cometadata/datacite-titles-descriptions-related-identifiers huggingface dataset:
DOI: 10.3886/e113429v1
title: Replication data for: Disruptive Change in the Taxi Business: The Case of Uber

description: In most cities, the taxi industry is highly regulated and has restricted entry. Ride sharing services, such as Uber and Lyft, which use mobile internet technology to connect passengers and drivers, have begun to compete with traditional taxis. This paper examines the efficiency of ride sharing services vis-a-vis taxis. In most cities with data available, UberX drivers spend a significantly higher fraction of their time, and drive a substantially higher share of miles, with a passenger in their car than do taxi drivers. Reasons for this efficiency advantage are explored.
DOI: 10.3886/e113430
title: Replication data for: Monetary Policy, Financial Stability, and the Zero Lower Bound

description: Much has happened in the world of central banking in the past decade. In this paper, I focus on three issues associated with the zero lower bound (ZLB) on short-term nominal interest rates and the nexus between monetary policy and financial stability: 1) whether we are moving toward a permanently lower long-run equilibrium real interest rate; 2) what steps can be taken to mitigate the constraints imposed by the ZLB; and 3) whether and how financial stability considerations should be incorporated in the conduct of monetary policy. These important topics deserve the attention of both academic and government professionals.
DOI: 10.3886/e113430v1
title: Replication data for: Monetary Policy, Financial Stability, and the Zero Lower Bound

description: Much has happened in the world of central banking in the past decade. In this paper, I focus on three issues associated with the zero lower bound (ZLB) on short-term nominal interest rates and the nexus between monetary policy and financial stability: 1) whether we are moving toward a permanently lower long-run equilibrium real interest rate; 2) what steps can be taken to mitigate the constraints imposed by the ZLB; and 3) whether and how financial stability considerations should be incorporated in the conduct of monetary policy. These important topics deserve the attention of both academic and government professionals.
DOI: 10.3886/e113431
title: Replication data for: How to Restore Equitable and Sustainable Economic Growth in the United States

description: Today's weakness in the US economy results from lack of aggregate demand, due to high and growing inequality, underinvestment in public infrastructure and technology that is complementary to private capital, continuing mild austerity, difficulties encountered in making the structural transformation from manufacturing to a service-based economy, and a financial sector failing to provide adequate funds to SMEs. An agenda to restore growth includes a carbon price, inducing climate investments; increased public investments in infrastructure and technology; fighting inequality through redistribution and rewriting the rules structuring the economy; and reforming the financial sector and the global reserve system.
DOI: 10.3886/e113431v1
title: Replication data for: How to Restore Equitable and Sustainable Economic Growth in the United States

description: Today's weakness in the US economy results from lack of aggregate demand, due to high and growing inequality, underinvestment in public infrastructure and technology that is complementary to private capital, continuing mild austerity, difficulties encountered in making the structural transformation from manufacturing to a service-based economy, and a financial sector failing to provide adequate funds to SMEs. An agenda to restore growth includes a carbon price, inducing climate investments; increased public investments in infrastructure and technology; fighting inequality through redistribution and rewriting the rules structuring the economy; and reforming the financial sector and the global reserve system.
DOI: 10.3886/e113690
title: Replication data for: The Family Peer Effect on Mothers' Labor Supply

description: The historical rise in female labor force participation has flattened in recent decades, but the proportion of mothers working full-time has increased. We provide the first empirical evidence that the increase in mothers' working hours is amplified through the influence of family peers. For identification, we exploit partially overlapping peer groups. Using Norwegian administrative data, we find positive and statistically significant family peer effects but only on the intensive margin of women's labor supply. These are in part driven by concerns about time allocation from early childhood and concerns about earnings from age five.
DOI: 10.3886/e113691
title: Replication data for: Racial Discrimination in the Sharing Economy: Evidence from a Field Experiment

description: In an experiment on Airbnb, we find that applications from guests with distinctively African American names are 16 percent less likely to be accepted relative to identical guests with distinctively white names. Discrimination occurs among landlords of all sizes, including small landlords sharing the property and larger landlords with multiple properties. It is most pronounced among hosts who have never had an African American guest, suggesting only a subset of hosts discriminate. While rental markets have achieved significant reductions in discrimination in recent decades, our results suggest that Airbnb's current design choices facilitate discrimination and raise the possibility of erasing some of these civil rights gains.
DOI: 10.3886/e113691v1
title: Replication data for: Racial Discrimination in the Sharing Economy: Evidence from a Field Experiment

