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We assess the rate of replication for empirical papers in the 2010 American Economic Review. Across 70 empirical papers, we find that 29 percent have 1 or more citation that partially replicates the original result. While only a minority of papers has a published replication, a majority (60 percent) have either a replication, robustness test, or an extension. Surveying authors within the literature, we find substantial uncertainty over the number of extant replications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I examine replications of empirical papers in development economics published in the top-5 and next-5 general interest journals between the years 2000 through 2015. Of the 1,138 empirical papers, 71 papers (6.2 percent) were replicated in another published paper or working paper. The majority (77.5 percent) of replications involved reanalysis of the data using different econometric specifications to assess robustness. The strongest predictor of whether a paper is replicated or not is the paper's Google Scholar citation count, followed by year of publication. Papers based on randomized control trials (RCTs) appear to be replicated at a higher rate (12.5 percent). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines whether and how market competition affected the political bias of government-owned newspapers in China from 1981 to 2011. We measure media bias based on coverage of government mouthpiece content (propaganda) relative to commercial content. We first find that a reform that forced newspaper exits (reduced competition) affected media bias by increasing product specialization, with some papers focusing on propaganda and others on commercial content. Second, lower-level governments produce less-biased content and launch commercial newspapers earlier, eroding higher-level governments’ political goals. Third, bottom-up competition intensifies the politico-economic trade-off, leading to product proliferation and less audience exposure to propaganda. (JEL D72, L31, L82, O14, O17, P26, P31) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How is credit for group work allocated when individual contributions are not observed? I use data on academics' publication records to test whether demographic traits like gender influence how credit is allocated under such uncertainty. While solo-authored papers send a clear signal about ability, coauthored papers are noisy, providing no specific information about each contributor's skills. I find that men are tenured at roughly the same rate regardless of coauthoring choices. Women, however, are less likely to receive tenure the more they coauthor. The result is much less pronounced among women who coauthor with other women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We make a two-pronged proposal to (i) strengthen the incentives for replication work and (ii) better organize and draw attention to the replications that are conducted. First we propose that top journals publish short 'replication reports.' These reports could summarize novel work replicating an existing high-impact paper, or they could highlight a replication result embedded in a wider-scope published paper. Second, we suggest incentivizing replications with the currency of our profession: citations. Enforcing a norm of citing replication work alongside the original would provide incentives for replications to both authors and journals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the evolution of economics research using a machine-learning-based classification of publications into fields and styles. The changing field distribution of publications would not seem to favor empirical papers. But economics' empirical shift is a within-field phenomenon; even fields that traditionally emphasize theory have gotten more empirical. Empirical work has also come to be more cited than theoretical work. The citation shift is sharpened when citations are weighted by journal importance. Regression analyses of citations per paper show empirical publications reaching citation parity with theoretical publications around 2000. Within fields and journals, however, empirical work is now cited more. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editors note that the current issue offers papers and proceedings from the American Economic Association's January 2015 annual meeting, outline how the papers were selected, and offers thanks to many who helped in the preparation of the issue.

Can the well-known experimental phenomenon of present-bias in intertemporal choice be confounded with the risks associated with receiving payment? Can measurements of risk preferences be used to represent desires for smoothness in intertemporal payments? In our two 2012 papers in this journal we explored these two questions and found the answer to the first to be yes and the second to be no. We feel the three papers inspired by our work and published here underscore these arguments and point to interesting new possibilities for modeling and measuring risk over time. (JEL C91, D81, D91) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Corrupt government hiring is common in developing countries. This paper uses original data to document the operation and consequences of corrupt hiring in a health bureaucracy. Hires pay bribes averaging 17 months of salary, but contrary to conventional wisdom, their observable quality is comparable to counterfactual merit-based hires. Exploiting variation across jobs, I show that the consequences of corrupt allocations depend on the correlation between wealth and quality among applicants: service delivery outcomes are good for jobs where this was positive and poor when negative. In this setting, the correlation was typically positive, leading to relatively good performance of hires. (JEL D73, I11, J16, J24, J45, M51, O17) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents discusses the "American Economic Journal: Microeconomics." The author offers information regarding the editorial staff of the journal, the publication processes, and article submission statistics. Several charts are provided that describe the recent history of the journal's publication as well as the main topics of its articles.

