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Consumers' health plan choices are highly persistent even though optimal plans change over time. This paper separates two sources of inertia, inattention to plan choice and switching costs. We develop a panel data model with separate attention and choice stages, linked by heterogeneity in acuity, i.e., the ability and willingness to make diligent choices. Using data from Medicare Part D, we find that inattention is an important source of inertia but switching costs also play a role, particularly for low-acuity individuals. Separating the two stages and allowing for heterogeneity is crucial for counterfactual simulations of interventions that reduce inertia. (JEL D12, G22, H51, I13, I18, L65) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Every year, millions of Americans experience the incarceration of a family member. Using 30 years of administrative data from Ohio and exploiting differing incarceration propensities of randomly assigned judges, this paper provides the first quasi-experimental estimates of the effects of parental and sibling incarceration in the United States. Parental incarceration has beneficial effects on some important outcomes for children, reducing their likelihood of incarceration by 4.9 percentage points and improving their adult neighborhood quality. While estimates on academic performance and teen parenthood are imprecise, we reject large positive or negative effects. Sibling incarceration leads to similar reductions in criminal activity. (JEL H76, J13, K42) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the competitive forces which shaped ideological diversity in the US press in the early twentieth century. We find that households preferred like-minded news and that newspapers used their political orientation to differentiate from competitors. We formulate a model of newspaper demand, entry, and political affiliation choice in which newspapers compete for both readers and advertisers. We use a combination of estimation and calibration to identify the model's parameters from novel data on newspaper circulation, costs, and revenues. The estimated model implies that competition enhances ideological diversity, that the market undersupplies diversity, and that optimal competition policy requires accounting for the two-sidedness of the news market. (JEL D72, K21, L13, L41, L82, N42, N72) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This section answers several question about papers and proceedings of the annual meetings of the American Economic Association.

This paper studies competitive allocations under adverse selection. We first provide a general necessary and sufficient condition for entry on an inactive market to be unprofitable. We then use this result to characterize, for an active market, a unique budget-balanced allocation implemented by a market tariff making additional trades with an entrant unprofitable. Motivated by the recursive structure of this allocation, we finally show that it emerges as the essentially unique equilibrium outcome of a discriminatory ascending auction. These results yield sharp predictions for competitive nonexclusive markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the effects of the lower bound for interest rates on the distributions of inflation and interest rates. In a New Keynesian model with a lower bound, two equilibria emerge: policy is mostly unconstrained in the "target equilibrium," whereas policy is mostly constrained in the "liquidity trap equilibrium." Using options data on interest rates and inflation, we find forecast densities consistent with the target equilibrium and find no evidence in favor of the liquidity trap equilibrium. The lower bound has a sizable effect on the distribution of interest rates, but its impact on inflation is relatively modest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a report from the Committee on Economic Education of the American Economic Association. During a series of meetings in New Orleans, Louisiana in 2008 the Committee hosted six sessions, including those devoted to high school and undergraduate economics education in the U.S., graduate-level economics education, and undergraduate economics courses. Panel members and those who delivered papers at these sessions are acknowledged. In addition, the author notes that the number of bachelor's degrees conferred in economics during 2006-2007 declined slightly from the previous period.

