Updated 1-2-2025.

In this blog article, I have compiled a list of papers in different economic disciplines. Please let me know if you have any comments by emailing me through the About page. Thanks!

Labor

Zhou, Heckman, Liu & Lu (2022)

  • childhood home visiting program

Anelli & Koenig (2021)

  • Model: WTP for health risk.
  • Data: Homebase.
  • Method: DiD. Comparing between people who are on either side of the $600 FPUC threshold based on state-specific criteria.
  • Results: WTP is higher than the “Heroes pay” program offered.

Humphries, Joensen & Veramendi (2019)

  • Title: Complementaries in High School and College Investments
  • Objective: study the complementarities between multi-dimentional abilities, high school investments, and college investments in wages.
  • First part: non-parametric evidence of the strong complementarities between abilities, high school investments and college investments.
  • Second part: generalized Roy model that accounts for additional unobserved heterogeneity using within-school-across-cohort variation in specialization choices.
  • Results: investing in more challenging tracks in high school increases college enrollment and graduation, but not necessarily wages.

Albert & Monras (2021): Immigration and Spatial Equilibrium: The Role of Expenditures in the Country of Origin

  • Document that international migrants concentrate more in expensive cities
  • The more concentration, the lower the prices in their original countries are
  • International migrants consume less locally than comparable natives
  • Quantitative spatial equilibrium model
    • A part of immigrants’ income goes towards consumption in their origin countries
  • More efficient spatial allocation of labor
    • Increases aggregate output and welfare of natives

Deming (2021): The Growing Importance of Decision-Making on the Job

Colas (2021): The Indirect Fiscal Benets of Low-Skilled Immigration

  • Low-skilled immigrants push locals to higher income brackets, thus increases tax revenue

Heller & Kessler (2021): The Effects of Letters of Recommendation in the Youth Labor Market

McDermott & Hansen (2021): Labor Reallocation and Remote Work During COVID-19: Real-Time Evidence from GitHub

  • GitHub Data

Rossi (2021): The Relative Efficiency of Skilled Labor across Countries: Measurement and Interpretation

Poverty

Kaur, Mullainathan, Oh & Schilbach (2021): Do Financial Concerns Make Workers Less Productive?

Carvalho, Meier, & Wang (2016): Poverty and Economic Decision-Making: Evidence from Changes in Financial Resources at Payday

  • AER

Banerjee & Mullainathan (2008): Limited Attention and Income Distribution

401(K)

Poterba, Venti & Wise (2000): Saver Behavior and 401(k) Retirement Wealth

  • AER

Social Benefits

Bhargava & Manoli (2015): Psychological Frictions and the Incomplete Take-Up of Social Benefits: Evidence from an IRS Field Experiment

  • AER
  • receipt of the mailing, simplification, and the heightened salience of benefits led to substantial additional claiming

Technology

Acemoglu, Autor, Hazell, and Restrepo (2022): Artificial Intelligence and Jobs: Evidence from Online Vacancies

  • JLE
  • AI has substituted for humans in a subset of tasks
  • No discernible relationship between AI exposure and employment or wage growth at the occupation or industry level

Inequality

Stantcheva (2022): Inequalities in the times of a pandemic

Angrist, Hull, Pathak & Walters (2021): Race and the Mismeasure of School Quality

Fernandez, Parsa & Viarengo (2021): Coming out in America: Thirty Years of Cultural Change

  • Data: GSS
  • Empirical strategy: DiD
  • Conclusion: Greater exposure to the gay population, rather than expanding liberalism and civil liberties, lead to the increased acceptance of same-sex relationships.

Athey, Ferguson, Gentzkow & Schmidt (2021): Estimating experienced racial segregation in US cities using large-scale GPS data

  • PNAS
  • Experienced isolation: captures individuals’ exposure to diverse others in the places they visit over the course of their days.

Gender Inequality

Cabral & Dillender (2021): Gender Differences in Medical Evaluations: Evidence from Randomly Assigned Doctors

  • Compared to differences among their male patient counterparts, female patients randomly assigned a female doctor rather than a male doctor are 5.0% more likely to be evaluated as disabled and receive 8.5% more subsequent cash benefits on average.
  • The magnitude of these effects implies that having female doctors evaluate patients entirely offsets the observed gender gap in the likelihood of being evaluated as disabled when male doctors evaluate patients.

