American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 2024年 10月刊 目录与摘要
刊发卷期：Vol. 16, Issue 4
刊发时间：October 2024
期刊等级：ABS 4
出版厂商：American Economic Association
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目录
1. The Curse of Plenty: The Green Revolution and the Rise in Chronic Disease
Sheetal Sekhri and Gauri Kartini Shastry
2. Optimal Sin Taxation and Market Power
Martin O'Connell and Kate Smith
3. Distortion by Audit: Evidence from Public Procurement
Maria Paula Gerardino, Stephan Litschig, and Dina Pomeranz
4. Schoolgirls, Not Brides: Education as a Shield against Child Marriage
Hélène Giacobino, Elise Huillery, Bastien Michel, and Mathilde Sage
5. Expected Returns to Crime and Crime Location
Nils Braakmann, Arnaud Chevalier, and Tanya Wilson
6. Unintended Consequences of Welfare Cuts on Children and Adolescents
Christian Dustmann, Rasmus Landersø, and Lars Højsgaard Andersen
7. When Dad Can Stay Home: Fathers' Workplace Flexibility and Maternal Health
Petra Persson and Maya Rossin-Slater
8. The Paradox of Innovation Nondisclosure: Evidence from Licensing Contracts
Gaurav Kankanhalli, Alan Kwan, and Kenneth Merkley
9. Preferences, Access, and the STEM Gender Gap in Centralized High School Assignment
Diana Ngo and Andrew Dustan
10. Experience-Based Discrimination
Louis-Pierre Lepage
11. Noise, Cognitive Function, and Worker Productivity
Joshua T. Dean
12. Independent Media, Propaganda, and Religiosity: Evidence from Poland
Irena Grosfeld, Etienne Madinier, Seyhun Orcan Sakalli, and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya
13. Customer Capital Spillovers: Evidence from Sales Managers in International Markets
Bérengère Patault and Clémence Lenoir
14. Family Formation and Crime
Maxim Massenkoff and Evan K. Rose
15. The Dynamic Response of Municipal Budgets to Revenue Shocks
Ines Helm and Jan Stuhler
16. Working Remotely? Selection, Treatment, and the Market for Remote Work
Natalia Emanuel and Emma Harrington
摘要
1. The Curse of Plenty: The Green Revolution and the Rise in Chronic Disease
Sheetal Sekhri and Gauri Kartini Shastry
The rising rate of chronic disease is a leading driver of the global disease burden. Yet, its determinants are not fully understood. Exploiting the Green Revolution and its expansion in historically groundwater-rich Indian districts, we examine the unanticipated contribution of agricultural productivity growth to the rise in chronic, diet-related diseases. We find that areas with greater adoption of new staple varieties saw an increase in diabetes in men born after the introduction of high-yield crops. We find suggestive evidence that diet is an important mechanism, such as heterogeneous impacts with respect to dietary habits and increases in household calorie consumption.
2. Optimal Sin Taxation and Market Power
Martin O'Connell and Kate Smith
We study how market power impacts the efficiency and redistributive properties of sin taxation, with an empirical application to sugar-sweetened beverage taxation. We estimate an equilibrium model of the UK drinks market, which we embed in a tax design framework to solve for optimal sugar-sweetened beverage tax policy. Positive price-cost margins for drinks create inefficiencies that lower the optimal rate compared with a perfectly competitive setting. Since profits mainly accrue to the rich, this is partially mitigated under social preferences for equity. Overall, ignoring market power when setting tax policy leads to welfare gains 40 percent below those at the optimum.
3. Distortion by Audit: Evidence from Public Procurement
Maria Paula Gerardino, Stephan Litschig, and Dina Pomeranz
Public sector audits are key to state capacity. However, they can create unintended distortions. Regression discontinuity analysis from Chile shows that audits lowered the use of auctions for public procurement, reduced supplier competition, and increased the likelihood of small, local, and incumbent firms winning contracts. Looking inside the black box of the audit process reveals that relative to comparable direct contracts, auctions underwent more than twice as many checks and led to twice as many detected infractions. These findings show that standard audit protocols can mechanically discourage the use of more regulated, complex, and transparent procedures involving more auditable steps.