This paper studies sequential information acquisition by an ambiguity-averse decision-maker (DM), who decides how long to collect information before taking an irreversible action. The agent optimizes against the worst-case belief and updates prior by prior. We show that the consideration of ambiguity gives rise to rich dynamics: compared to the Bayesian DM, the DM here tends to experiment excessively when facing modest uncertainty and, to counteract it, may stop experimenting prematurely when facing high uncertainty. In the latter case, the DM's stopping rule is nonmonotonic in beliefs and features randomized stopping. (JEL C61, D81, D83, D91) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes consumption to evaluate the distributional effects of pension reforms. Using Swedish administrative data, we show that on average, workers who retire earlier consume less while retired and experience larger drops in consumption around retirement. Interpreted via a theoretical model, these findings imply that reforms incentivizing later retirement incur a substantial consumption smoothing cost. Turning to other features of pension policy, we find that reforms that redistribute based on early-career labor supply would have opposite-signed redistributive effects, while differentiating on wealth may help to target pension benefits toward those who are vulnerable to larger drops in consumption around retirement. (JEL E21, G51, H23, H55, J22, J26) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How did countries recover from the Great Depression? In this paper, we explore the argument that leaving the gold standard helped by boosting inflationary expectations, lowering real interest rates, and stimulating interest-sensitive expenditures. We do so for a sample of 27 countries, using modern nowcasting methods and a new data-set containing more than 230,000 monthly and quarterly observations for over 1,500 variables. In those cases where the departure from gold happened on well-defined dates, inflationary expectations clearly rose in the wake of departure. Instrumental variable, difference-in-difference, and synthetic matching techniques suggest that the relationship is causal. (JEL E31, E32, E42, E43, F30, N10, N20) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a unified explanation for the slowdown of productivity growth, the decline in business dynamism, and the rise of market power. Using a quantitative framework, I show that the rise of intangible inputs, such as software, can explain these trends. Intangibles reduce marginal costs and raise fixed costs, which gives firms with high-intangible adoption a competitive advantage, in turn deterring other firms from entering. I structurally estimate the model on French and US micro data. After initially boosting productivity, the rise of intangibles causes a decline in productivity growth, consistent with the empirical trends observed since the mid-1990s. (JEL D22, D24, E23, L11, O31, O47) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a report form the Committee on Economic Education, a subcomittee of the American Economics Association (AEA). Details of the three sessions presenting academic papers held at the 2007 AEA meeting in Chicago, Illinois are described.The sessions featured papers evaluating a number of areas of economic study including an assessment of graduate school economic education and the teaching of economics at the college undergraduate level and to students in elementary, middle and high schools

The secular decline in safe interest rates since the early 1980s has been the subject of considerable attention. In this short paper, we argue that it is important to consider the evolution of safe real rates in conjunction with three other first-order macroeconomic stylized facts: the relative constancy of the real return to productive capital, the decline in the labor share, and the decline and subsequent stabilization of the earnings yield. Through the lens of a simple accounting framework, these four facts offer suggestive insights into the economic forces that might be at work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an earlier work (Kamada and Kojima 2015), we introduced 'matching with constraints,' a two-sided matching problem in which the market is subject to feasibility constraints. That paper proposed and analyzed a possible solution to this problem and discussed various real-market applications of our results. The present paper reorganizes some of the findings from our more recent effort, based on Kamada and Kojima (2016a, b). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper defines and studies a variable selection procedure called Testing-Based Forward Model Selection. The procedure inductively selects covariates which increase predictive accuracy into a working statistical regression model until a stopping criterion is met. The stopping criteria and selection criteria are defined using statistical hypothesis tests. The paper explicitly describes a testing procedure in the context of high-dimensional linear regression with heteroskedastic disturbances. Finally, a simulation study examines finite sample performance of the proposed procedure and shows that it behaves favorably in high-dimensional sparse settings in terms of prediction error and size of selected model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the January 5, 2017 proceedings of the meeting of the Executive Committee of the organization American Economic Association (AEA) in Chicago, Illinois. Topics include the establishment of an annual lecture named for economist Elinor Ostrom, a report on the journal "American Economic Review," and a report by the AEA's Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession (CSWEP).

Dahl and Lochner (2012) provides some of the first causal evidence of the effects of family income on child achievement using changes in the Earned Income Tax Credit. Unfortunately, a coding error in the creation of total family income affects the first stage estimates and inflates the instrumental variable (IV) estimates. Importantly, it does not affect the reduced-form estimates or alter statistical significance of the IV estimates. This response shows that correcting this error does not alter the core findings or main message of the paper. (JEL H24, H31, I21, I38, J13) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rate of inflation fell far less over the period 2007-2013 than in the period 1979-1985 despite similar large increases in the unemployment rate. This paper asks why. Possible explanations include a change in the persistence of inflation, changes in NAIRU, and other shocks. A change in the persistence of inflation, with inflation more anchored in the period 2007-2013 than in the period 1979-1985, is found to be important. The level and change in the NAIRU cannot be precisely estimated, but the data suggest an increase of nearly 1 percentage point since 2007. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the scholarly periodical the "American Economic Journal: Economic Policy" (AEJ Policy) as of 2014. According to the article, four issues of AEJ Policy were published in 2013. The article discusses the editorial process of AEJ Policy, the submission process, and the review process. According to the article, AEJ Policy's co-editors are scholars Mark Duggan and Dan Silverman. The article also presents statistics concerning the number of manuscripts submitted and published from 2007 to 2013.