description: In an experiment on Airbnb, we find that applications from guests with distinctively African American names are 16 percent less likely to be accepted relative to identical guests with distinctively white names. Discrimination occurs among landlords of all sizes, including small landlords sharing the property and larger landlords with multiple properties. It is most pronounced among hosts who have never had an African American guest, suggesting only a subset of hosts discriminate. While rental markets have achieved significant reductions in discrimination in recent decades, our results suggest that Airbnb's current design choices facilitate discrimination and raise the possibility of erasing some of these civil rights gains.
DOI: 10.3886/e113692
title: Replication data for: Conflicts of Interest and Steering in Residential Brokerage

description: This paper documents uniformity in real estate commission rates offered to buyers' agents using 653,475 residential listings in eastern Massachusetts from 1998–2011. Properties listed with lower commission rates experience less favorable transaction outcomes: they are 5 percent less likely to sell and take 12 percent longer to sell. These adverse outcomes reflect decreased willingness of buyers' agents to intermediate low commission properties (steering), rather than heterogeneous seller preferences or reduced effort of listing agents. Offices with large market shares purchase a disproportionately small fraction of low commission properties. The negative outcomes for low commissions provide empirical support for regulatory concerns over steering.
DOI: 10.3886/e113692v1
title: Replication data for: Conflicts of Interest and Steering in Residential Brokerage

description: This paper documents uniformity in real estate commission rates offered to buyers' agents using 653,475 residential listings in eastern Massachusetts from 1998–2011. Properties listed with lower commission rates experience less favorable transaction outcomes: they are 5 percent less likely to sell and take 12 percent longer to sell. These adverse outcomes reflect decreased willingness of buyers' agents to intermediate low commission properties (steering), rather than heterogeneous seller preferences or reduced effort of listing agents. Offices with large market shares purchase a disproportionately small fraction of low commission properties. The negative outcomes for low commissions provide empirical support for regulatory concerns over steering.
DOI: 10.3886/e113693
title: Replication data for: Conflict and the Persistence of Ethnic Bias

description: How persistent are the effects of conflict on bias toward co-ethnics? What are the channels of persistence? We employ a measure of ethnic bias derived from decisions made by Israeli Arab and Jewish judges to study the levels and determinants of bias during the 2000-2004 conflict and its aftermath (2007-2010). Despite the fall in violence, we find no evidence of a general attenuation in bias. Furthermore, bias remains positively associated with past intensity of violence in different localities. This persistence does not appear to be due to judges' personal exposure to violence but rather to different dynamics in afflicted areas.
DOI: 10.3886/e113693v1
title: Replication data for: Conflict and the Persistence of Ethnic Bias

description: How persistent are the effects of conflict on bias toward co-ethnics? What are the channels of persistence? We employ a measure of ethnic bias derived from decisions made by Israeli Arab and Jewish judges to study the levels and determinants of bias during the 2000-2004 conflict and its aftermath (2007-2010). Despite the fall in violence, we find no evidence of a general attenuation in bias. Furthermore, bias remains positively associated with past intensity of violence in different localities. This persistence does not appear to be due to judges' personal exposure to violence but rather to different dynamics in afflicted areas.
DOI: 10.3886/e113694v1
title: Replication data for: Diabetes and Diet: Purchasing Behavior Change in Response to Health Information

description: Individuals with obesity and related conditions are often reluctant to change their diet. Evaluating the details of this reluctance is hampered by limited data. I use household scanner data to estimate food purchase response to a diagnosis of diabetes. I use a machine learning approach to infer diagnosis from purchases of diabetes-related products. On average, households show significant, but relatively small, calorie reductions. These reductions are concentrated in unhealthy foods, suggesting they reflect real efforts to improve diet. There is some heterogeneity in calorie changes across households, although this heterogeneity is not well predicted by demographics or baseline diet, despite large correlations between these factors and diagnosis. I suggest a theory of behavior change which may explain the limited overall change and the fact that heterogeneity is not predictable.
DOI: 10.3886/e113964
title: Replication data for: Forty Years of Oil Price Fluctuations: Why the Price of Oil May Still Surprise Us

description: It has been 40 years since the oil crisis of 1973/74. This crisis has been one of the defining economic events of the 1970s and has shaped how many economists think about oil price shocks. In recent years, a large literature on the economic determinants of oil price fluctuations has emerged. Drawing on this literature, we first provide an overview of the causes of all major oil price fluctuations between 1973 and 2014. We then discuss why oil price fluctuations remain difficult to predict, despite economists' improved understanding of oil markets. Unexpected oil price fluctuations are commonly referred to as oil price shocks. We document that, in practice, consumers, policymakers, financial market participants, and economists may have different oil price expectations, and that, what may be surprising to some, need not be equally surprising to others.
DOI: 10.3886/e113965
title: Replication data for: Using Natural Resources for Development: Why Has It Proven So Difficult?