4. Schoolgirls, Not Brides: Education as a Shield against Child Marriage
Hélène Giacobino, Elise Huillery, Bastien Michel, and Mathilde Sage
We study the impact of a scholarship-based intervention aimed to reduce child marriage by fostering secondary education among adolescent girls in Niger. Using a large-scale randomized controlled trial, we find that after three years of implementation, the intervention led to large and positive effects. It halved both dropout and marriage rates and increased girls' and their parents' aspirations. Importantly, there is no displacement effect detrimental to the education and marriage status of nontreatment girls. Our results show that financial aid for education has the potential to transform adolescent girls' lives.
5. Expected Returns to Crime and Crime Location
Nils Braakmann, Arnaud Chevalier, and Tanya Wilson
We provide first evidence that variations in the expected returns to crime affect the location of property crime. Our identification strategy relies on the widely held perception in the United Kingdom that South Asian households store gold jewelry at home. Price movements on the international market for gold exogenously affect the expected gains from burgling these households. Using a neighborhood-level panel on crime and difference-in-differences, we find that burglaries in South Asian neighborhoods are more sensitive to variations in the gold price than other neighborhoods in the same municipality. We conduct various tests on neighborhood and individual data to eliminate alternative explanations.
6. Unintended Consequences of Welfare Cuts on Children and Adolescents
Christian Dustmann, Rasmus Landersø, and Lars Højsgaard Andersen
This paper studies the effects of a large welfare benefit reduction on the children in the affected families. The welfare cut targeted adult refugees who received residency in Denmark, and it reduced their disposable income by 30 percent on average over the first five years. We show that children exposed to the welfare cut during preschool and school-age obtained lower GPAs, experienced reduced well-being and overall education levels, and suffered lower employment and earnings as adults. Children in their teens at exposure faced large increases in conviction probabilities for violent and property crimes.
7. When Dad Can Stay Home: Fathers' Workplace Flexibility and Maternal Health
Petra Persson and Maya Rossin-Slater
We study how fathers' access to workplace flexibility affects maternal postpartum health. We use variation from a Swedish reform that granted new fathers more flexibility to take intermittent parental leave during the postpartum period and show that increasing the father's temporal flexibility—and thereby his ability to be present at home together with the mother—reduces the incidence of maternal postpartum health complications. Our results suggest that mothers bear part of the burden from a lack of workplace flexibility for men because a father's inability to respond to domestic shocks exacerbates the maternal health cost of childbearing.
8. The Paradox of Innovation Nondisclosure: Evidence from Licensing Contracts
Gaurav Kankanhalli, Alan Kwan, and Kenneth Merkley
Innovative firms must trade off disclosing to investors and maintaining secrecy from competitors. We study this trade-off in a sample of IP licenses mandatorily disclosed by US public firms, whose contents can be temporarily redacted. Hand classifying the redacted information, we find that firms with valuable IP in competitive markets redact IP information more often. Markets react positively to the redaction of IP information, consistent with theoretical predictions rationalizing a separating equilibrium in which nondisclosure signals more valuable IP. Our results suggest that credible nondisclosure partially resolves information frictions for innovative public firms when facilitated by sophisticated investors.
9. Preferences, Access, and the STEM Gender Gap in Centralized High School Assignment
Diana Ngo and Andrew Dustan
The gender gap in STEM widens during high school due both to differences in student choices and institutional barriers to accessing STEM education. Using rich data from Mexico City's centralized assignment system and a structural model of high school choice, we document strong demand for elite STEM programs and relatively weak demand for non-elite STEM programs. Decomposition and counterfactual simulations demonstrate that most of the gap is due to gendered choices, with males more strongly preferring STEM. Test-based assignment restricts elite STEM access for females, who have lower placement test scores despite similar low-stakes exam scores.
