The Effect of Unemployment Benefits on the Duration of Unemployment Insurance Receipt: New Evidence from a Regression Kink Design in Missouri, 2003-2013

By David Card, Andrew Johnston, Pauline Leung, Alexandre Mas, and Zhuan Pei

American Economic Review, May 2015

We provide new evidence on the effect of the unemployment insurance (UI) weekly benefit amount on unemployment insurance spells based on administrative data from the state of Missouri covering the period 2003-2013. Identification comes from a regression k...

Credit Market Consequences of Improved Personal Identification: Field Experimental Evidence from Malawi

By Xavier Giné, Jessica Goldberg, and Dean Yang

American Economic Review, October 2012

We implemented a randomized field experiment in Malawi examining borrower responses to being fingerprinted when applying for loans. This intervention improved the lender's ability to implement dynamic repayment incentives, allowing it to withhold future l...

Cheap Talk

By Joseph Farrell and Matthew Rabin

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1996

Economists often ask how private information is shared through markets, costly signaling, and other mechanisms. Yet most information sharing is done through ordinary, informal talk. Economists are inconsistent in their view of such 'cheap talk': sometimes...

Education and Catch-Up in the Industrial Revolution

By Sascha O. Becker, Erik Hornung, and Ludger Woessmann

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2011

Research increasingly stresses the role of human capital in modern economic development. Existing historical evidence -- mostly from British textile industries -- however, rejects that formal education was important for the Industrial Revolution. Our new ...

Heterogeneity and Aggregation: Implications for Labor-Market Fluctuations

By Yongsung Chang and Sun-Bin Kim

American Economic Review, December 2007

We demonstrate that aggregate employment and consumption can increase without a corresponding movement in productivity in a model with heterogeneous agents where the only aggregate disturbance is a productivity shock. The interaction between incomplete ca...

The Market Impacts of Pharmaceutical Product Patents in Developing Countries: Evidence from India

By Mark Duggan, Craig Garthwaite, and Aparajita Goyal

American Economic Review, January 2016

In 2005, as the result of a World Trade Organization mandate, India implemented a patent reform for pharmaceuticals that was intended to comply with the 1995 Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). Exploiting variation in the timing...

Firm Heterogeneity and the Long-Run Effects of Dividend Tax Reform

By François Gourio and Jianjun Miao

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2010

To study the long-run effect of dividend taxation on aggregate capital accumulation, we build a dynamic general equilibrium model in which there is a continuum of firms subject to idiosyncratic productivity shocks. We find that a dividend tax cut raises...

The Effect of Newspaper Entry and Exit on Electoral Politics

By Matthew Gentzkow, Jesse M. Shapiro, and Michael Sinkinson

American Economic Review, December 2011

We use new data on entries and exits of US daily newspapers from 1869 to 2004 to estimate effects on political participation, party vote shares, and electoral competitiveness. Our identification strategy exploits the precise timing of these events and all...

Technological Diversification

By Miklós Koren and Silvana Tenreyro

American Economic Review, February 2013

Economies at early stages of development are frequently shaken by large changes in growth rates, whereas advanced economies tend to experience relatively stable growth rates. To explain this pattern, we propose a model of technological diversification....

Welfare and Trade without Pareto

By Keith Head, Thierry Mayer, and Mathias Thoenig

American Economic Review, May 2014

Quantifications of gains from trade in heterogeneous firm models assume that productivity is Pareto distributed. Replacing this assumption with log-normal heterogeneity retains some useful Pareto features, while providing a substantially better fit to sal...

Is the U.S. Labor Market Really That Exceptional? A Review of Richard Freeman

By Stephen Nickell

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2008

America Works is a splendid book and Richard Freeman is to be congratulated on producing a work that sets out what is right and what is wrong with the U.S. labor market while being a joy to read. While I am generally sympathetic to both the analysis an...

Anomalous Behavior in a Traveler's Dilemma?

By C. Monica Capra, Jacob K. Goeree, Rosario Gomez, and Charles A. Holt

American Economic Review, June 1999

Productivity and Postwar U.S. Economic Growth

[Symposium: The Slowdown in Productivity Growth]

By Dale W. Jorgenson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1988

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the sources of postwar U.S. economic growth. The findings presented here allocate more than three-fourths of U.S. economic growth during the period 1948-1979 to growth of capital and labor inputs and less than one-f...

Ideology as Opinion: A Spatial Model of Common-Value Elections

By Joseph McMurray

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2017

Spatial election literature attributes voters' political differences to irreconcilable conflicts of interest. Alternatively, voters may merely hold differing beliefs regarding which policies best promote the public interest, as in the classic common-value...

Technical Change, Inequality, and the Labor Market

By Daron Acemoglu

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2002

This essay discusses the effect of technical change on wage inequality. I argue that the behavior of wages and returns to schooling indicates that technical change has been skill-biased during the past sixty years. Furthermore, the recent increase in ineq...

Monetary, Credit and (Other) Transmission Processes: A Monetarist Perspective

[Symposium: The Monetary Transmission Mechanism]

By Allan H. Meltzer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1995

Monetarist analysis of the transmission process highlights the response of relative prices and real wealth to monetary (and other) impulses. Monetary impulses are neutral in the long run. Short-run nonneutrality reflects uncertainty, incomplete informatio...

The Value of Information in the Court: Get It Right, Keep It Tight

By Matias Iaryczower and Matthew Shum

American Economic Review, February 2012

We estimate an equilibrium model of decision making in the US Supreme Court that takes into account both private information and ideological differences between justices. We measure the value of information in the court by the probability that a justice ...

The Trouble with Stock Options

[Symposium: Stock Options]

By Brian J. Hall and Kevin J. Murphy

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2003

The benefits of stock options are often not large enough to offset the inefficiency implied by the large divergence between the cost of options to companies and the value of options to risk-averse, undiversified executives and employees. Moreover, the ben...

Resale Price Maintenance with Secret Contracts and Retail Service Externalities

By Tommy Staahl Gabrielsen and Bjørn Olav Johansen

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2017

We analyze a setting where a monopolist sells through retailers that set prices and provide valuable but non-contractible services to customers. We assume that contracts are private. We find that purely bilateral price restraints have no effect on the equ...

JEL Classification System

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2008