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Articles 1 - 30 of 3476
Full-Text Articles in Economics
The Lingering Effects On Junk Bond Spreads Of The Fed’S 2020 Corporate Bond Backstop Facilities, John V. Duca, An Nguyen
The Lingering Effects On Junk Bond Spreads Of The Fed’S 2020 Corporate Bond Backstop Facilities, John V. Duca, An Nguyen
Journal of Financial Crises
The US corporate bond market is typically disrupted during financial crises, when uncertainty and risk premiums are high and bond issuance is depressed. During the COVID-19 recession, the Federal Reserve introduced two unprecedented interventions: the Primary Market Corporate Credit Facility and Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facility. These backstop facilities stood ready to purchase corporate bonds when corporate bond spreads were wide. While existing literature highlights their effects on investment-grade bonds, the implications for high-yield (junk) bonds remain less well understood. We track uncertainty using the Cboe Volatility Index, or VIX; Jurado, Ludvigson, and Ng’s measures of macroeconomic uncertainty; and other …
A Framework For Understanding The Vulnerabilities Of New Money-Like Products, Kenechukwu Anadu, Patrick Mccabe, J.P. Perez-Sangimino, Nathan Swem
A Framework For Understanding The Vulnerabilities Of New Money-Like Products, Kenechukwu Anadu, Patrick Mccabe, J.P. Perez-Sangimino, Nathan Swem
Journal of Financial Crises
New money-like products, such as tokenized money market funds (MMFs), money market exchange-traded funds, and stablecoins, could be transformative for finance. These products may offer significant benefits, but like other money-like assets, they also have certain vulnerabilities. We introduce a framework to analyze the vulnerabilities of new products by comparing their features to those that contribute to vulnerabilities in MMFs. Specifically, we examine the extent to which each product engages in liquidity transformation, is subject to threshold effects, serves as a money-like asset, poses contagion risks, and has reactive investors. Our framework is useful for assessing the potential effects of …
Teen Suicide And The Outcomes Of Surviving Peers, Emily Cuddy, Janet Currie, Elisa Jácome, Lucy Manly
Teen Suicide And The Outcomes Of Surviving Peers, Emily Cuddy, Janet Currie, Elisa Jácome, Lucy Manly
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
By age 17, a quarter of U.S. students have experienced a peer suicide. Using linked administrative data from South Carolina and a matched difference-in-differences design, we find that exposure to a peer’s self-harm death increases the probability of a self-harm diagnosis by nearly 50% and both the incidence and frequency of mental health visits. Effects on care use and criminal behavior are concentrated among white boys, and responses diverge by prior mental health history: students without a prior diagnosis increase felony offending rather than care-seeking. Deaths from assault and transportation accidents produce no comparable rise in self-harm, consistent with contagion.
When Does Emigration Reduce Domestic Economic Activities? Evidence On The Loss Of Management Capacity From A Visa Lottery, Marup Hossain, Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak
When Does Emigration Reduce Domestic Economic Activities? Evidence On The Loss Of Management Capacity From A Visa Lottery, Marup Hossain, Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak
Discussion Papers
Economic development is often conceived as structural transformation and migration out of rural agriculture (Lewis, 1954; Fei & Ranis, 1964). Understanding development therefore requires us to identify how rural economies transform in response to emigration. We study how international migration reshapes domestic economic activity in origin households using a randomized visa lottery that gave Bangladeshi men job opportunities in Malaysia. Winning the lottery raises total household income through remittances, but income earned in Bangladesh declines due to contractions in nonfarm business activity. In contrast, crop income remains stable despite large reductions in agricultural input expenditures, because farming gets delegated through …
The Effect Of Childcare On Female Labor Supply And Child Development In Low And Middle Income Countries, Serena Goldberg, Costas Meghir
The Effect Of Childcare On Female Labor Supply And Child Development In Low And Middle Income Countries, Serena Goldberg, Costas Meghir
Discussion Papers
