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Price Floors and Employer Preferences: Evidence from a Minimum Wage Experiment

By John J. Horton

òòò½Íø Review, January 2025

Firms posting job openings in an online labor market were randomly assigned minimum hourly wages. When facing a minimum wage, fewer firms hired, but those they did hire paid higher wages. Hours-worked fell substantially. Treated firms shifted to hiring mo...

In Harm's Way? Infrastructure Investments and the Persistence of Coastal Cities

By Clare Balboni

òòò½Íø Review, January 2025

Coasts contain a disproportionate share of the world's population, reflecting historical advantages, but environmental change threatens a reversal of coastal fortune in the coming decades as natural disasters intensify and sea levels rise. This paper cons...

Dynamic Inconsistency in Risky Choice: Evidence from the Lab and Field

By Rawley Heimer, Zwetelina Iliewa, Alex Imas, and Martin Weber

òòò½Íø Review, January 2025

We document a robust dynamic inconsistency in risky choice. Using a unique brokerage dataset and a series of experiments, we compare people's initial risk-taking plans to their subsequent decisions. Across settings, people accept risk as part of a loss-ex...

The Global Financial Resource Curse

By Gianluca Benigno, Luca Fornaro, and Martin Wolf

òòò½Íø Review, January 2025

We provide a model connecting the global saving glut to productivity growth. The key feature is that the tradable sector is the engine of growth of the economy. Capital flows from developing countries to the United States boost demand for US nontradable g...

Universalism: Global Evidence

By Alexander W. Cappelen, Benjamin Enke, and Bertil Tungodden

òòò½Íø Review, January 2025

This paper leverages nationally representative surveys across 60 countries and 64,000 respondents to present novel stylized facts about the relationship-specific nature of altruism. Across individuals, universalist preferences systematically vary with dem...

Organized Voters: Elections and Public Funding of Nonprofits

By Camille Urvoy

òòò½Íø Review, January 2025

What makes politicians respond to civil society organizations' demands? I use new data on government transfers to French associations and exploit close elections to show that politicians grant more funds to ideologically close organizations when the local...

Dying or Lying? For-Profit Hospices and End-of-Life Care

By Jonathan Gruber, David H. Howard, Jetson Leder-Luis, and Theodore L. Caputi

òòò½Íø Review, January 2025

The Medicare hospice program is intended to provide palliative care to terminal patients, but patients with long stays in hospice are highly profitable, motivating concerns about overuse among the Alzheimer's and Dementia (ADRD) population in the rapidly ...

Whatever It Takes? The Impact of Conditional Policy Promises

By Valentin Haddad, Alan Moreira, and Tyler Muir

òòò½Íø Review, January 2025

At the announcement of a new policy, agents form a view of state-contingent policy actions and impact. We develop a method to estimate this state-contingent perception and implement it for many asset-purchase interventions worldwide. Expectations of large...

Five Facts about MPCs: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment

By Johannes Boehm, Etienne Fize, and Xavier Jaravel

òòò½Íø Review, January 2025

We present five facts from an experiment on the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) out of transitory transfers: (1) the one-month MPC on a cash-like transfer is 23 percent; (2) it is substantially higher (61 percent) on a transfer administered via a car...

Heterogeneity in School Value Added and the Private Premium

By Tahir Andrabi, Natalie Bau, Jishnu Das, and Asim I. Khwaja

òòò½Íø Review, January 2025

We estimate and validate test score–based measures of school quality (school value added, or SVA) in Pakistan. We document substantial variation in SVA within villages and within the public and private sectors, leading to a wide range of possible estima...

2024 in Research Highlights

[Research Highlight]

December 17, 2024

Economists addressed issues related to economics publishing, congestion effects, bank runs, and more.

Front Matter

òòò½Íø Journal: Applied Economics, January 2025

Changes in Nutrient Intake at Retirement

By Melvin Stephens Jr. and Desmond Toohey

òòò½Íø Journal: Applied Economics, January 2025

Prior research finds food expenditure decreases at retirement, which suggests households are inadequately saving. In contrast, other evidence shows that direct measures of food intake are unaffected by exiting the labor force. Using a wide array of data s...

Rising Import Tariffs, Falling Exports: When Modern Supply Chains Meet Old-Style Protectionism

By Kyle Handley, Fariha Kamal, and Ryan Monarch

òòò½Íø Journal: Applied Economics, January 2025

We examine the impacts of the 2018–2019 US import tariff increases on US exports through the lens of supply chain linkages. Using 2016 confidential firm-trade linked data, we identify exporters who were importing products that eventually faced tariff in...

Changes in Family Structure and Welfare Participation since the 1960s: The Role of Legal Services

By Jamein Cunningham and Andrew Goodman-Bacon

òòò½Íø Journal: Applied Economics, January 2025

This paper evaluates the effects of the War on Poverty's legal services program (LSP), which provided subsidized legal assistance to poor communities, focusing on divorce and welfare access. We use a difference-in-difference (DiD) research design based on...

Smart Thermostats, Automation, and Time-Varying Prices

By Joshua Blonz, Karen Palmer, Casey J. Wichman, and Derek C. Wietelman

òòò½Íø Journal: Applied Economics, January 2025

Can automation complement economic incentives? We explore this question by randomly encouraging households to activate a feature on their existing smart thermostat that automates responsiveness to time-of-use electricity pricing. The feature reduces air c...

Digital Information Provision and Behavior Change: Lessons from Six Experiments in East Africa

By Raissa Fabregas, Michael Kremer, Matthew Lowes, Robert On, and Giulia Zane

òòò½Íø Journal: Applied Economics, January 2025

While some studies suggest mobile phone–based information programs change behavior; others find no effect. We evaluate six text message agricultural extension programs, collectively covering 128,000 farmers. A meta-analysis finds a 1.22-fold increase in...

Location, Location, Location

By David Card, Jesse Rothstein, and Moises Yi

òòò½Íø Journal: Applied Economics, January 2025

We use linked employer–employee data to study the causal effects of location on earnings in the United States. We estimate a model with employer and employee effects, then aggregate to the commuting zone (CZ) level. Sorting across firms biases tradition...

The Willingness to Pay for a Cooler Day: Evidence from 50 Years of Major League Baseball Games

By Kevin Kuruc, Melissa LoPalo, and Sean O'Connor

òòò½Íø Journal: Applied Economics, January 2025

The climate economy literature has documented adverse effects of extreme temperatures on well-being through mechanisms such as mortality, productivity, and conflict. Impacts due simply to discomfort are less well understood. This paper investigates indivi...

Wealth Tax Mobility and Tax Coordination

By David R. Agrawal, Dirk Foremny, and Clara ²Ñ²¹°ù³Ùí²Ô±ð³ú-°Õ´Ç±ô±ð»å²¹²Ô´Ç

òòò½Íø Journal: Applied Economics, January 2025

We study the effects of decentralized wealth taxation on mobility and the effectiveness of tax coordination at mitigating tax competition. We exploit the reintroduction of the Spanish wealth tax, after which all regions except Madrid levied positive tax r...