A Gender Agenda: A Progress Report on Competitiveness

By Muriel Niederle

American Economic Review, May 2017

I review the role of a new behavioral trait, competitiveness, on the gender agenda. I first describe how to measure competitiveness in the laboratory and show that gender differences in competitiveness are robust. I then establish the external economic re...

Optimal Search Profiling with Linear Deterrence

By Charles F. Manski

American Economic Review, May 2005

Did Household Consumption Become More Volatile?

By Olga Gorbachev

American Economic Review, August 2011

I show that after accounting for predictable variation arising from movements in real interest rates, preferences and income shocks, liquidity constraints and measurement errors, volatility of household consumption in the US increased by 25 percent betwee...

Declining Discount Rates

By Maureen L. Cropper, Mark C. Freeman, Ben Groom, and William A. Pizer

American Economic Review, May 2014

We ask whether the US government should replace its current discounting practices with a declining discount rate schedule, as the United Kingdom and France have done, or continue to discount the future at a constant exponential rate. We present the theore...

Celebrating Ned

By Axel Leijonhufvud

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2004

Review Essay on British Economic Growth, 1270-1870 by Stephen Broadberry, Bruce M. S. Campbell, Alexander Klein, Mark Overton, and Bas van Leeuwen

By Jeffrey G. Williamson

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2016

British Economic Growth, 1270-1870 makes a big leap forward in our understanding of the long-run performance of what became the leading nineteenth-century economy and the workshop of the world. It does so by implementing a giant quantitative ente...

The Use of Structural Models in Econometrics

[Symposium: Recent Ideas in Econometrics]

By Hamish Low and Costas Meghir

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2017

This paper discusses the role of structural economic models in empirical analysis and policy design. The central payoff of a structural econometric model is that it allows an empirical researcher to go beyond the conclusions of a more conventional empiric...

Prediction Policy Problems

By Jon Kleinberg, Jens Ludwig, Sendhil Mullainathan, and Ziad Obermeyer

American Economic Review, May 2015

Most empirical policy work focuses on causal inference. We argue an important class of policy problems does not require causal inference but instead requires predictive inference. Solving these "prediction policy problems" requires more than simple regres...

When the Levee Breaks: Black Migration and Economic Development in the American South

By Richard Hornbeck and Suresh Naidu

American Economic Review, March 2014

In the American South, post-bellum economic development may have been restricted in part by white landowners' access to low-wage black labor. This paper examines the impact of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 on black out-migration and subsequent agr...

Estimating the Value of Political Connections

By Raymond Fisman

American Economic Review, September 2001

Dynamics and Stagnation in the Malthusian Epoch

By Quamrul Ashraf and Oded Galor

American Economic Review, August 2011

This paper examines the central hypothesis of the influential Malthusian theory, according to which improvements in the technological environment during the preindustrial era had generated only temporary gains in income per capita, eventually leading to a...

Wage Inequality and Firm Growth

By Holger M. Mueller, Paige P. Ouimet, and Elena Simintzi

American Economic Review, May 2017

We discuss firm-level evidence based on UK data showing that within-firm pay inequality--wage differentials between top- and bottom-level jobs--increases with firm size. Moreover, within-firm pay inequality rises as firms grow larger over time. Lastly, us...

Inherited Control and Firm Performance

By Francisco Pérez-González

American Economic Review, December 2006

I use data from chief executive officer (CEO) successions to examine the impact of inherited control on firms’ performance. I find that firms where incoming CEOs are related to the departing CEO, to a founder, or to a large shareholder by either blood ...

Confidence-Enhanced Performance

By Olivier Compte and Andrew Postlewaite

American Economic Review, December 2004

There is ample evidence that emotions affect performance. Positive emotions can improve performance, while negative ones can diminish it. For example, the fears induced by the possibility of failure or of negative evaluations have physiological consequenc...

Real-Time Search in the Laboratory and the Market

By Meta Brown, Christopher J. Flinn, and Andrew Schotter

American Economic Review, April 2011

While widely accepted labor market search models imply a constant reservation wage policy, empirical evidence strongly suggests that reservation wages decline in search duration. This paper reports the results of the first real-time-search laboratory expe...

Balanced Skills and Entrepreneurship

By Edward P. Lazear

American Economic Review, May 2004

State-Owned and Privately Owned Firms: An Empirical Analysis of Profitability, Leverage, and Labor Intensity

By Kathryn L. DeWenter and Paul H. Malatesta

American Economic Review, March 2001

The Rise of Europe: Atlantic Trade, Institutional Change, and Economic Growth

By Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson

American Economic Review, June 2005

The rise of Western Europe after 1500 is due largely to growth in countries with access to the Atlantic Ocean and with substantial trade with the New World, Africa, and Asia via the Atlantic. This trade and the associated colonialism affected Europe not o...

Why Do Firms in Developing Countries Have Low Productivity?

By Nicholas Bloom, Aprajit Mahajan, David McKenzie, and John Roberts

American Economic Review, May 2010

Auctions with Resale Markets: An Application to U.S. Forest Service Timber Sales

By Philip A. Haile

American Economic Review, June 2001

When bidders anticipate an opportunity for resale trade, the value of winning an auction is determined in part by the option values of buying and selling in the secondary market. One implication is that a bidder's willingness to pay at an auction increase...