The Financial Crisis: Lessons for International Macroeconomics

By Matthieu Bussière, Jean Imbs, Robert Kollmann, and Romain Rancière

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2013

This article introduces a special section of the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, containing five papers presented during a conference in Paris in October 2011. The aim of the conference was to derive lessons from the financial crisis, for re...

Self-Interest through Delegation: An Additional Rationale for the Principal-Agent Relationship

By John R. Hamman, George Loewenstein, and Roberto A. Weber

American Economic Review, September 2010

Principal-agent relationships are typically assumed to be motivated by efficiency gains from comparative advantage. However, principals may also delegate tasks to avoid taking direct responsibility for selfish or unethical behavior. We report three labora...

Improving the Design of Conditional Transfer Programs: Evidence from a Randomized Education Experiment in Colombia

By Felipe Barrera-Osorio, Marianne Bertrand, Leigh L. Linden, and Francisco Perez-Calle

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2011

Using a student level randomization, we compare three education-based conditional cash transfers designs: a standard design, a design where part of the monthly transfers are postponed until children have to re-enroll in school, and a design that lowers th...

Putting the Parts Together: Trade, Vertical Linkages, and Business Cycle Comovement

By Julian di Giovanni and Andrei A. Levchenko

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2010

Countries that trade more with each other exhibit higher business cycle correlation. This paper examines the mechanisms underlying this relationship using a large cross-country, industry-level panel dataset of manufacturing production and trade. We sho...

Innovation and Climate Change Policy

By Joshua S. Gans

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2012

This paper examines whether climate change policies will induce innovation in environmentally friendly technologies. The model demonstrates that a tighter emissions cap will reduce the scale of fossil fuel usage and that this will diminish incentives to ...

Does Money Illusion Matter? Comment

By Luba Petersen and Abel Winn

American Economic Review, March 2014

This paper experimentally investigates whether money illusion generates substantial nominal inertia. Building on the design of Fehr and Tyran (2001), we find no evidence that agents choose high nominal payoffs over high real payoffs. However, participants...

Satellites, Self-Reports, and Submersion: Exposure to Floods in Bangladesh

By Raymond Guiteras, Amir Jina, and A. Mushfiq Mobarak

American Economic Review, May 2015

A burgeoning "Climate-Economy" literature has uncovered many effects of changes in temperature and precipitation on economic activity, but has made considerably less progress in modeling the effects of other associated phenomena, like natural disasters. W...

Life-Cycle Variation in the Association between Current and Lifetime Earnings

By Steven Haider and Gary Solon

American Economic Review, September 2006

Researchers in a variety of important economic literatures have assumed that current income variables as proxies for lifetime income variables follow the textbook errors-in-variables model. In our analysis of Social Security records containing nearly care...

Does the Media Matter? A Field Experiment Measuring the Effect of Newspapers on Voting Behavior and Political Opinions

By Alan S. Gerber, Dean Karlan, and Daniel Bergan

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2009

We conducted a field experiment to measure the effect of exposure to newspapers on political behavior and opinion. Before the 2005 Virginia gubernatorial election, we randomly assigned individuals to a Washington Post free subscription treatment, a Was...

Two-Sided Matching with Endogenous Preferences

By Yair Antler

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2015

We modify the stable matching problem by allowing agents' preferences to depend on the endogenous actions of agents on the other side of the market. Conventional matching theory results break down in the modified setup. In particular, every game that is i...

Do People Vote with Their Feet? An Empirical Test of Tiebout

By H. Spencer Banzhaf and Randall P. Walsh

American Economic Review, June 2008

Charles Tiebout's suggestion that people "vote with their feet" for communities with optimal bundles of taxes and public goods has played a central role in local public finance for over 50 years. Using a locational equilibrium model, we derive formal t...

Output Spillovers from Fiscal Policy

By Alan J. Auerbach and Yuriy Gorodnichenko

American Economic Review, May 2013

For a large number of OECD countries we estimate the cross-country spillover effects of government purchases on output. Following the methodology in Auerbach and Gorodnichenko (2012a, b), we allow these multipliers to vary smoothly according to the state ...

Adaptation and Vertical Integration in the Airline Industry

By Silke Januszewski Forbes and Mara Lederman

American Economic Review, December 2009

We explore patterns of vertical integration in the US airline industry. Major airlines subcontract portions of their network to regional partners, which may or may not be owned. We investigate if ownership economizes on ex post renegotiation costs. We ...

School Desegregation, School Choice, and Changes in Residential Location Patterns by Race

By Nathaniel Baum-Snow and Byron F. Lutz

American Economic Review, December 2011

This paper examines the residential location and school choice responses to the desegregation of large urban public school districts. We decompose the well documented decline in white public enrollment following desegregation into migration to suburban di...

What Has Mattered to Economics Since 1970

By E. Han Kim, Adair Morse, and Luigi Zingales

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2006

Citations are one way that past research echoes through time. In this paper, we compile a list of articles published in major refereed economics journals in the last 35 years that have received more than 500 citations as of June 2006. We then use this lis...

Household Consumption When the Marriage Is Stable

By Laurens Cherchye, Thomas Demuynck, Bram De Rock, and Frederic Vermeulen

American Economic Review, June 2017

We develop a novel framework to analyze the structural implications of the marriage market for household consumption. We define a revealed preference characterization of efficient household consumption when the marriage is stable. We characterize stable m...

Editorial Note: Correction to Richard S. Tol's "The Economic Effects of Climate Change"

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2015

The European Central Bank, the Euro, and Global Financial Markets

[Symposium: The Euro]

By Kathryn M. E. Dominguez

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2006

The economic case for European monetary union was shaky at best when it was first discussed 35 years ago. Europe's leaders felt that monetary union was the capstone to their efforts to create an integrated Europe, and much to the rest of the world's surpr...

The Economics and Law of Sovereign Debt and Default

By Ugo Panizza, Federico Sturzenegger, and Jeromin Zettelmeyer

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2009

This paper surveys the recent literature on sovereign debt and relates it to the evolution of the legal principles underlying the sovereign debt market and the experience of the most recent debt crises and defaults. It finds limited support for theories...

Completion Rates and Time-to-Degree in Economics PhD Programs (with comments by David Colander, N. Gregory Mankiw, Melissa P. McInerney, James M. Poterba)

By Wendy A. Stock, John J. Siegfried, and T. Aldrich Finegan

American Economic Review, May 2011

This paper describes the progress, eight years after matriculating, of 586 individuals who entered one of 27 economics Ph.D. programs in fall 2002. By October 2010, 59 percent of the fall 2002 entering cohort had earned a Ph.D. in economics at the univers...