Eight Questions about Corruption

[Symposium: Institutions]

By Jakob Svensson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2005

This paper will discuss eight frequently asked questions about public corruption: (1) What is corruption? (2) Which countries are the most corrupt? (3) What are the common characteristics of countries with high corruption? (4) What is the magnitude of cor...

International Business Cycles: World, Region, and Country-Specific Factors

By M. Ayhan Kose, Christopher Otrok, and Charles H. Whiteman

American Economic Review, September 2003

The paper investigates the common dynamic properties of business-cycle fluctuations across countries, regions, and the world. We employ a Bayesian dynamic latent factor model to estimate common components in macroeconomic aggregates (output, consumption, ...

Narrative Economics

By Robert J. Shiller

American Economic Review, April 2017

This address considers the epidemiology of narratives relevant to economic fluctuations. The human brain has always been highly tuned toward narratives, whether factual or not, to justify ongoing actions, even such basic actions as spending and investing....

Diamonds Are Forever, Wars Are Not: Is Conflict Bad for Private Firms?

By Massimo Guidolin and Eliana La Ferrara

American Economic Review, December 2007

This paper studies the relationship between civil war and the value of firms in a poor, resource-abundant country using microeconomic data for Angola. We focus on diamond mining firms and conduct an event study on the sudden end of the conflict, marked ...

The U.S. Demographic Transition

By Jeremy Greenwood and Ananth Seshadri

American Economic Review, May 2002

Price Regulation of Access to Telecommunications Networks

By Ingo Vogelsang

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2003

Without access of networks to each other, competition in the telecommunications sector would hardly have spread so quickly. Such mutual access is necessary for carriers to provide ubiquitous service and enable end-users to call and be called by anybody wi...

Reputation and School Competition

By W. Bentley MacLeod and Miguel Urquiola

American Economic Review, November 2015

Stratification is a distinctive feature of competitive education markets that can be explained by a preference for good peers. Learning externalities can lead students to care about the ability of their peers, resulting in across-school sorting by ability...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, December 2017

A Scapegoat Model of Exchange-Rate Fluctuations

By Philippe Bacchetta and Eric Van Wincoop

American Economic Review, May 2004

Is Ignorance Bliss? The Effect of Asymmetric Information between Spouses on Intra-household Allocations

By Carolina Castilla and Thomas Walker

American Economic Review, May 2013

We conducted a field experiment in Southern Ghana to test the effect of asymmetric information on intrahousehold allocation. A lottery was conducted, where prizes were distributed in public and in private. The results indicate that asymmetric information ...

Examining the Role of Social Isolation on Stated Preferences

By John A. List, Robert P. Berrens, Alok K. Bohara, and Joe Kerkvliet

American Economic Review, June 2004

Education for Growth: Why and for Whom?

By Alan B. Krueger and Mikael Lindahl

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2001

This paper summarizes and tries to reconcile evidence from the microeconometric and empirical macro growth literatures on the effect of schooling on income and GDP growth. Much microeconometric evidence suggests that education is an important causal deter...

Economic Status and Health in Childhood: The Origins of the Gradient

By Anne Case, Darren Lubotsky, and Christina Paxson

American Economic Review, December 2002

The well-known positive association between health and income in adulthood has antecedents in childhood. Not only is children's health positively related to household income, but the relationship between household income and children's health becomes more...

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: Cigarette Tax Salience and Regressivity

By Jacob Goldin and Tatiana Homonoff

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2013

Recent evidence suggests consumers pay less attention to commodity taxes levied at the register than to taxes included in a good's posted price. If this attention gap is larger for high-income consumers than for low-income consumers, policymakers can m...

Gambling at Lucky Stores: Empirical Evidence from State Lottery Sales

By Jonathan Guryan and Melissa S. Kearney

American Economic Review, March 2008

We show that the week after selling a large-prize Texas Lotto winning ticket, a retailer experiences a 12 to 38 percent relative increase in ticket sales. Some increase persists for up to 40 weeks. We document that the sales response increases with jackpo...

"Globalization" and Vertical Structure

By John McLaren

American Economic Review, December 2000

This paper analyzes the effects of international openness on vertical integration. Vertical integration can confer a negative externality, by thinning the market for inputs and thus worsening opportunism problems; this induces strategic complementarity an...

Independent Auditor's Report

American Economic Review, June 2016

Collateral Crises

By Gary Gorton and Guillermo Ordoñez

American Economic Review, February 2014

Short-term collateralized debt, private money, is efficient if agents are willing to lend without producing costly information about the collateral backing the debt. When the economy relies on such informationally insensitive debt, firms with low qualit...

Job-to-Job Flows and Earnings Growth

By Joyce K. Hahn, Henry R. Hyatt, Hubert P. Janicki, and Stephen R. Tibbets

American Economic Review, May 2017

The US workforce has had little change in real wages, income, or earnings since the year 2000. However, even when there is little change in the average rate at which workers are compensated, individual workers experienced a distribution of wage and earnin...

An Empirical Assessment of the Comparative Advantage Gains from Trade: Evidence from Japan

By Daniel M. Bernhofen and John C. Brown

American Economic Review, March 2005

We provide an empirical assessment of the comparative advantage gains from trade argument. We use Japan's nineteenth-century opening up to world commerce as a natural experiment to answer the following counterfactual: "By how much would real income have h...