The following publications and working papers illustrate some of the recent research by our faculty.
Marianne Bitler: "Mothers as Insurance: Family Spillovers in WIC", Working Paper.
We find little impact on children when they age out of the WIC program at age five. But among adult women caloric intake falls and food insecurity increases, suggesting that mothers protect children by consuming less themselves.
Scott Carrell: "My professor cares: Experimental evidence on the role of faculty engagement," Accepted at Amercan Economic Journal: Economic Policy.
We present results from a small pilot in an introductory-level microeconomics course at a comprehensive research university, and the scale-up conducted in over 43 classrooms and nearly 4,000 students at a large broad-access university. The intervention consisted of several strategically-timed E-mails to students from the professor indicating keys to success in the class, the students’ current standing in the course, and a reminder of when the professor is available. Results from the pilot show that students in the treatment group scored higher on exams, homework assignments, and final course grade. Results from the scaled-up experiment are more mixed.
Oscar Jorda and Alan Taylor: "Loose monetary policy and financial instability, " Working Paper.
We find that when the stance of monetary policy is accommodative over an extended period, the likelihood of financial turmoil down the road increases considerably.
Diana Moreira; "Political Turnover, Bureaucratic Turnover, and the Quality of Public Services," Published in the American Economics Review.
Exploiting a regression discontinuity design for close elections in Brazil, we find that political turnover can adversely affect the quality of public services when the bureaucracy is not shielded from the political process.
Giovanni Peri: "Intergenerational spillover effects of language training for refugees," Published in the Journal of Public Economics.
We find that a reform in Denmark in 1999 that expanded language training for adult refugees and was shown to improve their earnings and job market outcomes permanently, also increased lower secondary school completion rates and decreased juvenile crime rates for their children.
Katherine Ericksson and Katheryn Russ, "Trade shocks and the shifting landscape of U.S. manufacturing," Published in the Journal of International Money and Finance.
Using data over more than a century, we show that shifts in the location of manufacturing industries are consistent with the belief that there are long-term, secular trends in U.S. industrial structure driving the movement of industries, which shocks may mitigate or accelerate.
Emile Marin : "Capital Controls and Free-Trade Agreements." Working paper.
How does the conduct of optimal cross-border financial policy change with prevailing trade agreements? Accounting for strategic retaliation, we show that committing to a free-trade agreement can reduce incentives to engage in costly capital-control wars for both countries.