Intermittent monitoring of environmental standards may induce strategic changes in polluting activities. This paper documents local strategic responses to a cyclical, once-every-six-day air quality monitoring schedule under the federal Clean Air Act. Using satellite data of monitored areas, I show that air quality is significantly worse on unmonitored days. This effect is explained by short-term suppression of pollution on monitored days, especially during high-pollution periods when the city's noncompliance risk is high. Cities' use of air quality warnings increases on monitored days, which suggests local governments' role in coordinating emission reductions. (JEL K32, Q35, Q58, R11) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the interplay between genetics and family investments in the process of skill formation. We model and estimate the joint evolution of skills and parental investments throughout early childhood. We document three genetic mechanisms: the direct effect of child genes on skills, the indirect effect of child genes via parental investments, and family genetic influences captured by parental genes. We show that genetic effects are dynamic, increase over time, and operate via environmental channels. Our paper highlights the value of integrating biological and social perspectives into a single unified framework. (JEL I24, I26, J12, J13, J24) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers a report on the journal "American Economic Journal: Applied Economics" ("AEJ: Applied") for 2016. Topics include a list of peer reviewers for the journal, the editorial process for the journal, and journal policies regarding access to article data and revisions to articles in relation to author contracts.

An introduction is presented that discusses the volume theme papers and proceedings from the January 2017 annual meeting of the organization American Economic Association, noting the criteria for the selection of papers by president-elect Alvin Roth of the Association.

It is very important to know how much we can extrapolate from a study's results. This paper examines the issue using data from impact evaluations in development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information regarding the scholarly periodical entitled the "American Economic Journal: Microeconomics," published by the American Economic Association, is presented.

The article presents information concerning the scholarly periodical "American Economic Review" (AER). It discusses the editorial process of the journal, particularly what the article refers to as a single-blind refereeing policy for prospective articles approved by the Executive Committee of the organization the American Economic Association (AEA). The article also presents statistics concerning manuscript submissions and publication, and discusses the journal's disclosure policy, data-posting policy, and editorial staff.

Claims that the VAT facilitates tax enforcement by generating paper trails on transactions between firms contributed to widespread VAT adoption worldwide, but there is surprisingly little evidence. This paper analyzes the role of third-party information for VAT enforcement through two randomized experiments among over 400,000 Chilean firms. Announcing additional monitoring has less impact on transactions that are subject to a paper trail, indicating the paper trail's preventive deterrence effect. This leads to strong enforcement spillovers up the VAT chain. These findings confirm that when taking evasion into account, significant differences emerge between otherwise equivalent forms of taxation. (JEL D83, H25, H26, K34, O17) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper builds a new microdatabase that covers 100 countries at all income levels and long-run time series in the United States (1870–2010) and Mexico (1960–2010) to document how the modern tax system arises over development. I establish a new set of stylized facts, which show that the income tax exemption threshold decreases in the income distribution as a country develops, tracking growth in the employee share of employment that occurs gradually further down the income distribution. Additional evidence supports the interpretation that the rise in third-party covered income through increases in employee share drives expansions of the income tax base over development. (JEL D31, H23, H24, H71, J22, J23, N40) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The credibility revolution in economics has promoted causal identification using randomized control trials (RCT), difference-in-differences (DID), instrumental variables (IV) and regression discontinuity design (RDD). Applying multiple approaches to over 21,000 hypothesis tests published in 25 leading economics journals, we find that the extent of p-hacking and publication bias varies greatly by method. IV (and to a lesser extent DID) are particularly problematic. We find no evidence that (i) papers published in the Top 5 journals are different to others; (ii) the journal "revise and resubmit" process mitigates the problem; (iii) things are improving through time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents discusses the "American Economic Journal: Economic Policy." The author offers information regarding the editorial staff of the journal, the publication processes, and article submission statistics. Several charts are provided that describe the recent history of the journal's publication as well as the main topics of its articles.

