Economic Incentives and the Defense Procurement Process

[Symposium: Defense Procurement]

By William P. Rogerson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1994

This paper describes some of the insights that the economic theory of incentives can contribute to defense procurement policy analysis. It describes the underlying incentive problems that shape the defense procurement problem, the nature of current instit...

Technology's Edge: The Educational Benefits of Computer-Aided Instruction

By Lisa Barrow, Lisa Markman, and Cecilia Elena Rouse

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2009

We present results from a randomized study of a well-defined use of computers in schools, a popular instructional computer program for pre-algebra and algebra. We primarily assess the program using a test designed to target pre-algebra and algebra skil...

Measured Aggregate Gains from International Trade

By Ariel Burstein and Javier Cravino

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2015

We examine the implications of workhorse trade models for how aggregate productivity, real GDP and real consumption, as measured by statistical agencies, respond to changes in trade costs. In a range of models, changes in measured productivity are equal t...

Child Labor: Cause, Consequence, and Cure, with Remarks on International Labor Standards

By Kaushik Basu

Journal of Economic Literature, September 1999

The paper brings together the abundant and somewhat anarchic literature on child labor, isolating its central findings and analytical insights. The investigation is especially directed at the micro economics of why child labor occurs and the sort of polic...

The Structure of Foreign Trade

By Elhanan Helpman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1999

During the last two decades, new research has greatly advanced the understanding of the structure of world trade. While research in the 1960s and 1970s provided mostly theoretical insights, major empirical innovations concerning the study of factor conten...

Checklists and Worker Behavior: A Field Experiment

By C. Kirabo Jackson and Henry S. Schneider

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2015

We analyze data from a field experiment in which an auto repair firm provided checklists to mechanics and monitored their use. Revenue was 20 percent higher during the experiment, and the effect is equivalent to that of a 1.6 percentage point (10 percent)...

The Personal Discount Rate: Evidence from Military Downsizing Programs

By John T. Warner and Saul Pleeter

American Economic Review, March 2001

The military drawdown program of the early 1990s provides an opportunity to obtain estimates of personal discount rates based on large numbers of people making real choices involving large sums. The program offered over 65,000 separatees the choice betwee...

Happiness and the Persistence of Income Shocks

By Christian Bayer and Falko Juessen

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2015

We reassess the empirical effects of income and employment on self-reported well-being. Our analysis makes use of a two-step estimation procedure that allows us to apply instrumental variable regressions with ordinal observable data. As suggested by the ...

Financial Intermediation, Investment Dynamics, and Business Cycle Fluctuations

By Andrea Ajello

American Economic Review, August 2016

I use micro data to quantify key features of US firm financing. In particular, I establish that a substantial 35 percent of firms' investment is funded using financial markets. I then construct a dynamic equilibrium model that matches these features and f...

Economics and the Biologists: A Review of Geerat J. Vermeij's Nature: An Economic History

By Joel Mokyr

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2006

This essay reviews and criticizes Vermeij’s Nature: An Economic History and places it in the context of evolutionary economics. Vermeij presents a natural history written in what he considers economic terms and argues that biologists should know more a...

Interim Bayesian Persuasion: First Steps

By Eduardo Perez-Richet

American Economic Review, May 2014

This paper makes a first attempt at building a theory of interim Bayesian persuasion. I work in a minimalist model where a low or high type sender seeks validation from a receiver who is willing to validate high types exclusively. After learning her type,...

Competitive Effects of Means-Tested School Vouchers

By David Figlio and Cassandra M. D. Hart

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2014

We use the introduction of a means-tested voucher program in Florida to examine whether increased competitive pressure on public schools affects students' test scores. We find greater score improvements in the wake of the program introduction for stude...

Hindsight, Foresight, and Insight: An Experimental Study of a Small-Market Investment Game with Common and Private Values

By Asen Ivanov, Dan Levin, and James Peck

American Economic Review, September 2009

We experimentally test an endogenous-timing investment model in which subjects privately observe their cost of investing and a signal correlated with the common investment return. Subjects overinvest, relative to Nash. We separately consider whether su...

No History of Ideas, Please, We're Economists

By Mark Blaug

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2001

Why Do Management Practices Differ across Firms and Countries?

By Nicholas Bloom and John Van Reenen

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2010

Economists have long puzzled over the astounding differences in productivity between firms and countries. In this paper, we present evidence on a possible explanation for persistent differences in productivity at the firm and the national level -- namely,...

Persistent Liquidity Effects and Long-Run Money Demand

By Fernando Alvarez and Francesco Lippi

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2014

We present a monetary model with segmented asset markets that implies a persistent fall in interest rates after a once and for all increase in liquidity. The gradual propagation mechanism produced by our model is novel in the literature. We provide an ...

Reexamining the Impact of Family Planning Programs on US Fertility: Evidence from the War on Poverty and the Early Years of Title X

By Martha J. Bailey

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2012

Almost 50 years after domestic US family planning programs began, their effects on childbearing remain controversial. Using the county-level roll-out of these programs from 1964 to 1973, this paper reevaluates their shorter and longer term effects on US ...

Financing Development: The Role of Information Costs

By Jeremy Greenwood, Juan M. Sanchez, and Cheng Wang

American Economic Review, September 2010

To address how technological progress in financial intermediation affects the economy, a costly-state verification framework is embedded into the standard growth model. The framework has two novel ingredients. First, firms differ in the risk/return combin...

Government Advertising and Media Coverage of Corruption Scandals

By Rafael Di Tella and Ignacio Franceschelli

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2011

We construct measures of the extent to which the four main newspapers in Argentina report government corruption on their front page during the period 1998-2007 and correlate them with government advertising. The correlation is negative. The size is consid...

The Great Diversification and Its Undoing

By Vasco Carvalho and Xavier Gabaix

American Economic Review, August 2013

We investigate the hypothesis that macroeconomic fluctuations are primitively the results of many microeconomic shocks. We define fundamental volatility as the volatility that would arise from an economy made entirely of idiosyncratic sectoral or firm-lev...