10. Experience-Based Discrimination
Louis-Pierre Lepage
I study discrimination arising from individual experiences of employers with worker groups. I present a model in which employers are uncertain about the productivity of one of two groups and learn through hiring. Positive experiences lead to positive biases, which correct themselves by leading to more hiring and learning. Negative experiences decrease hiring and learning, preserving negative biases, which can cause persistent discrimination. The model explains prejudice as incorrect statistical discrimination and generates novel predictions and policy implications. I then illustrate experience-based discrimination in an experimental labor market, finding support for key model predictions.
11. Noise, Cognitive Function, and Worker Productivity
Joshua T. Dean
Noisy workplaces common in low- and middle-income countries can impair workers' cognitive functions. However, whether this lowers earnings depends on the importance of these functions for productivity and whether workers understand these effects. I study these questions with two randomized experiments in Nairobi, Kenya. I find a noise increase of 7 dB reduces productivity in a textile training course by 3 percent, impairs cognitive function, but does not affect effort. I also find willingness to pay for quiet working conditions does not depend on whether pay depends on performance, suggesting participants are not aware that quiet would increase their productivity.
12. Independent Media, Propaganda, and Religiosity: Evidence from Poland
Irena Grosfeld, Etienne Madinier, Seyhun Orcan Sakalli, and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya
Exploring a drastic change in media landscape in Poland, we show that mainstream media can significantly affect religious participation. After nationalist populist party PiS came to power in 2015, news on state and private independent TV diverged due to propaganda on state TV, resulting in a switch of some of its audience to independent TV. Municipalities with access to independent TV continued to follow a long-term secularization trend, while municipalities with access only to state TV experienced a reversal of this trend. An online experiment sheds light on the mechanisms underlying the effect of exposure to independent news on religiosity.
13. Customer Capital Spillovers: Evidence from Sales Managers in International Markets
Bérengère Patault and Clémence Lenoir
Expanding their customer base is crucial for firms to grow. This paper leverages sales managers' job-to-job transitions to better understand how buyer-seller relationships form. Combining unique French firm-to-firm trade data with matched employer-employee data, we perform an event study analysis that exploits the timing of sales managers' transitions from one firm to another for identification. We find recruiting a sales manager increases by 36 percent the probability to export to the buyers of her former firm. The expansion of the firm's customer base is detrimental to the buyer's former suppliers. Yet business stealing is partial; job-to-job transitions are not zero-sum.
14. Family Formation and Crime
Maxim Massenkoff and Evan K. Rose
We perform a large-scale analysis of the impact of family formation on crime. For mothers, criminal arrests drop precipitously in the first few months of pregnancy, decreasing 50 percent overall. Men show a sustained 20 percent decline in crime that begins around pregnancy, although arrests for domestic violence spike at birth. A separate design using parents of stillborn children to estimate counterfactual arrest rates reinforces the main findings. Marriage, in contrast, is not associated with any sudden changes and marks the completion of a gradual 50 percent decline in arrests for both men and women.
15. The Dynamic Response of Municipal Budgets to Revenue Shocks
Ines Helm and Jan Stuhler
We study the fiscal and tax response to intergovernmental grants, exploiting quasi-experimental variation within Germany's fiscal equalization scheme triggered by census revisions of population counts. Municipal budgets do not adjust instantly. Instead, spending and investments adapt within five years to revenue gains, while the adjustment to losses is more rapid. Yet the long-run response is symmetric. The tax response is particularly slow, stretching over more than a decade. Well-known empirical anomalies such as the so-called flypaper effect may thus reflect a short-run phenomenon, while long-run fiscal behavior appears more consistent with standard theories of fiscal federalism.
16. Working Remotely? Selection, Treatment, and the Market for Remote Work
Natalia Emanuel and Emma Harrington
How does remote work affect productivity and how productive are workers who choose remote jobs? We decompose these effects in a Fortune 500 firm. Before COVID-19, remote workers answered 12 percent fewer calls per hour than on-site workers. After offices closed, the productivity gap narrowed by 4 percent, and formerly on-site workers' call quality and promotion rates declined. Even with everyone remote, an 8 percent productivity gap persisted, indicating negative selection into remote jobs. A cost-benefit analysis indicates savings in reduced turnover and office rents could outweigh remote work's negative productivity impact but not the costs of attracting less productive workers.