Childcare services can offer an opportunity for women to develop their careers and increase household income. At the same time, it can affect the development of children, depending on the quality of care. We first develop a collective model of the household as a conceptual framework to show how improving the availability of childcare can affect mothers’ labor market opportunities and earnings and how it can affect child development. We then review the literature on the effects of childcare on the employment and earnings of women and on child development. Childcare can increase mothers’ employment. However, limited work opportunities or …
The Near-Optimality Of Two-Part Tariffs For Nonlinear Pricing, Dirk Bergemann, Yang Cai, Jinzhao Wu, Konstantin Zabarnyi
The Near-Optimality Of Two-Part Tariffs For Nonlinear Pricing, Dirk Bergemann, Yang Cai, Jinzhao Wu, Konstantin Zabarnyi
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
The optimal mechanism for selling a divisible good under convex production costs can be arbitrarily complex, yet firms overwhelmingly use two-part tariffs: a fixed fee plus a constant markup over production cost. We quantify the profit this simplicity sacrifices. For regular value distributions, a two-part tariff guarantees a fraction of the optimal profit that depends only on a lower bound m on the elasticity of the marginal cost, independent of the value distribution. The guarantee approaches 1 as m grows, and is impossible without such a bound. Beyond regularity, no two-part tariff guarantees a constant fraction, but a menu …
Efficient Dynamic Mechanism Design Without A Common Prior, Dirk Bergemann, Marek Bojko
Efficient Dynamic Mechanism Design Without A Common Prior, Dirk Bergemann, Marek Bojko
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
We study efficient dynamic mechanism design with independent private values when agents do not share a common prior over the stochastic environment. Each agent privately observes the stochastic kernel governing the evolution of her own type and may hold arbitrary beliefs about the kernels of others. We extend the agents’ type space to include the kernel itself and show that the dynamic team mechanism of Athey and Segal (2013) and the dynamic pivot mechanism of Bergemann and Välimäki (2010) implement the socially efficient allocation in periodic ex-post equilibrium. We further show that kernels can be elicited only once, at the …
Fast Online Inference On Semiparametric Models, Xiaohong Chen, Elie Tamer, Qingsong Yao
Fast Online Inference On Semiparametric Models, Xiaohong Chen, Elie Tamer, Qingsong Yao
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
This paper develops a framework for fast online inference on semiparametric models with large sample sizes and possibly many covariates. The computational algorithm itself is the object of statistical study: after a globally consistent warm start in the first phase, the path of averaged online iterates generated in the second phase automatically delivers estimators with optimal convergence rates and valid confidence sets. Both phases require only a single pass over the data stream and are well suited to streaming data or to settings with storage/privacy constraints. For semiparametric monotone index models, the averaged trajectory of the second phase lead to …
The Risk Protection Value Of “Moral Hazard”, Angie Acquatella, Victoria Marone
The Risk Protection Value Of “Moral Hazard”, Angie Acquatella, Victoria Marone
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
Health insurance lowers the out-of-pocket price of healthcare, and it is well-established that this leads to higher utilization of care. This manifestation of “moral hazard” is typ ically viewed as a social cost of insurance. Within a standard model, this paper shows that a consumer’s ability to change her behavior in response to insurance can also play a central role in the ability of insurance to protect her from risk. We provide a theoretical characterization of this channel and quantify its importance empirically. Under stan dard parameterizations and estimates in the literature, we find that insurance-induced healthcare utilization can account …
Explanations For Robust Decisions, Kai Hao Yang, Nathan Yoder, Alexander K. Zentefis
Explanations For Robust Decisions, Kai Hao Yang, Nathan Yoder, Alexander K. Zentefis
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
We consider the problem of explaining a data generating process (DGP) to a decision maker (DM) who cannot understand it. Explanations are information, not approximations: they are useful because they rule out possible DGPs. If the DM maximizes her average payoff, explanations using OLS are robustly useful, and augmenting them with summary statistics makes them more so. Sampling error can destroy these guarantees, but theoretical assumptions linking that error to the DGP can restore them. If the DM is sufficiently ambiguity averse, explanations that are affine in outcomes are not robustly useful, but certificates reporting lower bounds on outcomes are.