The article discusses the scholarly periodical "American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics" (AEJ Macro) as of 2014. It discusses the editorial staff of the journal including co-editor Richard Rogerson and managing editor Michelle DeBlasi, and members of the Board of Editors including scholars Nick Bloom, Pierre Cahuc, and Tim Cogley. The article also examines the editorial process of the journal, and presents statistics concerning manuscript submissions and publication from 2007 to 2013.

US federal transfers to individuals are large, countercyclical, vary geographically, and are often credited with helping to stabilize regional economies. This paper estimates the short-run effects of these transfers using plausibly exogenous regional variation in temporary stimulus payments and permanent Social Security benefit increases. States that received larger transfers tended to grow faster contemporaneously, with a multiplier of around 1.5 for permanent transfers and 1/3 for temporary transfers. Results are broadly consistent with an open-economy New Keynesian model. At business cycle frequencies, cross-region transfer multipliers are not large, suggesting only modest gains in regional stabilization from US federal automatic stabilizers. (JEL E12, E32, E62, H23, H55, R12) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the large concentration of retirement behavior around statutory retirement ages, a puzzling stylized fact. To investigate this fact, I estimate bunching responses to 644 pension benefit discontinuities, using administrative data on the universe of German retirees. Financial incentives alone cannot explain retirement patterns, but there is a large direct effect of statutory retirement ages. I argue that the framing of statutory ages as reference points for retirement provides a plausible explanation. Simulations based on a model with reference dependence highlight that shifting statutory ages via pension reforms is an effective policy to influence retirement behavior. (JEL D91, H55, J26, J32) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies how changes in oil supply expectations affect the oil price and the macroeconomy. Using a novel identification design, exploiting institutional features of OPEC and high-frequency data, I identify an oil supply news shock. These shocks have statistically and economically significant effects. Negative news leads to an immediate increase in oil prices, a gradual fall in oil production, and an increase in inventories. This has consequences for the US economy: activity falls, prices and inflation expectations rise, and the dollar depreciates, providing evidence for a strong channel operating through supply expectations. (JEL E31, E32, F31, Q35, Q38, Q43) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does the impact of teachers extend beyond the students in their classroom? Using the natural transitions of students from multiple elementary schools into a single middle school, this paper provides a new method for isolating and quantifying peer spillover effects of teaching and shows that ignoring these spillovers underestimates a teacher's value by at least 30 percent. Because the spillovers also affect teacher value-added estimates, I develop a method of moments estimator of teacher value-added and show that accounting for the spillovers does not have a large impact on the ranking of teachers in New York City. I conclude by showing that the spillovers occur within groups of students who share the same race and gender, which suggests that social networks play a critical role in disseminating the effect. (JEL H75, I21, J15, J16, J45, Z13) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various reports published within the article, including several papers discussing fluctuations caused by the economic crisis of 2008-2009, several papers concerning convergence in macroeconomics, and several papers focusing on trade and growth.

This paper studies the business-cycle dynamics of secondary markets for physical capital and their effects on the macroeconomy. In the data, both capital reallocation and the price of used capital are procyclical. To rationalize these facts, I propose a model with endogenous partial irreversibility, where used investment goods are imperfect substitutes for new ones because of firm-level capital specificity. Equilibrium dynamics in the market for used capital induce countercyclical dispersion of marginal products of capital, propagate movements in aggregate TFP, and provide a microfoundation for state-dependent nonconvex capital adjustment costs. (JEL E22, E23, E32, G31) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