description: Developing economies have found it hard to use natural resource wealth to improve their economic performance. Utilizing resource endowments is a multistage economic and political problem that requires private investment to discover and extract the resource, fiscal regimes to capture revenue, judicious spending and investment decisions, and policies to manage volatility and mitigate adverse impacts on the rest of the economy. Experience is mixed, with some successes (such as Botswana and Malaysia) and more failures. This paper reviews the challenges that are faced in successfully managing resource wealth, the evidence on country performance, and the reasons for disappointing results.
DOI: 10.3886/e113966
title: Replication data for: Power Laws in Economics: An Introduction

description: Many of the insights of economics seem to be qualitative, with many fewer reliable quantitative laws. However a series of power laws in economics do count as true and nontrivial quantitative laws—and they are not only established empirically, but also understood theoretically. I will start by providing several illustrations of empirical power laws having to do with patterns involving cities, firms, and the stock market. I summarize some of the theoretical explanations that have been proposed. I suggest that power laws help us explain many economic phenomena, including aggregate economic fluctuations. I hope to clarify why power laws are so special, and to demonstrate their utility. In conclusion, I list some power-law-related economic enigmas that demand further exploration.
DOI: 10.3886/e113966v1
title: Replication data for: Power Laws in Economics: An Introduction

description: Many of the insights of economics seem to be qualitative, with many fewer reliable quantitative laws. However a series of power laws in economics do count as true and nontrivial quantitative laws—and they are not only established empirically, but also understood theoretically. I will start by providing several illustrations of empirical power laws having to do with patterns involving cities, firms, and the stock market. I summarize some of the theoretical explanations that have been proposed. I suggest that power laws help us explain many economic phenomena, including aggregate economic fluctuations. I hope to clarify why power laws are so special, and to demonstrate their utility. In conclusion, I list some power-law-related economic enigmas that demand further exploration.
DOI: 10.3886/e113967
title: Replication data for: Crime, the Criminal Justice System, and Socioeconomic Inequality

description: Crime rates in the United States have declined to historical lows since the early 1990s. Prison and jail incarceration rates as well as community correctional populations have increased greatly since the mid-1970s. Both of these developments have disproportionately impacted poor and minority communities. In this paper, we document these trends. We then assess whether the crime declines can be attributed to the massive expansion of the US criminal justice system. We argue that the crime rate is certainly lower as a result of this expansion and in the early 1990s was likely a third lower than what it would have been absent changes in sentencing practices in the 1980s. However, there is little evidence that further stiffening of sentences during the 1990s—a period when prison and other correctional populations expanded rapidly—have had an impact. Hence, the growth in criminal justice populations since 1990s has exacerbated socioeconomic inequality in the United States without generating much benefit in terms of lower crime rates.
DOI: 10.3886/e113967v1
title: Replication data for: Crime, the Criminal Justice System, and Socioeconomic Inequality

description: Crime rates in the United States have declined to historical lows since the early 1990s. Prison and jail incarceration rates as well as community correctional populations have increased greatly since the mid-1970s. Both of these developments have disproportionately impacted poor and minority communities. In this paper, we document these trends. We then assess whether the crime declines can be attributed to the massive expansion of the US criminal justice system. We argue that the crime rate is certainly lower as a result of this expansion and in the early 1990s was likely a third lower than what it would have been absent changes in sentencing practices in the 1980s. However, there is little evidence that further stiffening of sentences during the 1990s—a period when prison and other correctional populations expanded rapidly—have had an impact. Hence, the growth in criminal justice populations since 1990s has exacerbated socioeconomic inequality in the United States without generating much benefit in terms of lower crime rates.
DOI: 10.3886/e113968
title: Replication data for: The Billion Prices Project: Using Online Prices for Measurement and Research

description: A large and growing share of retail prices all over the world are posted online on the websites of retailers. This is a massive and (until recently) untapped source of retail price information. Our objective with the Billion Prices Project, created at MIT in 2008, is to experiment with these new sources of information to improve the computation of traditional economic indicators, starting with the Consumer Price Index. We also seek to understand whether online prices have distinct dynamics, their advantages and disadvantages, and whether they can serve as reliable source of information for economic research. The word "billion" in Billion Prices Project was simply meant to express our desire to collect a massive amount of prices, though we in fact reached that number of observations in less than two years. By 2010, we were collecting 5 million prices every day from over 300 retailers in 50 countries. We describe the methodology used to compute online price indexes and show how they co-move with consumer price indexes in most countries. We also use our price data to study price stickiness, and to investigate the "law of one price" in international economics. Finally we describe how the Billion Prices Project data are publicly shared and discuss why data collection is an important endeavor that macro- and international economists should pursue more often.
DOI: 10.3886/e113968v1
title: Replication data for: The Billion Prices Project: Using Online Prices for Measurement and Research