This article presents discusses the "American Economic Journal: Applied Economics." The author offers information regarding the editorial staff of the journal, the publication processes, and article submission statistics. Several charts are provided that describe the recent history of the journal's publication as well as the main topics of its articles.

An introduction is presented that discusses the issue theme of papers and proceedings from the January 2017 annual meeting of the organization American Economic Association (AEA) in Chicago, Illinois, discussing the selection of papers for the issue.

The article discusses the scholarly periodical "The American Economic Journal: Microeconomics" (AEJ Micro) as of 2014. According to the article, AEJ Micro was established in July 2007 by the organization the American Economic Association (AEA). The article discusses the editorial process and lists several members of the Editorial Board including scholars Kyle Bagwell, Darrell Duffie, and Michael Ostrovsky. It also presents statistics related to AEJ Micro.

An introduction is presented which offers information on the "American Economic Journal: Economic Policy" including editorial procedures, lists of editorial staff and editorial board members, and figures on the number of articles submitted which were accepted, rejected, or returned for revisions.

An introduction is presented which offers information on the American Economic Association publication "American Economic Journal: Applied Economics" including editorial procedures, lists of editorial board members and peer reviewers, and figures on the number of articles submitted and published.

The article offers information on two events put on by the Committee on Economic Education of the American Economic Association (AEA). The June 1-3, 2016 Conference on Teaching and Research in Economic Education (CTREE) in Atlanta, Georgia is described. An event by the committee at the 2017 AEA meetings in Chicago, Illinois is described, noting papers on the economics major, evidence-based economics teaching, and undergraduate econometrics curriculum.

The article offers a report on the journal "American Economic Journal: Microeconomics" ("AEJ Micro") as of 2016. Topics include a list of peer reviewers for the journal, the editorial board of the journal, and the process of submission and review for manuscripts submitted to the journal. Statistics on articles published by the journal are presented.

The article offers a report on the journal "American Economic Review" ("AER"). Topics include the publishing of papers and proceedings from the 2016 annual meeting of the organization American Economic Association, the journal's editorial board and staff, and lists of peer reviewers serving the journal in 2016.

The article offers a 2016 report on the journal "American Economic Journal: Economic Policy" ("AEJ Policy"). Topics include a listing of the editorial staff and board of the journal, data on manuscripts submitted to and published by the journal, and a list of peer reviewers for the journal. The journal's submission and review processes are described.

We introduce liquidity frictions into an otherwise standard DSGE model with nominal and real rigidities and ask: can a shock to the liquidity of private paper lead to a collapse in short-term nominal interest rates and a recession like the one associated with the 2008 US financial crisis? Once the nominal interest rate reaches the zero bound, what are the effects of interventions in which the government provides liquidity in exchange for illiquid private paper? We find that the effects of the liquidity shock can be large, and show some numerical examples in which the liquidity facilities of the Federal Reserve prevented a repeat of the Great Depression in the period 2008-2009. (JEL E13, E31, E43, E44, E52, E58, G01) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we conduct a structural analysis of multi-attribute auctions of contracts with a general allocation rule when private information is multidimensional. Upon modeling bidders' contract value that accounts for their endogenous ex post actions, we nonparametrically identify bidders' private information from their bids and estimate their joint distribution. Analyzing cash-royalty auctions of Louisiana oil leases, we find government revenue worse and development rates no better than in a cash auction with a fixed royalty in view of adverse selection and moral hazard. Our findings revise conventional wisdom on the optimality of multi-attribute auctions. (JEL D44, D82, D86, H82, Q35) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper documents that the earnings cost of job loss is concentrated among workers who find reemployment in lower-skill occupations, and that the cost and incidence of such occupation displacement is higher for workers who lose their job during a recession. I propose a model where hiring is endogenously more selective during recessions, leading some unemployed workers to optimally search for reemployment in lower-skill jobs. The model accounts for existing estimates of the size and cyclicality of the present value cost of job loss, and the cost of entering the labor market during a recession. (JEL E24, E32, J23, J24, J31, J63, J64) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies how the impact of monetary policy depends on the distribution of savings from refinancing mortgages. We show that the efficacy of monetary policy is state dependent, varying in a systematic way with the pool of potential savings from refinancing. We construct a quantitative dynamic life-cycle model that accounts for our findings and use it to study how the response of consumption to a change in mortgage rates depends on the distribution of savings from refinancing. These effects are strongly state dependent. We also use the model to study the impact of a long period of low interest rates on the potency of monetary policy. We find that this potency is substantially reduced both during the period and for a substantial amount of time after interest rates renormalize. (JEL D15, E21, E43, E52, G21, G51, R31) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the author comments on the articles in this issue, which are derived from the annual American Economic Association meeting in San Francisco, California in January 2016, including one on Robert Gordon's book "The Rise and Fall of American Growth," one on the relationship between big data and economics, and one on the economics of immigration policy.