Long-Run Effects Of H-1b Immigration On The U.S. Economy, Ran Abramitzky, Leah Boustan, Ahmet Gulak, Jens Hainmueller
Long-Run Effects Of H-1b Immigration On The U.S. Economy, Ran Abramitzky, Leah Boustan, Ahmet Gulak, Jens Hainmueller
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
We study the effects of H-1B immigration on U.S. industries that employ H-1B workers and their trading partners. Using a novel cross-industry design and the 1999–2003 expansion of the H-1B visa cap for identification, we find that H-1B exposure raised incomes for natives and pre-existing immigrants, with gains concentrated in non-STEM occupations. Income gains propagate forward through supply chains to downstream industries but not backward to upstream industries, consistent with a productivity shock rather than a labor supply shock. We find no direct effect on patenting, suggesting that productivity gains arise from better task execution rather than patentable invention.
Doctor Decision Making And Patient Outcomes, Janet Currie, W. Bentley Macleod, Kate Musen
Doctor Decision Making And Patient Outcomes, Janet Currie, W. Bentley Macleod, Kate Musen
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
Doctors often treat similar patients differently, which affects health outcomes and medical spending. We assess the recent literature on doctor decision making through the lens of a model that incorporates diagnostic and procedural skills, beliefs, incentives, and differences in patient pools. Decision making is affected by beliefs, training, experience, peer effects, financial incentives, and time constraints. Interventions to improve decision making include providing information, guidelines, and technologies like electronic medical records and algorithmic decision tools. Economists have made progress in understanding doctor decision making, but applications of that knowledge to improving health care are still limited.
How Much Should A Conversational Recommender System Converse?, Akshit Kumar, Vahideh Manshadi, Akhilesh Tumu
How Much Should A Conversational Recommender System Converse?, Akshit Kumar, Vahideh Manshadi, Akhilesh Tumu
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
Conversational recommender systems powered by generative AI can enhance personalization by facilitating information elicitation through follow-up questions. However, engaging in these conversations imposes a communication cost on users. As platforms with different objectives and monetization models deploy these systems, a central question is: how does the platform’s objective and sellers’ strategic response shape the design of these systems in terms of their elicitation strategy? We develop a parsimonious model of conversational elicitation in which interaction generates noisy preference information and imposes a communication cost borne by the user. A user-welfare-maximizing platform elicits more information when accurate niche matching yields large …
Life After Divorce: Effects Of Joint Custody On Parents And Children, Stella Canessa, Gordon B. Dahl, Anna Hasselqvist, Costas Meghir, Susan Niknami, Mårten Palme, Helmut Rainer, Olof Rosenqvist, Pengpeng Xiao
Life After Divorce: Effects Of Joint Custody On Parents And Children, Stella Canessa, Gordon B. Dahl, Anna Hasselqvist, Costas Meghir, Susan Niknami, Mårten Palme, Helmut Rainer, Olof Rosenqvist, Pengpeng Xiao
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
Divorce reshapes family life, yet little is known about one of its most consequential features: the allocation of child custody. We study the impact of joint versus sole custody on both parents and children using rich administrative data from Sweden linked to over 25 years of newly-collected court custody rulings. To address selection concerns, we exploit random assignment of custody disputes to judges who differ sharply in their propensity to grant joint custody. For fathers, joint custody substantially raises earnings and improves mental health, consistent with sustained paternal involvement enhancing labor market attachment and psychological well-being. In contrast, there are …
Ai Premium, Nicola Borri, Yukun Liu, Aleh Tsyvinski
Ai Premium, Nicola Borri, Yukun Liu, Aleh Tsyvinski
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
Using 380 trillion tokens of realized AI consumption across more than four hundred large language models from the licensed proprietary OpenRouter dataset covering approximately 2 percent of current global monthly AI token consumption, we analyze how AI affects firms, markets, and workers. Leveraging the unprecedented size, scope and granularity data, we construct the AI Factor from growth in tokens, dollars, and users, estimate firm-level AI Betas from stock return comovement, and characterize the AI Premium. First, we build a high-frequency AI factor and decompose it into salient components. Second, we show that firms whose returns covary more positively with the …
