Published in Annual Review of Economics
Recent supply disruptions catapulted the issue of risk in global supply chains (GSCs) to the top of policy agendas and created the impression that shortages would have been less severe if GSCs had been either shorter and more domestic or more diversified. But is this right? We start our answer by reviewing studies that look at risks to and from GSC...
This article reviews an emerging body of evidence on relational contracts, defined as informal arrangements sustained by the value of future interactions. We focus on developing and international markets, which are often characterized as contexts with weak formal contract enforcement. We introduce relational contracting between firms as a governanc...
Published in Annual Review of Economics
The adoption of barcode scanning technology in the 1970s gave rise to a new form of data: scanner data. Soon afterwards, researchers began using this new resource, and since then a large number of papers have exploited scanner data. The data provide detailed price, quantity, and product characteristic information for completely disaggregate product...
Published in Annual Review of Economics
The growth of the availability and use of detailed household financial transaction micro data has dramatically expanded the ability of researchers to understand both household decision making and aggregate economic fluctuations across a wide range of fields. This class of transaction data is derived from a myriad of sources, including financial ins...
Published in Annual Review of Economics
What model features and calibration strategies yield a large average marginal propensity to consume (MPC) in heterogeneous agent models? Through a systematic investigation of models with different preferences, dimensions of ex-ante heterogeneity, income processes, and asset structures, we show that the most important factor is the share and type of...
Deaths of despair, morbidity, and emotional distress continue to rise in the United States, largely borne by those without a college degree—the majority of American adults—for many of whom the economy and society are no longer delivering. Concurrently, all-cause mortality in the United States is diverging by education in a way not seen in other ric...
The adoption of health information and communication technology (HICT) has surged over the past two decades. We survey the medical and economic literature on HICT adoption and its impact on clinical outcomes, productivity, and the health care workforce. We find that HICT improves clinical outcomes and lowers health care costs; however, (a) the effe...
Published in Annual Review of Economics
In just a few years, central banks have rapidly ramped up their research and development efforts on central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). A growing body of economic research informs these activities, often focusing on the “reserves for all” aspect of CBDCs for retail use. However, CBDCs should be considered in the full context of the digital eco...
Published in Annual Review of Economics
Perceptions about others play an important role in shaping people's attitudes and behaviors, as well as social norms more broadly. This review presents a meta-analysis of the recent empirical literature that examines perceptions about others in the field, covering over a million observations for a total of 434 elicited perceptions. We document a nu...
Published in Annual Review of Economics
Over the past several decades, lab experiments have offered economists a rich source of evidence on incentivized behavior. In this article, we use detailed data on experimental papers to describe recent trends in the literature. We also discuss various experimentation platforms and new approaches to the design and analysis of the data they generate...