Law

Lane, Nosenzo, and Sonderegger (2023): Law and Norms: Empirical Evidence

  • Abstract: A large theoretical literature argues laws exert a causal effect on norms, but empirical evidence remains scant. Using a novel identification strategy, we provide a compelling empirical test of this proposition. We use incentivized vignette experiments to directly measure social norms relating to actions subject to legal thresholds. Our large-scale experiments (n = 7,000) run in the United Kingdom, United States, and China show that laws can causally influence social norms. Results are robust across different samples and methods of measuring norms, and are consistent with a model of social image concerns where individuals care about the inferences others make about their underlying prosociality.

Trade

Eaton & Kortum (2002)

  • Built on Ricardian model
  • Continuum of goods due to DFS (1977)
  • Multicountry
  • Tractable - good for making policy recommendations

IO

Kokovin, Ozhegova, Sharapudinov, and Tarasov (2024): A Theory of Monopolistic Competition with Horizontally Heterogeneous Consumers

  • Firms serve consumers for whom their products are the most preferred ones.
  • More productive firms choose larger local markets.
  • Markups are the highest in the most and least preferred locations.

Kong, Dubé, and Daljord (2024): Nonparametric Estimation of Demand with Switching Costs: the Case of Habitual Brand Loyalty

  • Habitual brand loyalty can account for between 10.8% and 72.2% of the repeat purchase behavior.

Campbell, Ushchev, and Zenou (2024): The Network Origins of Entry

  • Word of mouth learning about new product: based on network density, the pricing equilibria are either blockaded, or deterred, or accommodated entry.
  • For firms that can observe the network density, they can potentially charge less for people who have more friends.

Wang (2023)

  • Title: Subsidizing industry growth in a market with lemons: Evidence from the electric market in China
  • Abstract:The growth of a new infant industry is a combined result of firm competition and support from government policies. Three forces shape the dynamics of a nascent industry. First, firms continue to enter the industry, which leads to market structure changes determined by the underlying sunk cost of entry. Second, technology growth and upstream spillovers improve the industry’s cost structure. Third, for a consumer goods industry, consumer learning and the associated reputation-building dynamics are crucial for the industry’s development. Consumers could accept a product and gradually increase adoption if the industry builds a reputation for good quality. This paper examines the interaction of these three forces in the Chinese electric vehicle market and identifies how subsidies and other policy instruments affect industry growth through the three forces, with a focus on reputational concerns.

Ciliberto, Murry & Tamer (2021)

  • Model for estimating a game of simultaneous entry and pricing decisions while allowing for correlations between unobserved cost and demand shocks
  • Account for selection in the pricing stage.
  • Applied to merge situation

Goel (2021)

  • Use Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillators (ICDs) to analyze the welfare effects of market segmentation from third-degree price discrimination.
    • Allowing manufacturers’ product offerings to be endogenously determined
  • Uniform price can increase hospital surplus by up to 3.4%
    • Purchases of ICDs equipped with a superior technology drops by up to 26.3%

Game Theory

Nakamura (2014): One-Leader and Multiple-Follower Stackelberg Games with Private Information

  • Economics Letters

Blockchain

Halaburda, Haeringer, Gans, and Gandal (2022): The Microeconomics of Cryptocurrencies

  • JEL
  • Article covers supply, demand, price, and competition in cryptocurrencies

Makarov & Schoar (2021): Blockchain Analysis of the Bitcoin Market

  • Provides detailed analyses of the Bitcoin network and its main participants
  • Built a novel database using a large number of public and proprietary sources to link Bitcoin addresses to real entities
  • Develop an extensive suite of algorithms to extract information about the behavior of the main market participants
  • Three major pieces of analysis of the Bitcoin eco-system
    • Analyze the transaction volume and network structure of the main participants on the blockchain
    • Document the concentration and regional composition of the miners
    • Analyze the ownership concentration of the largest holders of Bitcoin

Experiments

Hussam, Rabbani, Reggiani & Rigol (2021): Rational Habit Formation: Experimental Evidence from Handwashing in India

Education

Angrist, Gray-Lobe, Idoux, and Pathak (2022): Still Worth the Trip? School Busing Effects in Boston and New York

  • NBER working paper
  • Busing increases integration but not achievement (SAT scores)
  • Counterfactual shows cost saving from not busing
  • LY: this may be discussed in the paper, but integration itself may build social capital, which is not measured by achievement. Perhaps if they could link the data to tax records, they can see the effect of busing on earnings. If they link it to the Census data, they can see the effect on family structure. Though the linking can be time-consuming, if not infeasible.

Heckman & Zhou (2022): Measuring Knowledge

  • Published as an IZA working paper
  • Psychometrically validated test scores are not comparable over time and people

Macro

Fitzgerald, Jones, Kulish & Nicolini (2024): Is There a Stable Relationship between Unemployment and Future Inflation?

  • Endogenous monetary policy distorts the Phillips curve at the national level. Locally, it still holds.