Incentives and Discrimination

By Eyal Winter

American Economic Review, June 2004

The Ethology of Homo Economicus

By Joseph Persky

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1995

Early critics of John Stuart Mill attacked him for creating a monomaniacal economic man concerned only with the accumulation of money. In fact, Mill's construct possessed a considerably richer psychology including desires for leisure, luxury, and sexual r...

Making a Name: Women's Surnames at Marriage and Beyond

By Claudia Goldin and Maria Shim

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2004

This paper tracks the fraction of college graduate women who kept their surnames upon marriage and after childbirth and explores some of the correlates of surname retention. Data from the New York Times, Harvard College alumni books, and Massachusetts bir...

The Role of Family in Family Firms

[Symposium: Cultural Economics]

By Marianne Bertrand and Antoinette Schoar

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2006

History is replete with examples of spectacular ascents of family businesses. Yet there are also numerous accounts of family businesses brought down by bitter feuds among family members, disappointed expectations between generations, and tragic sagas of l...

Second-Best Institutions

By Dani Rodrik

American Economic Review, May 2008

Are There Missing Girls in the United States? Evidence from Birth Data

By Jason Abrevaya

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2009

We offer evidence of gender selection within the United States. Analysis of comprehensive birth data shows unusually high boy-birth percentages after 1980 among later children (most notably third and fourth children) born to Chinese and Asian Indian mo...

A Neoclassical Perspective on Budget Deficits

[Symposium: Budget Deficit]

By B. Douglas Bernheim

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1989

Generally speaking, there are three schools of thought concerning the economic effects of budget deficits: Neoclassical, Keynesian, and Ricardian. It is remarkable that from among these three schools of thought, one can find support for every conceivable ...

The Natural Rate of Interest and Its Usefulness for Monetary Policy

By Robert Barsky, Alejandro Justiniano, and Leonardo Melosi

American Economic Review, May 2014

We estimate a state-of-the-art DSGE model to study the natural rate of interest in the United States over the last 20 years. The natural rate is highly procyclical, and fell substantially below zero in each of the last three recessions. Although the drop ...

Estimating the Knowledge-Capital Model of the Multinational Enterprise: Reply

By David L. Carr, James R. Markusen, and Keith E. Maskus

American Economic Review, June 2003

Rational Inattention to Discrete Choices: A New Foundation for the Multinomial Logit Model

By Filip Matějka and Alisdair McKay

American Economic Review, January 2015

Individuals must often choose among discrete actions with imperfect information about their payoffs. Before choosing, they have an opportunity to study the payoffs, but doing so is costly. This creates new choices such as the number of and types of questi...

Conscription and Crime: Evidence from the Argentine Draft Lottery

By Sebastian Galiani, Martín A. Rossi, and Ernesto Schargrodsky

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2011

We estimate the causal effect of mandatory participation in military service on individuals' subsequent involvement in criminal activities. To identify this causal effect, we exploit the random assignment of young men to conscription in Argentina through...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, October 2015

Voluntary Export Restraints on Automobiles: Evaluating a Trade Policy

By Steven Berry, James Levinsohn, and Ariel Pakes

American Economic Review, June 1999

The authors evaluate the voluntary export restraint that was initially placed on exports of automobiles from Japan in 1981. They evaluate the impact this policy had on U.S. consumer welfare, firm profits, and foregone tariff revenue from its initiation th...

Water Pollution Progress at Borders: The Role of Changes in China's Political Promotion Incentives

By Matthew E. Kahn, Pei Li, and Daxuan Zhao

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2015

At political boundaries, local leaders have weak incentives to reduce polluting activity because the social costs are borne by downstream neighbors. This paper exploits a natural experiment set in China in which the central government changed the local po...

Offshoring Bias in U.S. Manufacturing

By Susan Houseman, Christopher Kurz, Paul Lengermann, and Benjamin Mandel

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2011

In this paper, we show that the substitution of imported for domestically produced goods and services—often known as offshoring—can lead to overestimates of U.S. productivity growth and value added. We explore how the measurement of productivi...

Identity Theft

By Keith B. Anderson, Erik Durbin, and Michael A. Salinger

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2008

Identity theft is made possible by the nature of modern payment systems. In the modern economy, sellers are willing to offer goods and services to strangers in exchange for a promise to pay, provided the promise is backed up by data that link the buyer to...

Performance Pay and Multidimensional Sorting: Productivity, Preferences, and Gender

By Thomas Dohmen and Armin Falk

American Economic Review, April 2011

This paper studies the impact of incentives on worker self-selection in a controlled laboratory experiment. Subjects face the choice between a fixed and a variable payment scheme. Depending on the treatment, the variable payment is a piece rate, a tourna...

The Political Economy of Dynamic Elections: Accountability, Commitment, and Responsiveness

By John Duggan and César Martinelli

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2017

We survey the literature on dynamic elections in the traditional settings of spatial preferences and rent seeking under perfect and imperfect monitoring of politicians. We define stationary electoral equilibrium, which encompasses notions used by Barro (1...

Assassinations: Evaluating the Effectiveness of an Israeli Counterterrorism Policy Using Stock Market Data

By Asaf Zussman and Noam Zussman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2006

Since the outbreak of the Intifada in September 2000, the Israeli government has extensively employed a policy of assassinating members of Palestinian terrorist organizations. Theoretically, the net effect of an assassination on future terrorism is indete...

Reference-Dependent Consumption Plans

By Botond Kőszegi and Matthew Rabin

American Economic Review, June 2009

We develop a rational dynamic model in which people are loss averse over changes in beliefs about present and future consumption. Because changes in wealth are news about future consumption, preferences over money are reference-dependent. If news reson...