Economic Network

Fachliteratur:

American Economic Review

(Vol. 109, Issue 12 — December 2019)

 

Front Matter (#1)
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Does Diversity Matter for Health? Experimental Evidence from Oakland (#2)
Marcella Alsan, Owen Garrick and Grant Graziani
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Predicting and Understanding Initial Play (#3)
Drew Fudenberg and Annie Liang
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The Term Structure of Currency Carry Trade Risk Premia (#4)
Hanno Lustig, Andreas Stathopoulos and Adrien Verdelhan
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The Mortality and Medical Costs of Air Pollution: Evidence from Changes in Wind Direction (#5)
Tatyana Deryugina, Garth Heutel, Nolan H. Miller, David Molitor and Julian Reif
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Sovereign Debt and Structural Reforms (#6)
Andreas Müller, Kjetil Storesletten and Fabrizio Zilibotti
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Occupations and Import Competition: Evidence from Denmark (#7)
Sharon Traiberman
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Does Strategic Ability Affect Efficiency? Evidence from Electricity Markets (#8)
Ali Hortaçsu, Fernando Luco, Steven L. Puller and Dongni Zhu
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Self-Fulfilling Debt Crises: A Quantitative Analysis (#9)
Luigi Bocola and Alessandro Dovis
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The Violent Legacy of Conflict: Evidence on Asylum Seekers, Crime, and Public Policy in Switzerland (#10)
Mathieu Couttenier, Veronica Petrencu, Dominic Rohner and Mathias Thoenig
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(1) Front Matter
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(2) Does Diversity Matter for Health? Experimental Evidence from Oakland
Marcella Alsan, Owen Garrick and Grant Graziani
We study the effect of physician workforce diversity on the demand for preventive care among African American men. In an experiment in Oakland, California, we randomize black men to black or non-black male medical doctors. We use a two-stage design, measuring decisions before (pre-consultation) and after (post-consultation) meeting their assigned doctor. Subjects select a similar number of preventives in the pre-consultation stage, but are much more likely to select every preventive service, particularly invasive services, once meeting with a racially concordant doctor. Our findings suggest black doctors could reduce the black-white male gap in cardiovascular mortality by 19 percent.
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(3) Predicting and Understanding Initial Play
Drew Fudenberg and Annie Liang
We use machine learning to uncover regularities in the initial play of matrix games. We first train a prediction algorithm on data from past experiments. Examining the games where our algorithm predicts correctly, but existing economic models don’t, leads us to add a parameter to the best performing model that improves predictive accuracy. We then observe play in a collection of new „algorithmically generated“ games, and learn that we can obtain even better predictions with a hybrid model that uses a decision tree to decide game-by-game which of two economic models to use for prediction.
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(4) The Term Structure of Currency Carry Trade Risk Premia
Hanno Lustig, Andreas Stathopoulos and Adrien Verdelhan
Fixing the investment horizon, the returns to currency carry trades decrease as the maturity of the foreign bonds increases. Across developed countries, the local currency term premia, which increase with the maturity of the bonds, offset the currency risk premia. Similarly, in the time-series, the predictability of foreign bond returns in dollars declines with the bonds‘ maturities. Leading no-arbitrage models in international finance do not match the downward term structure of currency carry trade risk premia. We derive a simple preference-free condition that no-arbitrage models need to reproduce in the absence of carry trade risk premia on long-term bonds.
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(5) The Mortality and Medical Costs of Air Pollution: Evidence from Changes in Wind Direction
Tatyana Deryugina, Garth Heutel, Nolan H. Miller, David Molitor and Julian Reif
We estimate the causal effects of acute fine particulate matter exposure on mortality, health care use, and medical costs among the US elderly using Medicare data. We instrument for air pollution using changes in local wind direction and develop a new approach that uses machine learning to estimate the life-years lost due to pollution exposure. Finally, we characterize treatment effect heterogeneity using both life expectancy and generic machine learning inference. Both approaches find that mortality effects are concentrated in about 25 percent of the elderly population.
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(6) Sovereign Debt and Structural Reforms
Andreas Müller, Kjetil Storesletten and Fabrizio Zilibotti
We construct a dynamic theory of sovereign debt and structural reforms with limited enforcement and moral hazard. A sovereign country in recession wishes to smooth consumption. It can also undertake costly reforms to speed up recovery. The sovereign can renege on contracts by suffering a stochastic cost. The constrained optimal allocation (COA) prescribes imperfect insurance with nonmonotonic dynamics for consumption and effort. The COA is decentralized by a competitive equilibrium with markets for renegotiable GDP-linked one-period debt. The equilibrium features debt overhang: reform effort decreases in a high debt range. We also consider environments with less complete markets.
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(7) Occupations and Import Competition: Evidence from Denmark
Sharon Traiberman
I argue that the winners and losers from trade are decided primarily by occupation. In addition to fixed adjustment costs, workers build up specific human capital over time that is destroyed when they must change occupations. I show that ignoring human capital biases estimates of adjustment costs upward by a factor of 3. Estimating an occupational choice model of the Danish labor market, I show that 57 percent of the dispersion in worker outcomes is accounted for by occupations, and only 16 percent by sectors. Finally, the model suggests that rising import competition from 1995–2005 reduced lifetime earnings for 5 percent of workers.
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(8) Does Strategic Ability Affect Efficiency? Evidence from Electricity Markets
Ali Hortaçsu, Fernando Luco, Steven L. Puller and Dongni Zhu
Oligopoly models of price competition predict that strategic firms exercise market power and generate inefficiencies. However, heterogeneity in firms‘ strategic ability also generates inefficiencies. We study the Texas electricity market where firms exhibit significant heterogeneity in how they deviate from Nash equilibrium bidding. These deviations, in turn, increase the cost of production. To explain this heterogeneity, we embed a cognitive hierarchy model into a structural model of bidding and estimate firms‘ strategic sophistication. We find that firm size and manager education affect sophistication. Using the model, we show that mergers which increase sophistication can increase efficiency despite increasing market concentration.
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(9) Self-Fulfilling Debt Crises: A Quantitative Analysis
Luigi Bocola and Alessandro Dovis
This paper investigates the role of self-fulfilling expectations in sovereign bond markets. We consider a model of sovereign borrowing featuring endogenous debt maturity, risk-averse lenders, and self-fulfilling crises à la Cole and Kehoe (2000). In this environment, interest rate spreads are driven by both fundamental and nonfundamental risk. These two sources of risk have contrasting implications for the maturity structure of debt chosen by the government. Therefore, they can be indirectly inferred by tracking the evolution of debt maturity. We fit the model to Italian data and find that nonfundamental risk played a limited role during the 2008–2012 crisis.
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(10) The Violent Legacy of Conflict: Evidence on Asylum Seekers, Crime, and Public Policy in Switzerland
Mathieu Couttenier, Veronica Petrencu, Dominic Rohner and Mathias Thoenig
We study empirically how past exposure to conflict in origin countries makes migrants more violence-prone in their host country, focusing on asylum seekers in Switzerland. We exploit a novel and unique dataset on all crimes reported in Switzerland by the nationalities of perpetrators and of victims over 2009–2016. Our baseline result is that cohorts exposed to civil conflict/mass killing during childhood are 35 percent more prone to violent crime than the average cohort. This effect is particularly strong for early childhood exposure and is mostly confined to co-nationals, consistent with inter-group hostility persisting over time. We exploit cross-region heterogeneity in public policies within Switzerland to document which integration policies are best able to mitigate the detrimental effect of past conflict exposure on violent criminality. We find that offering labor market access to asylum seekers eliminates two-thirds of the effect.
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