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Parental Investments in Early Childhood and the Gender Gap in Math and Literacy

By Amanda Chuan, John A. List, Anya Samek, and Shreemayi Samujjwala

òòò½Íø Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Parental investments shape children's educational specializations. Using a longitudinal study, we find that parents invest more in daughters than sons at ages three through five. We find that early parental investment can explain persistently higher Engli...

How Early Adolescent Skills and Preferences Shape Economics Education Choices

By Lenka Fiala, John Eric Humphries, Juanna Schrøter Joensen, Uditi Karna, John A. List, and Gregory F. Veramendi

òòò½Íø Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Leveraging data from Sweden and Chicago, we study the educational pipeline for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and economics majors to better understand the determinants of the gender gap and when these determinants arise. We pres...

Online Tutoring by College Volunteers: Experimental Evidence from a Pilot Program

By Matthew A. Kraft, John A. List, Jeffrey A. Livingston, and Sally Sadoff

òòò½Íø Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

In-person tutoring programs can have large impacts on K-12 student achievement, but high program costs and limited local supply of tutors have hampered scale-up. Online tutoring provided by volunteers can potentially reach more students in need. We implem...

The Effect of Teaching Economics with Classroom Experiments: Estimates from a Within-Subject Experiment

By Sacha Gelfer, Jeffrey A. Livingston, and Sutanuka Roy

òòò½Íø Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Classroom experiments are a popular tool among economics instructors. A rich experimental literature studies their impact on student learning with between-subject designs that randomize classroom experiment use across course sections. Such designs are dif...

Fixing Errors in a SNAP: Addressing SNAP Underreporting to Evaluate Poverty

By Liana Fox, Jonathan Rothbaum, and Kathryn Shantz

òòò½Íø Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Since 1969, the official poverty measure has remained largely unchanged, despite substantial changes in the social safety net. This paper proposes a methodology for creating a buildable replacement to the official poverty measure, starting with market-bas...

Building a Consumption Poverty Measure: Initial Results Following Recommendations of a Federal Interagency Working Group

By Grayson Armstrong, Caleb Cho, Thesia I. Garner, Brett Matsumoto, Juan Munoz, and Jake Schild

òòò½Íø Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Consumption is a well-being measure that is determined by a combination of resources (e.g., income, in-kind benefits, assets, debt, time) available to households, their circumstances, and their preferences. In this study, we derive consumption poverty sta...

Income Declines during COVID-19

By Jeff Larrimore, Jacob Mortenson, and David Splinter

òòò½Íø Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

The COVID-19 recession caused regressive market income changes in the United States, with large losses more frequent than during the Great Recession and more concentrated at the bottom of the distribution. Progressive taxes and transfers, especially from ...

The Change in Poverty from 1995 to 2016 among Single-Parent Families

By Kevin Corinth, Bruce D. Meyer, and Derek Wu

òòò½Íø Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

This paper is the first to examine changes in poverty over time using a comprehensive set of linked survey and administrative data, implementing the recommendations of the Interagency Technical Working Group on Evaluating Alternative Measures of Poverty. ...

Structural Vector Autoregressions with Imperfect Identifying Information

By Christiane Baumeister and James D. Hamilton

òòò½Íø Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

The problem of identification is often the core challenge of empirical economic research. The traditional approach to identification is to bring in additional information in the form of identifying assumptions, such as restrictions that certain magnitudes...

What Can We Learn from Sign-Restricted VARs?

By Christian K. Wolf

òòò½Íø Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

I use a simple business cycle model to illustrate the workings and limitations of sign restrictions in structural vector autoregressions. Three lessons emerge. First, such sign-based identification is vulnerable to "shock masquerading": linear combination...

Signing Out Confounding Shocks in Variance-Maximizing Identification Methods

By Neville Francis and Gene Kindberg-Hanlon

òòò½Íø Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Recent papers have examined the dominant drivers of business cycles using variance-maximizing techniques for identification. However, identification is poor when shocks other than the target of interest play large roles in driving volatility at the target...

SVAR Identification from Higher Moments: Has the Simultaneous Causality Problem Been Solved?

By José Luis Montiel Olea, Mikkel ±Ê±ô²¹²µ²ú´Ç°ù²µ-²Ñø±ô±ô±ð°ù, and Eric Qian

òòò½Íø Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Two recent strands of the structural vector autoregression literature use higher moments for identification, exploiting either non-Gaussianity or heteroskedasticity. These approaches achieve point identification without exclusion or sign restrictions. We ...

The Trade Reform Wave of 1985−1995

By Douglas A. Irwin

òòò½Íø Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

The decade from 1985 to 1995 will go down in history as an unprecedented period in which global trade barriers were reduced. Some trade agreements (the North American Free Trade Agreement, the European Single Market, the Uruguay Round) were prominent late...

The Dismantling of Capital Controls after Bretton Woods and Latin American Productivity

By Diana Van Patten

òòò½Íø Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

The recent economic history of global integration has been characterized by a dismantling of capital controls and increased foreign direct investment (FDI). This paper explores the role of impediments to international capital mobility, foreign direct inve...

Migration on the Rise, a Paradigm in Decline: The Last Half-Century of Global Mobility

By Michael A. Clemens

òòò½Íø Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

The past several decades have witnessed a rebirth of global labor mobility. Workers are moving between countries at rates not seen since before World War I. During the same period, economists' study of international migration has been framed by a particul...

Women's Employment and Empowerment: Descriptive Evidence

By Madeline McKelway

òòò½Íø Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

It is widely believed that female employment and empowerment are intimately related. This paper presents relationships between women's employment and various measures of their empowerment, using data from rural India. The measures capture several dimensio...

Empowering Women to Engage in Commercial Agriculture

By Kate Ambler, Kelly M. Jones, and Michael O'Sullivan

òòò½Íø Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Despite women's large contributions to agricultural production in developing countries, they are often excluded from market-facing activities. There is little evidence on how to increase their participation in commercial agriculture. We designed a private...

Improving Willingness-to-Pay Elicitation by Including a Benchmark Good

By Rebecca Dizon-Ross and Seema Jayachandran

òòò½Íø Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

We propose and validate a simple way to augment the standard Becker-DeGroot-Marschak method that researchers use to elicit willingness to pay (WTP) for a good. The augmentation is to measure WTP for another good ("benchmark good"), one unrelated to both t...

Measuring Women's Empowerment in Collective Households

By Rossella Calvi, Jacob Penglase, and Denni Tommasi

òòò½Íø Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Measuring women's empowerment within families is challenging. Social scientists often rely on close-ended survey questions on women's participation in household decisions, domestic abuse, and autonomy to measure women's power and agency. Recent advances i...

Wealth Taxation: Lessons from History and Recent Developments

By Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman

òòò½Íø Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

This paper describes the historical experience of wealth taxation in Europe and draws lessons from this history for wealth taxation in the twenty-first century. We show that the wealth tax base was narrow in European countries, due to large exemptions, ta...