Credit Surfaces And Economic Uncertainty, John Geanokopolis, David E. Rappaport
Credit Surfaces And Economic Uncertainty, John Geanokopolis, David E. Rappaport
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
The Credit Surface along the leverage dimension gives the bond spread as a function of the loan-to-value ratio. Empirically, we show that uncertainty shocks typically increase spreads and steepen the credit surface, profoundly affecting the supply of credit. Theoretically, we derive necessary and sufficient conditions for the convexity of the credit surface, and for changes in the anticipated distribution of collateral prices that lead to steepening of the credit surface. Finally, we show that the credit surface itself fully reveals the entire distribution of collateral prices, thus providing a new and vivid language with which to describe uncertainty and stochastic …
The Displacement Effects Of Domestic Outsourcing, Mayara Felix, Michael B. Wong
The Displacement Effects Of Domestic Outsourcing, Mayara Felix, Michael B. Wong
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
Evidence that domestic outsourcing lowers pay comes largely from on-site transfers, in which workers move to a contractor but keep the same jobs. Displacement is rarely observed: whether workers lose their jobs, where they go, how earnings evolve. In Brazil’s 1993–1994 pro-outsourcing reforms, which differentially affected security guards, such transfers were rare; firms instead used occupational layoffs, shedding their guards while keeping other workers. Displaced guards’ employment recovered within five years, but many changed occupations and wages stayed about 12% lower. Lifetime losses average 1.2 to 1.5 years of pre-layoff earnings, concentrated among workers from high-wage firms, reflecting lost premia.
Domestic Outsourcing And Young-Worker Entry Into The Formal Sector, Mayara Felix, Michael B. Wong
Domestic Outsourcing And Young-Worker Entry Into The Formal Sector, Mayara Felix, Michael B. Wong
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
We provide evidence that domestic outsourcing increases young-worker entry into the formal sector. Leveraging a pair of 1993–1994 Brazilian reforms that reduced the relative cost of outsourcing security guards, a triple-differences design shows that the reforms increased formal guard employment by 4% and hiring from unemployment or informality by 7%, while reallocating formal employment from older to younger workers and leaving demographic-adjusted wages unchanged. Census data corroborate the rise in formality, driven by the youngest cohorts. The compositional shift mirrors a general pattern in Brazil’s matched employer–employee records: conditional on total firm size, employers with greater occupation-specific scale hire younger …
Multidimensional Screening For Quality With An Application To Health Insurance, Hector Chade, Victoria Marone, Amanda Starc, Jeroen Swinkels
Multidimensional Screening For Quality With An Application To Health Insurance, Hector Chade, Victoria Marone, Amanda Starc, Jeroen Swinkels
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
We analyze a multidimensional screening model in which a principal offers a menu of quality-price pairs to a consumer with multiple dimensions of private information and a quasilinear utility function. We derive necessary conditions for optimality, and use them to provide insight into optimal exclusion, positive trade, and screening. We then recast the problem in terms of incremental quality levels and prices, the so-called demand-profile approach (DPA). Under DPA, the problem decouples across increments and can be solved one at a time. We provide novel conditions under which DPA recovers the solution to the full problem exactly or approximately, and …
Neural Networks In Economics: A Selective Review, Xiaohong Chen, Luis Hoderlein, Jonas Lieber
Neural Networks In Economics: A Selective Review, Xiaohong Chen, Luis Hoderlein, Jonas Lieber
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
The "deep learning revolution" has led to remarkable success of neural networks in applications across a wide range of fields, such as computer vision, speech recognition, natural language processing, code generation, protein structure prediction, image and video generation, and dynamic control. This review introduces neural networks to economists. Recent advances and challenges in approximation theory, neural network architecture, computation, econometric theory and practice are presented. Finally, we survey the rapidly evolving applications of modern neural networks and Large Language Models in economic research.