More than one-half of all people living with HIV are women and 80 percent of all HIV-positive women in the world live in sub-Saharan Africa. This paper demonstrates that the legal origins of these formerly colonized countries significantly determine current-day female HIV rates. In particular, female HIV rates are significantly higher in common law sub-Saharan African countries compared to civil law ones. This paper explains this relationship by focusing on differences in female property rights under the two codes of law. In sub-Saharan Africa, common law is associated with weaker female marital property laws. As a result, women in these common law countries have lower bargaining power within the household and are less able to negotiate safe sex practices and are thus more vulnerable to HIV, compared to their civil law counterparts. Exploiting the fact that some ethnic groups in sub-Saharan Africa cross country borders with different legal systems, we are able to include ethnicity fixed effects into a regression discontinuity approach. This allows us to control for a large set of cultural, geographical, and environmental factors that could be confounding the estimates. The results of this paper are consistent with gender inequality (the 'feminization' of AIDS), explaining much of its prevalence in sub-Saharan Africa. (JEL I12, J15, J16, K11, K15, O15, O17) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article profiles Susan C. Athey, recipient of the 2007 John Bates Clark medal. As an applied theorist Athey has made significant contributions to several areas of economic thought. Her 2002 paper in the "Quarterly Journal of Economics" added to the body of knowledge about monotone information models. A 2001 paper she co-wrote with Jonathan Levin identified private information in timber auctions. In 2004, along with Kyle Bagwell and Chris Sanchirico, she authored a paper that described optimal collusive equilibrium among firms that repeatedly interact.

This article seeks to explain the effects of credible disinflation using a simple continuous-time version of research frameworks introduced by economic scholars John Taylor and Olivier Blanchard. The results support the view that staggered adjustment is not an important impediment to disinflation. With full credibility, disinflation can occur quite quickly (although not instantly) without reducing output. Indeed, the model yields a stronger, more surprising result: a quick disinflation causes not a recession but a boom. Since this result is likely to appear counterintuitive, this paper tries to explain how one's intuition about disinflation can go wrong. The confusion about this issue arises largely from a misinterpretation of the original Taylor and Blanchard models. Taylor (1979, 1980) and Blanchard (1983, 1986) show that staggering produces inertia in the price level: prices adjust slowly to a fall in the money supply, and output falls substantially. Disinflation, however, is a change in the growth rate of money, not a one-time shock to the level. In informal discussions, analysts often assume that the inertia result carries over from levels to growth rates - that inflation adjusts slowly to a fall in money growth. In fact, changes in money and changes in money growth have very different effects. The paper contains four sections. Section I presents the basic model. Section II considers an example in which the level of money declines. Section III considers disinflation. Finally, Section IV presents the results, which concerns the specifications of price-setting.

This article highlights the written reports presented by Robert Clower, managing editor of the American Economic Review, at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association in December 1981. The year 1981 has seen some changes in editorial procedures. Outside editorial scanners are no longer used. Comments on already published papers are now sent to the original authors for their information and reaction before being submitted to independent review by members of the Board of Editors or other disinterested parties. Office processing controls have been designed to ensure that, except in most unusual circumstances, authors will have a final editorial decision within three months of the date their manuscript is received. The Review received 784 papers in 1981, 20 percent more than the average number processed during each of the preceding five years. The acceptance rate on manuscripts for which processing has been completed is well below the ratio of published-to-submitted papers. This does not reflect a permanent upward shift in acceptance standards; it is merely a consequence of current efforts to reduce the backlog of papers awaiting publication. The Board of Editors consists of 18 members, chosen by the managing editor, with the approval of the Executive Committee of the Association.

The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) conducts analyses on a large variety of economic issues, publishes books, working papers, and two periodicals, sponsors conferences and holds workshops and seminars as part of an annual summer institute. Approximately 280 economists at universilies across the U..S. contribute to NBER's working paper series, and many other economists, here and abroad, attend conferences and the summer institute. The NBER also sponsors large scale projects which bring together researchers from several of these programs. One major project centers on the role of Government Budget and the Private Economy. In addition, NBER is currently sponsoring several smaller projects. Jeffrey Sachs is directing a project on Developing Country Debt. Richard Freeman heads a study of International Migration. Alan Auerbach is leading an examination of Mergers and Acquisitions. Martin Feldstein is directing a study of the Effects of Taxation on Capital Formation. And David Wise heads a project on the Economics of Aging.

This article introduces a series of papers discussed at the 1982 annual meeting of the American Economic Association.

A preface for the May issue of the journal "American Economic Review" is presented.

Presents the schedule for the 83rd Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association at the Cobo Hall in Detroit, Michigan on December 27 to 30, 1970.

