Ordering the Extraction of Polluting Nonrenewable Resources

By Ujjayant Chakravorty, Michel Moreaux, and Mabel Tidball

American Economic Review, June 2008

A well-known theorem by Herfindahl states that the low-cost nonrenewable resource must be exploited first. Consider resources that are differentiated only by their pollution content. For instance, both coal and natural gas are used to generate electricity...

Changing Labor-Market Opportunities for Women and the Quality of Teachers, 1957-2000

By Sean P. Corcoran, William N. Evans, and Robert M. Schwab

American Economic Review, May 2004

Reconciling Conflicting Evidence on the Performance of Propensity-Score Matching Methods

By Jeffrey A. Smith and Petra E. Todd

American Economic Review, May 2001

Bankruptcy Reform and Credit Cards

By Michelle J. White

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2007

From 1980 to 2004, the number of personal bankruptcy filings in the United States increased more than five-fold, from 288,000 to 1.5 million per year. By 2004, more Americans were filing for bankruptcy each year than were graduating from college, getting ...

Emmanuel Saez: 2009 John Bates Clark Medalist

By B. Douglas Bernheim

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2010

Emmanuel Saez, winner of the 2009 John Bates Clark Medal, has distinguished himself by making fundamental contributions concerning critical theoretical and empirical issues within the field of public economics. He is one of those exceptional scholars whos...

Vickrey Auctions in Practice: From Nineteenth-Century Philately to Twenty-First-Century E-Commerce

By David Lucking-Reiley

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2000

William Vickrey (1961) proposed an auction mechanism in which bidders submit sealed bids, and the highest bidder wins the good in return for payment of the second-highest bid amount. For decades, economists have credited Vickrey with inventing this auctio...

When Do Research Consortia Work Well and Why? Evidence from Japanese Panel Data

By Lee G. Branstetter and Mariko Sakakibara

American Economic Review, March 2002

We examine the impact of a large number of Japanese government-sponsored research consortia on the research productivity of participating firms by measuring their patenting in the targeted technologies before, during, and after participation. Consistent w...

A Contribution to the Empirics of Reservation Wages

By Alan B. Krueger and Andreas I. Mueller

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2016

This paper provides evidence on the behavior of reservation wages over the spell of unemployment, using high-frequency longitudinal data on unemployed workers in New Jersey. In comparison to a calibrated job search model, the reservation wage starts out t...

Longer-Term Impacts of Mentoring, Educational Services, and Learning Incentives: Evidence from a Randomized Trial in the United States

By Núria Rodríguez-Planas

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2012

This paper reports on a randomized evaluation of a program designed to improve high school graduation and postsecondary education enrollment among low-performing high school students. Treated youths were offered mentoring, educational services, and financ...

How Do 401(k)s Affect Saving? Evidence from Changes in 401(k) Eligibility

By Alexander M. Gelber

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2011

This paper investigates the effect of 401(k) eligibility on saving. To address the possibility that eligibility correlates across individuals with their unobserved tastes for saving, I examine a change in eligibility: some individuals are initially inelig...

The Great Recession: A Self-Fulfilling Global Panic

By Philippe Bacchetta and Eric van Wincoop

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2016

While the 2008-2009 financial crisis originated in the United States, output, consumption, and investment declined by similar magnitudes around the globe. Given the partial integration of both goods and financial markets, what can account for the remarkab...

State Gun Policy and Cross-State Externalities: Evidence from Crime Gun Tracing

By Brian Knight

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2013

This paper provides a theoretical and empirical analysis of crossstate externalities associated with gun regulations that impact gun trafficking. Using tracing data, which identify the source state for crime guns recovered in destination states, we fin...

Interpreting the Great Moderation: Changes in the Volatility of Economic Activity at the Macro and Micro Levels

By Steven J. Davis and James A. Kahn

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2008

Most advanced economies have experienced a striking decline in the volatility of aggregate economic activity since the early 1980s. Volatility reductions are evident for output and employment at the aggregate level and across most industrial sectors and e...

The Scale and Selectivity of Foreign-Born PhD Recipients in the US

By Jeffrey Grogger and Gordon Hanson

American Economic Review, May 2013

We study the scale and selectivity of foreign-born PhD students in science and engineering. We focus on students from China, India, Korea, and Taiwan, which together account for most roughly one-third of science and engineering PhD students in the United ...

How Mortgage Finance Reform Could Affect Housing

By John V. Duca, John Muellbauer, and Anthony Murphy

American Economic Review, May 2016

Although major changes in mortgage finance have occurred since the subprime bust, several issues remain unresolved, centering on the roles of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the FHA. We analyze how some reforms might affect house prices in a framework rich e...

Trade Agreements as Endogenously Incomplete Contracts

By Henrik Horn, Giovanni Maggi, and Robert W. Staiger

American Economic Review, March 2010

We propose a model of trade agreements in which contracting is costly, and as a consequence the optimal agreement may be incomplete. In spite of its simplicity, the model yields rich predictions on the structure of the optimal trade agreement and how t...

Prosperity and Depression

By Edward C. Prescott

American Economic Review, May 2002

Does Home Production Drive Structural Transformation?

By Alessio Moro, Solmaz Moslehi, and Satoshi Tanaka

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2017

Using new home production data for the United States, we estimate a model of structural transformation with a home production sector, allowing for both non-homotheticity of preferences and differential productivity growth in each sector. We report two mai...

Trade Restrictiveness and Deadweight Losses from US Tariffs

By Douglas A. Irwin

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2010

This paper calculates a trade restrictiveness index, i.e., the uniform tariff that yields the same welfare loss as an existing tariff structure, for nearly a century of US data. The results show that the average tariff understates the TRI by about 75 per...

How to Define Illegal Price Manipulation

By Albert S. Kyle and S. Viswanathan

American Economic Review, May 2008