Knowledge that Transforms

May 01 2018 Review of Economics and Statistics over the Past 100 Years: A Counting Exercise Asim I. Khwaja, Asim I. Khwaja Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Kunal Mangal Kunal Mangal Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Asim I. Khwaja Kunal Mangal Online Issn: 1530-9142 Print Issn: 0034-6535 © 2018 The President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology2018The President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Review of Economics and Statistics (2018) 100 (2): i–v. https://doi.org/10.1162/REST_e_00742 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation Asim I. Khwaja, Kunal Mangal; Review of Economics and Statistics over the Past 100 Years: A Counting Exercise. The Review of Economics and Statistics 2018; 100 (2): i–v. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/REST_e_00742 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAll JournalsThe Review of Economics and Statistics Search Advanced Search This content is only available as a PDF. © 2018 The President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology2018The President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

We analyze contracts between a large buyer and her suppliers. We find that contracts with critical product suppliers contain more clauses that address moral hazard, primarily through monitoring. If holdup concerns are larger, there are more contractual protections against it. Over time, contracts with the same supplier include additional provisions that address moral hazard through monitoring. This dynamic effect is strongest for service contracts, where observability and verifiability are initially lower. Our findings indicate that contracts become more complete over time and provide support to incomplete-contracting models that argue that contracts become more complete as contracting costs decrease.

Can electoral institutions induce lasting changes in citizens’ voting habits? We study the long-term and spillover effects of compulsory voting in the Swiss canton of Vaud (1900–1970) and find that this intervention increases turnout in federal referendums by 30 percentage points. However, despite its magnitude, the effect disappears quickly after voting is no longer compulsory. We find minor spillover effects on related forms of political participation that also vanish immediately after compulsory voting has been abolished. Overall, these results question habit formation arguments in the context of compulsory voting.

Exploiting a discontinuity in childhood Medicaid eligibility based on date of birth, we find that more years of childhood eligibility are associated with fewer hospitalizations in adulthood. For blacks, we find a 7% to 15% decrease in hospitalizations and a suggestive 2% to 5% decrease in emergency department visits, but no similar effect for nonblacks. The effects are pronounced for utilization related to chronic illnesses and for patients living in low-income postal codes. Calculations suggest that lower rates of hospitalizations during one year in adulthood for blacks offset between 2% and 4% of the initial costs of expanding Medicaid for all children.

This paper combines revealed preference and nonparametric estimation techniques to obtain nonparametric bounds on the distribution of the money metric utility and demand functions over a population of heterogeneous households. Our approach is independent of any functional specification on the household utility functions. Our method applies the weak axiom of revealed preference to a population of heterogeneous households. Although this does not produce the sharpest bounds, we show that it is computationally attractive and provides narrow bounds. We demonstrate the usefulness of our results by applying it to the Consumer Expenditure Survey, a U.S. cross–sectional consumption data set.

Abstract Recessions lead to short-term job loss, lower happiness, and decreasing income levels. There is growing evidence that workers who first join the labor market during economic downturns suffer from poor job matches that can have sustained detrimental effects on wages and career progressions. This paper uses U.S. and U.K. data to document a more disturbing long-run effect of recessions: young people who leave school during recessions are significantly more likely to lead a life of crime than those entering a buoyant labor market. Thus, crime scars resulting from higher entry-level unemployment rates prove to be long lasting and substantial.

Despite unprecedented vertical growth in large cities, the economics of skyscrapers remain understudied. We combine data on tall buildings with a panel of land prices covering 140 years to analyze the determinants of urban heights. We provide estimates of the land price elasticity of height, the height elasticity of construction cost, and the elasticity of substitution between land and capital for tall buildings. The land price elasticity of height increased substantially over time, and it is larger for commercial than for residential buildings, which suggests that the supply side helps to produce the typical segregation of urban land uses.

This paper examines fiscal policy forecasts prepared for the Federal Open Market Committee and its influence on U.S. monetary policy. The forecasts contain useful information beyond that in the CBO’s forecasts. Fiscal forecast errors are only weakly correlated with forecast errors for inflation and output growth, but those for the budget surplus are highly correlated with those for the unemployment rate and the output gap. Some fiscal variables can also account for a significant fraction of the “exogenous” changes in the federal funds rate target that Romer and Romer (2004) studied, consistent with the board’s statements on the importance of fiscal policy.

We examine the housing market and residential mobility changes that occur soon after a Title 1 school fails to achieve adequate yearly progress (AYP) in Charlotte, North Carolina. Students within attendance zones of failing schools are given priority in lotteries for oversubscribed schools, potentially increasing the attractiveness of living in a failing school attendance zone. We find that housing prices, home buyer income, and the probability of attending a nonassigned school increase in the highest-quality neighborhoods within failing school attendance zones. Our results are driven largely by the behavior of new residents.

Using data on women’s choice of hospital for childbirth in Florida, we find that women return to the same hospital approximately 70% of the time. We separate explanations of switching costs and unobserved preference heterogeneity using a panel data fixed effects estimator and find that switching costs account for approximately 40% of the demand effects of a lagged dependent variable. The welfare effects of excluding a hospital from a payer’s network are smaller in the short run but higher in the long run, given our estimates of switching costs, and the dynamic effects of entry on competition are significantly smaller.