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...

The Changing Selectivity of American Colleges

[Symposium: College Admissions]

By Caroline M. Hoxby

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2009

Over the past few decades, the average college has not become more selective: the reverse is true, though not dramatically. People who believe that college selectivity is increasing may be extrapolating from the experience of a small number of colleges su...

Understanding the "Family Gap" in Pay for Women with Children

By Jane Waldfogel

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1998

As the gender gap in pay between women and men has been narrowing, the 'family gap' in pay between mothers and nonmothers has been widening. One reason may be the institutional structure in the United States, which has emphasized equal pay and opportunity...

Whither Game Theory? Towards a Theory of Learning in Games

[Symposium: What is Happening in Game Theory?]

By Drew Fudenberg and David K. Levine

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2016

Game theory has been a huge success in economics. Many important questions have been answered, and game theoretic methods are now central to much economic investigation. We suggest areas where further advances are important, and argue that models of learn...

Aiming for Efficiency Rather Than Proficiency

[Symposium: No Child Left Behind]

By Derek Neal

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2010

The No Child Left Behind law is flawed for many reasons, but the most important is that it is built around proficiency targets. Proficiency rates are not useful metrics of school performance because universal proficiency is not a socially efficient goal f...