description: A large and growing share of retail prices all over the world are posted online on the websites of retailers. This is a massive and (until recently) untapped source of retail price information. Our objective with the Billion Prices Project, created at MIT in 2008, is to experiment with these new sources of information to improve the computation of traditional economic indicators, starting with the Consumer Price Index. We also seek to understand whether online prices have distinct dynamics, their advantages and disadvantages, and whether they can serve as reliable source of information for economic research. The word "billion" in Billion Prices Project was simply meant to express our desire to collect a massive amount of prices, though we in fact reached that number of observations in less than two years. By 2010, we were collecting 5 million prices every day from over 300 retailers in 50 countries. We describe the methodology used to compute online price indexes and show how they co-move with consumer price indexes in most countries. We also use our price data to study price stickiness, and to investigate the "law of one price" in international economics. Finally we describe how the Billion Prices Project data are publicly shared and discuss why data collection is an important endeavor that macro- and international economists should pursue more often.
DOI: 10.3886/e114109
title: Replication data for: Pushing on a String: US Monetary Policy Is Less Powerful in Recessions

description: We investigate how the response of the US economy to monetary policy shocks depends on the state of the business cycle. The effects of monetary policy are less powerful in recessions, especially for durables expenditure and business investment. The asymmetry relates to how fast the economy is growing, rather than to the level of resource utilization. There is some evidence that fiscal policy has counteracted monetary policy in recessions but reinforced it in booms. We also find evidence that contractionary policy shocks are more powerful than expansionary shocks, but contractionary shocks have not been more common in booms. So this asymmetry cannot explain our main finding.
DOI: 10.3886/e114110v1
title: Replication data for: How Credible Is the Federal Reserve? A Structural Estimation of Policy Re-optimizations

description: The paper proposes a new measure of the degree of credibility of the Federal Reserve. We estimate a medium-scale macroeconomic model, where the central bank has access to a commitment technology, but where a regime-switching process governs occasional re-optimizations of announced plans. The framework nests the commonly used discretion and commitment cases, while allowing for a continuum of intermediate cases. Our estimates reject both full-commitment and discretion. We instead identify occasional re-optimization episodes both before and during the Great Moderation period. Finally, through counterfactual analyses we assess the role of credibility over the past four decades.
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3483824
title: Supplementary Data 3

description: Supplementary Data 3
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3483825
title: Supplementary Data 3

description: Supplementary Data 3
DOI: 10.3886/e113432
title: Replication data for: Can We Restart the Recovery All Over Again?

description: Many have argued that a deviation from good economic policy has been a cause of the poor U.S. economic performance of the past decade and that policy reforms are needed to restore strong growth. Yet others argue that the recent stagnation is secular or that the possibility of a rapid recovery is long gone without more fiscal stimulus. Here I show that unusual economic conditions leave plenty of room for a reform-induced rebound. Taking demographics and the growth of capital services into account, labor force participation and productivity growth are unusually low. Hence, policy reforms could generate a post-recession-like acceleration as well as sustained growth and stability.
DOI: 10.3886/e113432v1
title: Replication data for: Can We Restart the Recovery All Over Again?

description: Many have argued that a deviation from good economic policy has been a cause of the poor U.S. economic performance of the past decade and that policy reforms are needed to restore strong growth. Yet others argue that the recent stagnation is secular or that the possibility of a rapid recovery is long gone without more fiscal stimulus. Here I show that unusual economic conditions leave plenty of room for a reform-induced rebound. Taking demographics and the growth of capital services into account, labor force participation and productivity growth are unusually low. Hence, policy reforms could generate a post-recession-like acceleration as well as sustained growth and stability.
DOI: 10.3886/e113433
title: Replication data for: Experimental Age Discrimination Evidence and the Heckman Critique

description: We design and implement a large-scale field experiment on age discrimination to address limitations of past research that may bias their results. One limitation is the practice of giving older and younger applicants similar experience in the job to which they are applying, to make them "otherwise comparable." The second limitation is ignoring the likelihood of greater variation in unobserved differences among older workers owing to human capital investment. Based on evidence from over 40,000 job applications, we find robust evidence of age discrimination in hiring against older women, but considerably less evidence of age discrimination against older men.