American Economic Review: Insights 2024年 12月刊 目录与摘要
刊发卷期：Vol. 6, Issue 4
刊发时间：December 2024
期刊等级：ABS 3
出版厂商：American Economic Association
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目录
1. Law-Abiding Immigrants: The Incarceration Gap between Immigrants and the US-Born, 1870–2020
Ran Abramitzky, Leah Boustan, Elisa Jácome, Santiago Pérez, and Juan David Torres
2. On the Equilibrium Properties of Spatial Models
Treb Allen, Costas Arkolakis, and Xiangliang Li
3. The Impact of Criminal Financial Sanctions: A Multistate Analysis of Survey and Administrative Data
Keith Finlay, Matthew Gross, Carl Lieberman, Elizabeth Luh, and Michael Mueller-Smith
4. Noise-Tolerant Community Enforcement and the Strength of Small Stakes
Drew Fudenberg and Alexander Wolitzky
5. Is There Too Little Antitrust Enforcement in the US Hospital Sector?
Zarek Brot, Zack Cooper, Stuart V. Craig, and Lev Klarnet
6. Coordination with Differential Time Preferences: Experimental Evidence
Marina Agranov, Jeongbin Kim, and Leeat Yariv
7. Large Shocks Travel Fast
Alberto Cavallo, Francesco Lippi, and Ken Miyahara
8. The AI Dilemma: Growth versus Existential Risk
Charles I. Jones
摘要
1. Law-Abiding Immigrants: The Incarceration Gap between Immigrants and the US-Born, 1870–2020
Ran Abramitzky, Leah Boustan, Elisa Jácome, Santiago Pérez, and Juan David Torres
We provide the first nationally representative long-run series (1870–2020) of incarceration rates for immigrants and the US-born. As a group, immigrants have had lower incarceration rates than the US-born for 150 years. Moreover, relative to the US-born, immigrants' incarceration rates have declined since 1960: immigrants today are 60 percent less likely to be incarcerated (30 percent relative to US-born Whites). This relative decline occurred among immigrants from all regions and cannot be explained by changes in observable characteristics or immigration policy. Instead, the decline is part of a broader divergence of outcomes between less-educated immigrants and their US-born counterparts.
2. On the Equilibrium Properties of Spatial Models
Treb Allen, Costas Arkolakis, and Xiangliang Li
We consider a broad class of spatial models where there are many types of interactions across a large number of locations. We provide a new theorem that offers an iterative algorithm for calculating an equilibrium and sufficient and "globally necessary" conditions under which the equilibrium is unique. We show how this theorem enables the characterization of equilibrium properties for one important spatial system: an urban model with spillovers across a large number of different types of agents. An online appendix provides 12 additional examples of both spatial and nonspatial economic frameworks for which our theorem provides new equilibrium characterizations.
3. The Impact of Criminal Financial Sanctions: A Multistate Analysis of Survey and Administrative Data
Keith Finlay, Matthew Gross, Carl Lieberman, Elizabeth Luh, and Michael Mueller-Smith
We estimate the impact of financial sanctions in the US criminal justice system, leveraging nine natural experiments in a regression discontinuity design framework across a diverse range of enforcement levels (6,000) and institutional environments. We leverage survey and administrative data to consider a variety of short- and long-term outcomes, including employment, recidivism, household expenditures, and other self-reported measures of well-being. We find robust evidence of precise null effects, including ruling out long-run impacts larger than –142 in annual earnings and −0.001–0.01 in annual convictions, with no corresponding payment increases despite salient and heterogeneous enforcement mechanisms.
4. Noise-Tolerant Community Enforcement and the Strength of Small Stakes
Drew Fudenberg and Alexander Wolitzky
We study community enforcement in a large population with noisy monitoring. We focus on equilibria in the prisoner's dilemma that are coordination proof, meaning that matched partners never play a Pareto-dominated Nash equilibrium in the one-shot game induced by the equilibrium continuation payoffs at their current histories. We show that a noise-tolerant version of contagion strategies is optimal among all coordination-proof equilibria. Welfare under tolerant contagion strategies decreases in the noise level and the gain from defection faster than welfare in a fixed partnership does. Thus, community enforcement has a comparative advantage in supporting "low-stakes" relationships.
5. Is There Too Little Antitrust Enforcement in the US Hospital Sector?
Zarek Brot, Zack Cooper, Stuart V. Craig, and Lev Klarnet
From 2002 to 2020, there were over 1,000 mergers of US hospitals. During this period, the FTC took enforcement actions against 13 transactions. However, using the FTC's standard screening tools, we find that 20 percent of these mergers could have been predicted to meaningfully lessen competition. We show that, from 2010 to 2015, predictably anticompetitive mergers resulted in price increases over 5 percent. We estimate that approximately half of predictably anticompetitive mergers had to be reported to the FTC per the Hart–Scott–Rodino Act. We conclude that there appears to be underenforcement of antitrust laws in the hospital sector.
6. Coordination with Differential Time Preferences: Experimental Evidence
Marina Agranov, Jeongbin Kim, and Leeat Yariv
The experimental literature on repeated games has largely focused on settings where players discount the future identically. In applications, however, interactions often occur between players whose time preferences differ. We study experimentally the effects of discounting differentials in infinitely repeated coordination games. In our data, differential discount factors play two roles. First, they provide a coordination anchor: more impatient players get higher payoffs first. Introducing even small discounting differentials reduces coordination failures significantly. Second, with pronounced discounting differentials, intertemporal trades are prevalent: impatient players get higher payoffs for an initial phase and patient players get higher payoffs in perpetuity afterward.
7. Large Shocks Travel Fast
Alberto Cavallo, Francesco Lippi, and Ken Miyahara
We document a sizeable increase in the frequency of price adjustments following the large energy shocks of 2022. We use a tractable New Keynesian model, calibrated to the preshock data, to interpret such a pattern. The calibration highlights the state dependence of firms' decisions: prices are adjusted rapidly when markups are misaligned. In the model, a large cost shock triggers a swift increase in the frequency of price adjustments, causing a rapid pass-through from costs to prices. Time-dependent models, such as the Calvo model, miss this frequency response, failing to capture the sudden inflation surge after a large shock.
8. The AI Dilemma: Growth versus Existential Risk
Charles I. Jones
Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they may increase economic growth as AI augments our ability to innovate. On the other hand, many experts worry that these advances entail existential risk: creating a superintelligence misaligned with human values could lead to catastrophic outcomes, even possibly human extinction. This paper considers the optimal use of AI technology in the presence of these opportunities and risks. Under what conditions should we continue the rapid progress of AI, and under what conditions should we stop?
