Why Wait? A Century of Life before IPO

By Boyan Jovanovic and Peter L. Rousseau

American Economic Review, May 2001

Does Culture Matter in Economic Behavior? Ultimatum Game Bargaining among the Machiguenga of the Peruvian Amazon

By Joseph Henrich

American Economic Review, September 2000

Retrospectives: Captains of Industry

By Robert Dixon

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2002

This paper traces the origin and use of the term "captains of industry." Introduced by the Scottish historian and essayist Thomas Carlyle in the mid-nineteenth century, its meanings and associations were very different from today. For Carlyle, they were f...

Debt Constraints and the Labor Wedge

By Patrick Kehoe, Virgiliu Midrigan, and Elena Pastorino

American Economic Review, May 2016

Changes in household debt and employment across regions of the U.S. during the Great Recession are highly correlated: regions where the decrease in household debt was most pronounced were also regions where the decline in employment was most severe. We sh...

Childhood Environment and Gender Gaps in Adulthood

By Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Frina Lin, Jeremy Majerovitz, and Benjamin Scuderi

American Economic Review, May 2016

We show that differences in childhood environments shape gender gaps in adulthood by documenting three facts using population tax records for children born in the 1980s. First, gender gaps in employment rates, earnings, and college attendance vary substan...

Organizational Design and Technology Choice under Intrafirm Bargaining: Comment

By Catherine C. de Fontenay and Joshua S. Gans

American Economic Review, March 2003

Does Banning Affirmative Action Lower College Student Quality?

By Jimmy Chan and Erik Eyster

American Economic Review, June 2003

Competition Policy, Rivalries, and Defense Industry Consolidation

[Symposium: Defense Procurement]

By William E. Kovacic and Dennis E. Smallwood

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1994

Declining outlays for new weapons programs have triggered a process of consolidation that promises to shrink the U.S. defense industry drastically. Consolidation in the defense industry raises complex competition policy issues that are not amenable to con...

Taxing Consumption and Other Sins

[Symposium: U.S. Tax Policy in International Perspective]

By James R. Hines Jr.

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2007

Federal and state governments in the United States use income and payroll taxes as their primary tools to collect revenue. Relative to the United States, governments in the rest of the world rely much more heavily on taxing consumption. Heavy American rel...

Regulation, Competition and Liberalization

By Mark Armstrong and David E.M. Sappington

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2006

In many countries throughout the world, regulators are struggling to determine whether and how to introduce competition into regulated industries. This essay examines the complexities involved in the liberalization process. While stressing the importanc...

Growth Dynamics: The Myth of Economic Recovery

By Valerie Cerra and Sweta Chaman Saxena

American Economic Review, March 2008

Using panel data for a large set of high-income, emerging market, developing, and transition countries, we find robust evidence that the large output loss from financial crises and some types of political crises is highly persistent. The results on financ...

Consumption Volatility, Marketization, and Expenditure in an Emerging Market Economy

By Daniel L. Hicks

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2015

In response to income fluctuations, households smooth consumption by substituting between market expenditure and time inputs. This paper provides evidence of this substitution in the context of food consumption over transitory and permanent income fluctua...

Trade Costs, 1870-2000

By David S. Jacks, Christopher M. Meissner, and Dennis Novy

American Economic Review, May 2008

Preferences over Inflation and Unemployment: Evidence from Surveys of Happiness

By Rafael Di Tella, Robert J. MacCulloch, and Andrew J. Oswald

American Economic Review, March 2001

Intelligence, Social Mobility, and Growth

By John Hassler and Jose V. Rodriguez Mora

American Economic Review, September 2000

We develop a model where the allocation of human resources, intergenerational social mobility, and technological growth are jointly determined. High growth endogenously increases the equilibrium return to innate cognitive ability and makes the allocation ...

Manager-Investor Conflicts in Mutual Funds

By Paul G. Mahoney

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2004

Half of all of U.S. households own shares in one or more mutual funds, either directly or through personal or employer-sponsored retirement accounts. This article describes the structure and regulation of mutual funds and the resulting incentives facing t...

Identifying Hedonic Models

By Ivar Ekeland, James J. Heckman, and Lars Nesheim

American Economic Review, May 2002

Law and Finance "at the Origin"

By Ulrike Malmendier

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2009

What are the key determinants of financial development and growth? A large literature debates the relative importance of countries' legal and political environment. In this paper, I present evidence from ancient Rome, where an early form of shareholder ...

Purple America

[Symposium: Red and Blue States]

By Stephen Ansolabehere, Jonathan Rodden, and James M. Snyder Jr.

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2006

America, we are told, is a nation divided. The cartographers who draw up the maps of U.S. election results have branded a new division in American politics: Republican red versus Democratic blue. What is the source of this division? Most observers point n...

Derivative Assets Analysis

[Symposium: Arbitrage]

By Mark Rubinstein

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1987

Derivative assets analysis enjoys an unusual status; it is a recently developed, relatively complex tool of economic analysis, faithful to the core of economic theory, and widely used to make real-life decisions. This paper, discusses derivative assets ba...