Immigration, Innovation, And The Geography Of Growth, Costas Arkolakis, Sun Kyoung Lee, Michael Peters
Immigration, Innovation, And The Geography Of Growth, Costas Arkolakis, Sun Kyoung Lee, Michael Peters
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
Between 1880 and 1920, more than 20 million immigrants settled in the United States. We study how this migration wave affected innovation and growth. Using a newly constructed dataset linking individual census records to historical immigration records and the universe of US patents, we highlight a new channel through which immigrants contributed to growth: they disproportionately settled in urban innovation hubs. To quantify the aggregate and regional effects of this mass migration episode, we develop a new spatial growth model in which skilled workers have a comparative advantage in innovation and sort endogenously across space. We find that international arrivals …
From Innovation To Speculation: Ai And The Magnificent Seven, Rerotlhe B. Basele, Peter C. B. Phillips, Shuping Shi
From Innovation To Speculation: Ai And The Magnificent Seven, Rerotlhe B. Basele, Peter C. B. Phillips, Shuping Shi
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
The AI boom has driven the Nasdaq and the Magnificent Seven tech stocks to record highs. But how much do these new records reflect underlying value, how much is speculation, and how vulnerable are these stocks and the wider market to a major downturn? Our evidence and analyses show clear signs of bubble exuberance in most of these stocks, concentrated in a few names like Nvidia, leading to latent risks for investors who assume their index funds are safely diversified and supported by wider economic fundamentals.
Offsetting Carbon With Lemons: Adverse Selection And Certification In The Voluntary Carbon Market, Vahideh Manshadi, Faidra Monachou, Ilan Morgenstern
Offsetting Carbon With Lemons: Adverse Selection And Certification In The Voluntary Carbon Market, Vahideh Manshadi, Faidra Monachou, Ilan Morgenstern
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
To meet voluntary climate targets, firms often complement internal decarbonization efforts by purchasing carbon credits in the voluntary carbon market (VCM), which finance projects that reduce emissions elsewhere. However, these emissions reductions are difficult to verify, and growing evidence of overcrediting has cast doubt on the VCM's potential to genuinely offset emissions. We investigate how the VCM's defining features shape its climate effectiveness. Our model captures three central elements: adverse selection, as high-quality projects that truly reduce emissions are costlier yet difficult to distinguish from low-quality ones; imperfect third-party certification, as projects are screened based on a noisy signal of …
Incentives, Evidence, And Reminders For Bureaucrats: Overcoming Barriers To Policy Scale Up, Patrick Agte, Daniel R. Morales, Christopher Neilson, Sebastian Otero, Guatam Rao
Incentives, Evidence, And Reminders For Bureaucrats: Overcoming Barriers To Policy Scale Up, Patrick Agte, Daniel R. Morales, Christopher Neilson, Sebastian Otero, Guatam Rao
Discussion Papers
Scaling up effective policies often requires the attention of frontline bureaucrats with many competing responsibilities. Even when policymakers adopt effective programs, implementation may not follow. In a nationwide experiment in the Dominican Republic, we test interventions to increase school principals' implementation of an educational program proven effective in a previous RCT. Only 37% of control schools verifiably implemented the intervention when ordered to by the Ministry of Education, compared with 83% in the original trial. Implementation was no higher among schools that previously implemented the program in the RCT, suggesting that fixed costs of adoption do not explain non-adoption. We …
Cross Section Curve Data Autoregression, Peter C.B. Phillips, Liang Jiang
Cross Section Curve Data Autoregression, Peter C.B. Phillips, Liang Jiang
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
This paper develops and applies new asymptotic theory for estimation and inference in parametric autoregression and vector autoregression with function valued cross section curve time series. The study provides a new approach to dynamic panel regression with high dimensional dependent cross section data. We deal with the stationary case and provide a full set of results extending those of standard Euclidean space autoregression, showing how function space curve cross section data raises efficiency and reduces bias in estimation and shortens confidence intervals. Wild-bootstrap methods are also developed to improve testing and inference. The findings reveal that function space models with …
From Unstructured Data To Demand Counterfactuals: Theory And Practice, Timothy Christensen, Giovanni Compiani
From Unstructured Data To Demand Counterfactuals: Theory And Practice, Timothy Christensen, Giovanni Compiani
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
Empirical models of multi-product demand rely on low-dimensional product representations to capture substitution patterns, increasingly using proxies built from unstructured data. When proxies are imperfect, standard workflows yield biased counterfactuals and invalid inference. We develop a practical toolkit to address these issues. Our methods apply to market-level and/or individual data, require minimal additional computation, provide simple standard-error formulas, and accommodate proxies from fine-tuned models. Further, we propose diagnostics to assess proxy quality. Our methods yield meaningful improvements in predicting substitution in empirically calibrated simulations and in an application where we assess counterfactual prediction performance against a ground truth.
