What Can Economists Learn from Happiness Research?

By Bruno S. Frey and Alois Stutzer

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2002

In recent years, there has been a steadily increasing interest on the part of economists in happiness research. We argue that reported subjective well-being is a satisfactory empirical approximation to individual utility and that happiness research is abl...

Policy Watch: U.S. Disability Policy in a Changing Environment

By Richard V. Burkhauser and Mary C. Daly

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2002

In this paper we provide a context for evaluating the goals and effectiveness of current disability policy. We review the Social Security Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income programs and examine trends in disability benefit receipt and e...

The Impact of Pollution on Worker Productivity

By Joshua Graff Zivin and Matthew Neidell

American Economic Review, December 2012

This paper assesses the impact of pollution on worker productivity by relating exogenous daily variations in ozone with productivity of agricultural workers as recorded under piece rate contracts. We find robust evidence that ozone levels well below feder...

On the Size of U.S. Government: Political Economy in the Neoclassical Growth Model

By Per Krusell and Jose-Victor Rios-Rull

American Economic Review, December 1999

We study a dynamic version of Meltzer and Richard's median-voter model of the size of government. Taxes are proportional to total income, and they are redistributed as equal lump-sum transfers. Voting takes place periodically over time, and each consumer ...

Consumer Response to Tax Rebates

By Matthew D. Shapiro and Joel Slemrod

American Economic Review, March 2003

US Trade and Inventory Dynamics

By George Alessandria, Joseph P. Kaboski, and Virgiliu Midrigan

American Economic Review, May 2011

We examine the source of the large fall and rebound in US trade in the recent recession. While trade fell and rebounded more than expenditures or production of traded goods, we find that relative to the magnitude of the downturn, these trade fluctuations ...

Health and Wealth among the Poor: India and South Africa Compared

By Anne Case and Angus Deaton

American Economic Review, May 2005

Riding the South Sea Bubble

By Peter Temin and Hans-Joachim Voth

American Economic Review, December 2004

This paper presents a case study of a well-informed investor in the South Sea bubble. We argue that Hoare's Bank, a fledgling West End London bank, knew that a bubble was in progress and nonetheless invested in the stock: it was profitable to "ride the bu...

Fiscal Policy, Profits, and Investment

By Alberto Alesina, Silvia Ardagna, Roberto Perotti, and Fabio Schiantarelli

American Economic Review, June 2002

This paper evaluates the effects of fiscal policy on investment using a panel of OECD countries. We find a sizeable negative effect of public spending—and in particular of its wage component—on profits and on business investment. This result is consis...

Facts and Challenges from the Great Recession for Forecasting and Macroeconomic Modeling

By Serena Ng and Jonathan H. Wright

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2013

This paper provides a survey of business cycle facts, updated to take account of recent data. Emphasis is given to the Great Recession, which was unlike most other postwar recessions in the United States in being driven by deleveraging and financial mar...

International Institutions for Reducing Global Financial Instability

[Symposium: Global Financial Instability]

By Kenneth Rogoff

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1999

This paper asks how recent developments in research on banking and sovereign lending can help inform the debate on choosing a new international financial architecture. A broad range of plans is considered, including a global lender of last resort facility...

Efficient Pollution Regulation: Getting the Prices Right: Reply

By Nicholas Z. Muller and Robert Mendelsohn

American Economic Review, February 2012

Fraas and Lutter raise two important points in their comment on Muller and Mendelsohn (2009): How to design policies for sources that yield negative marginal damages? How does statistical uncertainty in the marginal damages affect the trading ratios acros...

The Price of Political Opposition: Evidence from Venezuela's Maisanta

By Chang-Tai Hsieh, Edward Miguel, Daniel Ortega, and Francisco Rodriguez

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2011

In 2004, the Hugo Chávez regime in Venezuela distributed the list of several million voters who had attempted to remove him from office throughout the government bureaucracy, allegedly to identify and punish these voters. We match the list of pet...

Shopping While Female: Who Pays Higher Prices and Why?

By Anne Fitzpatrick

American Economic Review, May 2017

I estimate gender price discrimination in the Ugandan antimalarial drug market with an audit study. To determine whether results are consistent with statistical or taste-based discrimination, I contrast gender results with results by ethnicity (tribe). Ve...

Search, Liquidity, and the Dynamics of House Prices and Construction

By Allen Head, Huw Lloyd-Ellis, and Hongfei Sun

American Economic Review, April 2014

The dynamics of house prices, sales, construction, and population growth in response to city-specific income shocks are characterized for 106 US cities. A dynamic model of search in the housing market in which construction, the entry of buyers, house p...

The Growth of Low-Skill Service Jobs and the Polarization of the US Labor Market

By David H. Autor and David Dorn

American Economic Review, August 2013

We offer a unified analysis of the growth of low-skill service occupations between 1980 and 2005 and the concurrent polarization of US employment and wages. We hypothesize that polarization stems from the interaction between consumer preferences, which...

Two Perspectives on Preferences and Structural Transformation

By Berthold Herrendorf, Richard Rogerson, and Ákos Valentinyi

American Economic Review, December 2013

We assess the empirical importance of changes in income and relative prices for structural transformation in the postwar United States. We explain two natural approaches to the data: sectors may be categories of final expenditure or value added; e.g., ...

Ambiguity Aversion with Three or More Outcomes

By Mark J. Machina

American Economic Review, December 2014

Ambiguous choice problems which involve three or more outcome values can reveal aspects of ambiguity and ambiguity aversion which cannot be displayed in the classic two-outcome Ellsberg urn problems, and hence are not always captured by models designed...

Think Locally, Act Locally: Spillovers, Spillbacks, and Efficient Decentralized Policymaking

By Hikaru Ogawa and David E. Wildasin

American Economic Review, September 2009

We analyze models with interjurisdictional spillovers among heterogeneous jurisdictions, such as CO2 emissions that affect the global environment. Each jurisdiction's emissions depend upon the local stock of capital, which is interjurisdictionally mobi...

Storable Good Monopoly: The Role of Commitment

By Paolo Dudine, Igal Hendel, and Alessandro Lizzeri

American Economic Review, December 2006

We study dynamic monopoly pricing of storable goods in an environment where demand changes over time. The literature on durables has focused on incentives to delay purchases. Our analysis focuses on a different intertemporal demand incentive. The key f...