Interesting Questions in Freakonomics

By John DiNardo

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2007

Freakonomics is more about "entertainment" than it is a serious attempt at popularization. Consequently, rather than conduct a comprehensive fact check, I use the book as a springboard for a broader inquiry into social science research and take ...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2015

The Acceleration of Variety Growth

By Mark Bils and Peter J. Klenow

American Economic Review, May 2001

The Role of International Fragmentation in the Development Process

By Ronald W. Jones and Sugata Marjit

American Economic Review, May 2001

Improving Educational Quality through Enhancing Community Participation: Results from a Randomized Field Experiment in Indonesia

By Menno Pradhan, Daniel Suryadarma, Amanda Beatty, Maisy Wong, Arya Gaduh, Armida Alisjahbana, and Rima Prama Artha

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2014

Education ministries worldwide have promoted community engagement through school committees. This paper presents results from a large field experiment testing alternative approaches to strengthen school committees in public schools in Indonesia. Two no...

Should Central Banks Respond to Movements in Asset Prices?

By Ben S. Bernanke and Mark Gertler

American Economic Review, May 2001

Teaching Economics at the Start of the 21st Century: Still Chalk-and-Talk

By William E. Becker and Michael Watts

American Economic Review, May 2001

Deposit Collecting: Unbundling the Role of Frequency, Salience, and Habit Formation in Generating Savings

By Suresh de Mel, Craig McIntosh, and Christopher Woodruff

American Economic Review, May 2013

We report on a field experiment using several methods for collecting deposits made in formal bank accounts in rural areas in Sri Lanka. We find that only frequent, face-to-face collection increases aggregate household savings. Collection involving communi...

The Effects of Monetary Policy on Stock Market Bubbles: Some Evidence

By Jordi Galí and Luca Gambetti

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2015

We estimate the response of stock prices to monetary policy shocks using a time-varying coefficients VAR. Our evidence points to protracted episodes in which stock prices end up increasing persistently in response to an exogenous tightening of monetary po...

New York City Cab Drivers' Labor Supply Revisited: Reference-Dependent Preferences with Rational-Expectations Targets for Hours and Income

By Vincent P. Crawford and Juanjuan Meng

American Economic Review, August 2011

This paper proposes a model of cab drivers' labor supply, building on Henry S. Farber's (2005, 2008) empirical analyses and Botond Koszegi and Matthew Rabin's (2006; henceforth "KR") theory of reference-dependent preferences. Following KR, our model has t...

Measuring the Efficiency of an FCC Spectrum Auction

By Jeremy T. Fox and Patrick Bajari

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2013

We propose a method to structurally estimate the deterministic component of bidder valuations in FCC spectrum auctions, and apply it to the 1995-1996 C block auction. We base estimation on a pairwise stability condition: two bidders cannot exchange two li...

Are the Non-monetary Costs of Energy Efficiency Investments Large? Understanding Low Take-Up of a Free Energy Efficiency Program

By Meredith Fowlie, Michael Greenstone, and Catherine Wolfram

American Economic Review, May 2015

We document very low take-up of an energy efficiency program that is widely believed to be privately beneficial. Program participants receive a substantial home "weatherization" retrofit; all installation and equipment costs are covered by the program. Le...

Imperfect Public Monitoring with Costly Punishment: An Experimental Study

By Attila Ambrus and Ben Greiner

American Economic Review, December 2012

This paper experimentally investigates the effects of a costly punishment option on cooperation and social welfare in long, finitely repeated public good contribution games. In a perfect monitoring environment, increasing the severity of the potential p...

A Continuous Dilemma

By Daniel Friedman and Ryan Oprea

American Economic Review, February 2012

We study prisoners' dilemmas played in continuous time with flow payoffs accumulated over 60 seconds. In most cases, the median rate of mutual cooperation is about 90 percent. Control sessions with repeated matchings over eight subperiods achieve less tha...

Ascending Prices and Package Bidding: A Theoretical and Experimental Analysis

By John H. Kagel, Yuanchuan Lien, and Paul Milgrom

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2010

We use theory and experiment to explore the performance of multi-round, price-guided, combinatorial auctions. We define efficiency-relevant and core-relevant packages and show that if bidders bid aggressively on these and losing bidders bid to their limit...

Creating a Smarter U.S. Electricity Grid

[Symposium: Energy Challenges]

By Paul L. Joskow

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2012

This paper focuses on efforts to build what policymakers call the "smart grid," involving 1) improved remote monitoring and automatic and remote control of facilities in high-voltage electricity transmission networks; 2) improved remote monitoring, two-wa...

Saving Social Security

[Symposium: Social Security Reform]

By Peter A. Diamond and Peter R. Orszag

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2005

Social Security is one of America's most successful government programs. It has helped millions of Americans avoid poverty in old age. To be sure, the program faces a long-term deficit and is in need of updating. But Social Security's long-term financial ...

Notes

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1998

Induced Innovation and Energy Prices

By David Popp

American Economic Review, March 2002

I use U.S. patent data from 1970 to 1994 to estimate the effect of energy prices on energy-efficient innovations. Using patent citations to construct a measure of the usefulness of the existing base of scientific knowledge, I consider the effect of both d...

Early Life Health Interventions and Academic Achievement

By Prashant Bharadwaj, Katrine Vellesen Løken, and Christopher Neilson

American Economic Review, August 2013

This paper studies the effect of improved early life health care on mortality and long-run academic achievement in school. We use the idea that medical treatments often follow rules of thumb for assigning care to patients, such as the classification of...