Do Investors Trade Too Much?

By Terrance Odean

American Economic Review, December 1999

Financial Globalization, Inequality, and the Rising Public Debt

By Marina Azzimonti, Eva de Francisco, and Vincenzo Quadrini

American Economic Review, August 2014

During the last three decades government debt has increased in most developed countries. During the same period we have also observed a significant liberalization of international financial markets. We propose a multi-country model with incomplete markets...

Search and Satisficing

By Andrew Caplin, Mark Dean, and Daniel Martin

American Economic Review, December 2011

Many everyday decisions are made without full examination of all available options, and, as a result, the best available option may be missed. We develop a search-theoretic choice experiment to study the impact of incomplete consideration on the quality o...

Natural Resources: Curse or Blessing?

By Frederick van der Ploeg

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2011

Are natural resources a "curse" or a "blessing"? The empirical evidence suggests that either outcome is possible. This paper surveys a variety of hypotheses and supporting evidence for why some countries benefit and others lose from the presence of natura...

Economic Growth: How Good Can It Get?

By Frank P. Stafford

American Economic Review, May 1999

Estimating a Structural Model of Herd Behavior in Financial Markets

By Marco Cipriani and Antonio Guarino

American Economic Review, January 2014

We develop a new methodology to estimate herd behavior in financial markets. We build a model of informational herding that can be estimated with financial transaction data. In the model, rational herding arises because of information-event uncertainty...

Can Compulsory Military Service Raise Civilian Wages? Evidence from the Peacetime Draft in Portugal

By David Card and Ana Rute Cardoso

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2012

We provide new evidence on the long-term impacts of peacetime conscription, using longitudinal data for Portuguese men born in 1967. These men were inducted at age 21, allowing us to use preconscription wages to control for ability differences between con...

Malthusian Dynamism and the Rise of Europe: Make War, Not Love

By Nico Voigtlander and Hans-Joachim Voth

American Economic Review, May 2009

A True Development Round? A Review of Joseph E. Stiglitz and Andrew Charlton's Fair Trade for All: How Trade Can Promote Development

By Robert Z. Lawrence

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2007

In Fair Trade for All: How Trade Can Promote Development, Stiglitz and Charlton prescribe what a multilateral trade agreement--that promotes development and is fair for all--would include. This review appraises their prescriptions and offers some...

The Rise in Mortgage Defaults

[Symposium: Early Stages of the Credit Crunch]

By Christopher Mayer, Karen Pence, and Shane M. Sherlund

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2009

The first hints of trouble in the mortgage market surfaced in mid-2005, and conditions subsequently began to deteriorate rapidly. Mortgage defaults and delinquencies are particularly concentrated among borrowers whose mortgages are classified as "subprime...

The Safe-Asset Share

By Gary Gorton, Stefan Lewellen, and Andrew Metrick

American Economic Review, May 2012

We document that the percentage of all U.S. assets that are "safe" has remained stable at about 33 percent since 1952. This stable ratio is a rare example of calm in a rapidly changing financial world. Over the same time period, the ratio of U.S. assets...

JEL Classification System

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2012

Complex Tax Incentives

By Johannes Abeler and Simon Jäger

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2015

How does complexity affect people's reaction to tax changes? To answer this question, we conduct an experiment in which subjects work for a piece rate and face taxes. One treatment features a simple tax system, the other a complex one. Subjects' economic ...

Of Smart Phone Wars and Software Patents

[Symposium: Patents]

By Stuart Graham and Saurabh Vishnubhakat

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2013

Among the main criticisms currently confronting the US Patent and Trademark Office are concerns about software patents and what role they play in the web of litigation now proceeding in the smart phone industry. We will examine the evidence on the litigat...

Intrinsic Motivation and Incentives

By Canice Prendergast

American Economic Review, May 2008

Recent Trends in the Size Distribution of Household Wealth

By Edward N. Wolff

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1998

Based on the Survey of Consumer Finances, the distribution of wealth in the United States became much more unequal in the 1980s and that trend continued, albeit at a slower pace, in the 1990s. The only households that saw their mean net worth rise in abso...

Does Federal Student Aid Raise Tuition? New Evidence on For-Profit Colleges

By Stephanie Riegg Cellini and Claudia Goldin

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2014

We provide the first comprehensive estimates of the size of the for-profit higher education sector and evaluate whether for-profits increase tuition in response to federal subsidies. By using state administrative data we include institutions that do not p...

Population, Food, and Knowledge

By D. Gale Johnson

American Economic Review, March 2000

The Short- and Long-Term Career Effects of Graduating in a Recession

By Philip Oreopoulos, Till von Wachter, and Andrew Heisz

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2012

This paper analyzes the magnitude and sources of long-term earnings declines associated with graduating from college during a recession. Using a large longitudinal university-employer-employee dataset, we find that the cost of recessions for new graduates...

Retrospectives: The Origins of Neoclassical Microeconomics

By Robert B. Ekelund Jr and Robert F. Hébert

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2002

Until recently, the standard story line in history of thought textbooks was that a triumvirate of British and Continental writers established demarcation between classical economics and neoclassical economics in the early 1870s. The authors raise two obje...