The article presents discussions by economists on some papers that are published in the May 1, 1970 issue of the journal "American Economic Review." The author states that the university is a part of the existing socioeconomic system with specific functions, among which that are mentioned by authors of papers published in the present issue of the journal, to socialize students as wage-workers is only one. Another is to inculcate into the student, a potential future leader, member of the intellectual elite, teacher of future students, precisely the point of view that underlies economics curriculum. Authors of those papers follow with iron logic that the university is not going to accept, let alone promote, an alternative curriculum, which begins by rejecting, or calling into question all basic institutions, relations and results of the existing system. It is true that under stress, such as that which developed on many campuses last year, powers-that-be will make concessions and often will promise more concessions. It is significant that economics department refused to recognize it and academic authorities denied permission for it to abandon the grading system, which authors criticized so effectively in their papers.

This article presents comments on papers by economists Frank de Leeuw and Hyman P. Minsky. De Leeuw's paper is a very impressive one. He not only displays a mastery of monetary theory and statistical technique but also shows considerable artistry in the construction of his model. He has managed to include in his model the main institutional features of the complex financial system of the U.S., while keeping the scale of his model down to manageable proportions. Anyone who has tried his hand at realistic financial analysis will realize that is in itself a considerable achievement. Minsky's paper is an equally interesting one, though entirely different both in style and content. He argues that the ratio of debt to income tends to rise progressively during a long period of prosperity interrupted only by minor recessions. The increase in debt ratios may operate as a drag on the rate of investment and slow down or bring to a halt the growth of demand. Of course, the system may simply move toward an equilibrium debt income ratio and continue to grow to scale. The effects of debt on the system are analogous to those of accumulating capital in simple capital-stock-adjustment models.

The article presents the author's comments on various papers on income distribution. It discusses various aspects of capital output and wage sharing as written in the research paper of economist Sidney Weintraub. The paper is said to have uncovered a constant through both the short and the long run. This has been accomplished by calculating the labor share of the gross business product rather than of national income or of private national income. However, this means that Weintraub has added to the normal recipients of national income-labor and capital-government as a recipient of indirect business taxes and capital consumption. These two new non-labor recipients grew relatively in the depression of the thirties, thus balancing the disappearance of profits and cutting down labor's normal rise in a deep recession. The article also discusses on the research paper given by economists Oswald Brownlee and Alfred Conrad. Their paper evaluates the distributive effects of inflation as compared to those of several policies alternative to inflation including a tight money policy, a policy of increased federal taxes, and a policy of decreased federal expenditures.

This article presents the author's views regarding the critique by professor Clarence L. Barber on his article "The Cyclical Turning Points in an Open Economy: Canada, 1927-1939." The author argues that much of the disagreement between him and Barber and arises from differing treatment of the basic statistics. Barber has worked from seasonally corrected data, whereas the author has preferred the original series. In addition, in some of his citations Barber seems to prefer annual averages, whereas the author has stressed the monthly details. Barber is also unconvinced that the declining prices in the pulp and paper industry could have been significant, particularly since the value of production and exports continued to increase. However, following the 1928 newsprint price war the Canadian index of the prices of securities of paper companies dropped from 160.0 to 97.1, while the entire index of Canadian stock prices rose from 177.0 to 227.3. The price drop put pressure on profit margins, and led to widespread bankruptcies in the industry after 1929.

The article presents a reply to a commentary about a 2012 paper by Maurizio Mazzocco and Shiv Saini, titled "Testing Efficient Risk Sharing With Heterogeneous Risk Preferences."

The article discusses the publication of papers presented at the annual meeting of the organization the American Economic Association (AEA) between January 3, 2014, and January 5, 2014, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the structure of the annual meeting, and the selection of papers for presentation. It recognizes several members of the AEA Program Committee including scholars Joseph Altonji, Alan Auerbach, and Nicholas Bloom.

This article presents information on the articles published in the May 1998 issue of the journal. This volume contains the papers and proceedings of the one hundred and tenth annual meeting of the American Economic Association. The Proceedings record the business activities of the Association in 1997, the annual membership meetings, and the March and January 1998 meetings of the Association's officers and committees.

After the Great Recession several central banks started setting negative nominal interest rates in an expansionary attempt, but the effectiveness of this measure remains unclear. Negative rates can stimulate the economy by lowering the rates that commercial banks charge on loans, but they can also erode bank profitability by squeezing deposit spreads. This paper studies the effects of negative rates in a new DSGE model where banks intermediate the transmission of monetary policy. I use bank-level data to calibrate the model and find that monetary policy in negative territory is between 60 and 90 percent as effective as in positive territory. (JEL E12, E32, E43, E52, E58, G21) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]