clippel, Kareen Rozen
We propose relaxing the first-order conditions in optimization to approximate rational consumer choice. We assess the magnitude of departures with a new, axiomatically founded measure that admits multiple interpretations. Standard inequality tests of rationality for any given reference class of preferences can be conveniently repurposed to measure goodness-of-fit with that class. Another advantage
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Saving for Multiple Financial Needs: Evidence from Lockboxes and Mobile Money in Malawi The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2023-07-11 Shilpa Aggarwal, Valentina Brailovskaya, Jonathan Robinson
We test whether the provision of multiple labeled savings accounts affects savings and downstream outcomes in an experiment with 761 microentrepreneurs in urban Malawi. Treatment respondents received one or multiple savings accounts, in the form of lockboxes or mobile money. We find that while providing additional boxes increased savings by 40%, technical issues marred the efficacy of a second mobile
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Discrimination, Narratives, and Family History: An Experiment with Jordanian Host and Syrian Refugee Children The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2023-07-11 Kai Barron, Heike Harmgart, Steffen Huck, Sebastian O. Schneider, Matthias Sutter
We measure the prevalence of discrimination between Jordanian host and Syrian refugee children attending school in Jordan. Using a simple sharing experiment, we find only a small degree of out-group discrimination. However, Jordanian children with Palestinian roots do not discriminate at all, suggesting that a family history of refugee status can generate solidarity with new refugees. We also find
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Long-Term Care Hospitals: A Case Study in Waste The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2023-07-11 Liran Einav, Amy Finkelstein, Neale Mahoney
There is substantial waste in U.S. healthcare but little consensus on how to combat it. We identify one source of waste: long-term care hospitals (LTCHs). Using the entry of LTCHs into hospital markets in an event study design, we find that most LTCH patients would have counterfactually received care at Skilled Nursing Facilities—facilities that provide medically similar care but are paid significantly
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Cognitive Biases: Mistakes or Missing Stakes? The Review of Economics and Statistics (IF 6.481) Pub Date : 2023-07-11 Benjamin Enke, Uri Gneezy, Brian Hall, David Martin, Vadim Nelidov, Theo Offerman, Jeroen van de Ven
Despite decades of research on heuristics and biases, evidence on the effect of large incentives on cognitive biases is scant. We test the effect of incentives on four widely documented biases: base-rate neglect, anchoring, failure of contingent thinking, and intuitive reasoning. In laboratory experiments with 1,236 college students in Nairobi, we implement three incentive levels: no incentives, standard