Reclaiming Virtue Ethics for Economics

[Symposium: Economics and Moral Virtues]

By Luigino Bruni and Robert Sugden

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2013

Virtue ethics is an important strand of moral philosophy, and a significant body of philosophical work in virtue ethics is associated with a radical critique of the market economy and of economics. Expressed crudely, the charge sheet is this: The market...

Inefficient Hiring in Entry-Level Labor Markets

By Amanda Pallais

American Economic Review, November 2014

Hiring inexperienced workers generates information about their abilities. If this information is public, workers obtain its benefits. If workers cannot compensate firms for hiring them, firms will hire too few inexperienced workers. I determine the effect...

What Does Performance in Graduate School Predict? Graduate Economics Education and Student Outcomes

By Susan Athey, Lawrence F. Katz, Alan B. Krueger, Steven Levitt, and James Poterba

American Economic Review, May 2007

Can Mentoring Help Female Assistant Professors? Interim Results from a Randomized Trial

By Francine D. Blau, Janet M. Currie, Rachel T. A. Croson, and Donna K. Ginther

American Economic Review, May 2010

The Trillion Dollar Conundrum: Complementarities and Health Information Technology

By David Dranove, Chris Forman, Avi Goldfarb, and Shane Greenstein

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2014

We examine the heterogeneous relationship between the adoption of EMR and hospital operating costs at thousands of US hospitals between 1996 and 2009. We first document a previously-identified puzzle: Adoption of EMR is associated with a slight cost incre...

Household Production and the Excess Sensitivity of Consumption to Current Income

By Marianne Baxter and Urban J. Jermann

American Economic Review, September 1999

Empirical research on the permanent-income hypothesis (PIH) has found that consumption growth is excessively sensitive to predictable changes in income. This finding is interpreted as strong evidence against the PIH. We propose an explanation for apparent...

Strike Three: Discrimination, Incentives, and Evaluation

By Christopher A. Parsons, Johan Sulaeman, Michael C. Yates, and Daniel S. Hamermesh

American Economic Review, June 2011

Major League Baseball umpires express their racial/ethnic preferences when they evaluate pitchers. Strikes are called less often if the umpire and pitcher do not match race/ethnicity, but mainly where there is little scrutiny of umpires. Pitchers under...

What Do Trade Negotiators Negotiate About? Empirical Evidence from the World Trade Organization

By Kyle Bagwell and Robert W. Staiger

American Economic Review, June 2011

According to the terms-of-trade theory, governments use trade agreements to escape from a terms-of-trade-driven prisoner's dilemma. We use the terms-of-trade theory to develop a relationship that predicts negotiated tariff levels on the basis of pre-ne...

Is the Mediterranean the New Rio Grande? US and EU Immigration Pressures in the Long Run

[Symposium: Immigration and Labor Markets]

By Gordon Hanson and Craig McIntosh

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2016

How will worldwide changes in population affect pressures for international migration in the future? We examine the past three decades, during which population pressures contributed to substantial labor flows from neighboring countries into the United Sta...

How to Subvert Democracy: Montesinos in Peru

By John Mcmillan and Pablo Zoido

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2004

Which of the democratic checks and balances--opposition parties, the judiciary, a free press--is the most forceful? Peru has the full set of democratic institutions. In the 1990s, the secret-police chief Montesinos systematically undermined them all with ...

Institution Formation in Public Goods Games

By Michael Kosfeld, Akira Okada, and Arno Riedl

American Economic Review, September 2009

Sanctioning institutions are of utmost importance for overcoming free-riding tendencies and enforcing outcomes that maximize group welfare in social dilemma situations. We investigate, theoretically and experimentally, the endogenous formation of insti...

Big Data: New Tricks for Econometrics

[Symposium: Big Data]

By Hal R. Varian

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2014

Computers are now involved in many economic transactions and can capture data associated with these transactions, which can then be manipulated and analyzed. Conventional statistical and econometric techniques such as regression often work well, but there...

Immigration Enforcement and Crime

By Paolo Pinotti

American Economic Review, May 2015

Immigration enforcement has ambiguous implications for the crime rate of undocumented immigrants. On the one hand, expulsions reduce the pool of immigrants at risk of committing crimes, on the other they lower the opportunity cost of crime for those who a...

Consumer Prices, the Consumer Price Index, and the Cost of Living

[Symposium: Measuring the CPI]

By Michael J. Boskin, Ellen L. Dulberger, Robert J. Gordon, Zvi Griliches, and Dale W. Jorgenson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1998

After presenting major findings and recommendations, the CPI Commission reiterates the estimate of a 1.1 percentage point per annum upward bias. It rejects the contention that the BLS already makes substantial corrections for quality change; that quality ...

Noisy News in Business Cycles

By Mario Forni, Luca Gambetti, Marco Lippi, and Luca Sala

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2017

We investigate the role of "noise" shocks as a source of business cycle fluctuations. To do so we set up a simple model of imperfect information and derive restrictions for identifying the noise shock in a VAR model. The novelty of our approach is that id...

Estimating the Impact of Microcredit on Those Who Take It Up: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment in Morocco

By Bruno Crépon, Florencia Devoto, Esther Duflo, and William Parienté

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2015

We report results from a randomized evaluation of a microcredit program introduced in rural areas of Morocco in 2006. Thirteen percent of the households in treatment villages took a loan, and none in control villages did. Among households identified as mo...

Economic Integration and Political Disintegration

By Alberto Alesina, Enrico Spolaore, and Romain Wacziarg

American Economic Review, December 2000

In a world of trade restrictions, large countries enjoy economic benefits, because political boundaries determine the size of the market. Under free trade and global markets even relatively small cultural, linguistic or ethnic groups can benefit from form...

The End of Bank Secrecy? An Evaluation of the G20 Tax Haven Crackdown

By Niels Johannesen and Gabriel Zucman

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2014

During the financial crisis, G20 countries compelled tax havens to sign bilateral treaties providing for exchange of bank information. Policymakers have celebrated this global initiative as the end of bank secrecy. Exploiting a unique panel dataset, ou...

Equilibrium Fictions: A Cognitive Approach to Societal Rigidity

By Karla Hoff and Joseph E. Stiglitz

American Economic Review, May 2010

Telecommunications Infrastructure and Economic Development: A Simultaneous Approach

By Lars-Hendrik Roller and Leonard Waverman

American Economic Review, September 2001

In this paper we investigate how telecommunications infrastructure affects economic growth. We use evidence from 21 OECD countries over a 20-year period to examine the impacts that telecommunications developments may have had. We jointly estimate a microm...