Rejoinder to Abaluck and Gruber

Abstract

The purpose of this rejoinder is to clarify key areas of agreement and disagreement with Abaluck and Gruber and address aspects of their reply to our comment, both of which appear in the December 2016 issue of the American Economic Review. Readers of our exchange may wonder how we can reach such divergent conclusions from analyzing the same data. In this rejoinder we show how. We demonstrate that Abaluck and Gruber’s criticism of our analysis is based on their mistaken claims about theory and empirics, their omission of key facts, and their emphasis on results that obscure our many areas of agreement.

JEL Classification: C52, D12, I13, I18, J14