Technological advance is often embodied in capital inputs, like computers, airplanes, and robots. This paper builds a framework where capital inputs advance through (i) increased automation and (ii) increased productivity. The interplay of these two innovation dimensions can produce balanced growth, satisfying the Uzawa Growth Theorem even though technological progress is capital-embodied. The framework can further address structural transformation, general-purpose technologies, the limited macroeconomic impact of computing, and declining productivity growth and labor shares. Overall, this tractable framework can help resolve puzzling tensions between micro-level observations of innovation and balanced growth while providing new perspectives on numerous macroeconomic phenomena. (JEL E22, E23, E24, E25, L16, O33, O41) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates a large urban public works program randomly rolled out across neighborhoods of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. We find the program increased public employment and reduced private labor supply among beneficiaries and improved local amenities in treated locations. We then combine a spatial equilibrium model and unique commuting data to estimate the spillover effects of the program on private sector wages across neighborhoods: under full program rollout, wages increased by 18.6 percent. Using our model, we show that welfare gains to the poor are six times larger when we include the indirect effects on private wages and local amenities. (JEL H76, I38, J22, J31, O15, O18, R23) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using Canadian administrative data, this paper presents evidence of revenue and productivity spillovers across firms at fine spatial scales. Accounting for the endogenous sorting of firms across space, we estimate an average elasticity of firm revenue and productivity with respect to the average quality of other firms within 75 meters of 0.024. We find scant evidence that the average firm benefits from being surrounded by a greater amount of economic activity at this spatial scale. Sorting of higher-quality firms into more productive locations and higher average and aggregate quality peer groups is salient in the data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We create a general and tractable theory of increasing sorting in pairwise matching models with monetary transfers. The positive quadrant dependence partial order subsumes Becker (1973) as the extreme cases with most and least sorting and implies increasing regression coefficients. Our theory turns on synergy—the cross-partial difference or derivative of match production. This reflects basic economic forces: diminishing returns, technological convexity, insurance, and learning dynamics. We prove sorting increases if match synergy globally increases, and is cross-sectionally monotone or single crossing. We use our results to derive sorting predictions in major economics sorting papers and in new applications. (JEL C78, D21, D82, D86, J12) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editors comment on the proper methods for article submissions, appropriate article content, and editing processes.

The article discusses the scholarly periodical the "American Economic Journal: Applied Economics" (AEJ Applied) as of 2014. According to the article, the AEJ Applied was established by the organization the American Economic Association (AEA) in July 2007. The article discusses the editorial process overseen by editor Esther Duflo. It also lists members of the editorial board including scholars Joshua Angrist, Gordon Dahl, and David Card.

An introduction is presented in which the editor of the journal discusses the selection and publication of the papers and proceedings of the annual meeting of the organization the American Economic Association in January 2014.