From Trade War To Green Transition: Optimal Electric Vehicle Tariffs With Revenue-Funded Subsidies, Panle Jia Barwick, Jack Collison, Pinelopi K. Goldberg, Shanjun Li, Yucheng Wang
From Trade War To Green Transition: Optimal Electric Vehicle Tariffs With Revenue-Funded Subsidies, Panle Jia Barwick, Jack Collison, Pinelopi K. Goldberg, Shanjun Li, Yucheng Wang
Discussion Papers
We study the optimal design of trade and industrial policy when governments pursue environmental objectives alongside traditional national welfare. Motivated by the global transition to electric vehicles (EVs) and growing concerns about competitiveness, resilience, and the environment, we develop a framework in which policymakers choose tariffs and domestic production subsidies to maximize national welfare, defined as the sum of consumer surplus, domestic profits, environmental benefits, and tariff revenue net of subsidies. We combine a theoretical model of differentiated-product oligopoly with a structural demand model estimated using vehicle-level data from 13 countries during 2004-2023 that together account for the vast majority …
How Much And How Fast Do Investors Respond To Equity Premium Changes? Evidence From Wealth Taxation, Andreas Fagereng, Luigi Guiso, Marius Ring
How Much And How Fast Do Investors Respond To Equity Premium Changes? Evidence From Wealth Taxation, Andreas Fagereng, Luigi Guiso, Marius Ring
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
Using administrative panel data on Norwegian investors’ portfolios, we document strong but slow portfolio allocation responses to a persistent wealth-tax-induced shock to the equity premium. Short-run responses resemble the modest sensitivity documented using surveys. The longer-run responses are much larger and can be rationalized by moderate risk aversion. We document that equity premium shocks affect stock market entry but not exits, suggesting that entry costs dominate participation costs. Our finding of slow responses supports the asset-pricing literature that uses adjustment frictions to explain important asset-pricing puzzles, and has implications for optimal capital taxation when tax rates differ across assets.
How Much Should A Conversational Recommender System Converse?, Akshit Kumar, Vahideh Manshadi, Akhilesh Tumu
How Much Should A Conversational Recommender System Converse?, Akshit Kumar, Vahideh Manshadi, Akhilesh Tumu
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
Conversational recommender systems powered by generative AI can enhance personalization by facilitating information elicitation through follow-up questions. However, engaging in these conversations imposes a communication cost on users. As platforms with different objectives and monetization models deploy these systems, a central question is: how does the platform’s objective and sellers’ strategic response shape the design of these systems in terms of their elicitation strategy? We develop a parsimonious model of conversational elicitation in which interaction generates noisy preference information and imposes a communication cost borne by the user. A user-welfare-maximizing platform elicits more information when accurate niche matching yields large …
Uneven Ranks: Geographic Deepening Of The All-Volunteer Force, Christine Hogestyn
Uneven Ranks: Geographic Deepening Of The All-Volunteer Force, Christine Hogestyn
Master in Public Policy Theses
Who is enlisting in Fiscal Year 2025, and what state-level characteristics are associated with military enlistment rates, service selection, and recruit quality? This study documents the geographic landscape of U.S. military accessions during a period of recruiting recovery, filling a gap in the literature by providing a current, empirical description of who enlists and from where in today’s All-Volunteer Force. Drawing on personnel data from the Department of War, the U.S. Census and Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates, and a federal dataset of military installations, I analyze 203,987 new accessions across the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps from …