Is the 2007 US Sub-prime Financial Crisis So Different? An International Historical Comparison

By Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff

American Economic Review, May 2008

Measurement Matters: Perspectives on Education Policy from an Economist and School Board Member

[Symposium: No Child Left Behind]

By Kevin Lang

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2010

One of the potential strengths of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act enacted in 2002 is that the law requires the production of an enormous amount of data, particularly from tests, which, if used properly, might help us improve education. As an economist...

Report of the Editor: American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

By Matthew D. Shapiro

American Economic Review, May 2016

Disease and Gender Gaps in Human Capital Investment: Evidence from Niger's 1986 Meningitis Epidemic

By Belinda Archibong and Francis Annan

American Economic Review, May 2017

This paper examines whether disease burdens, especially prevalent in the tropics, contribute significantly to widening gender gaps in educational attainment. We estimate the impact of sudden exposure to the 1986 meningitis epidemic in Niger on girls' educ...

Spite and Development

By Ernst Fehr, Karla Hoff, and Mayuresh Kshetramade

American Economic Review, May 2008

Ignorance Is Bliss: An Experimental Study of the Use of Ambiguity and Vagueness in the Coordination Games with Asymmetric Payoffs

By Marina Agranov and Andrew Schotter

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2012

We consider a game where one player, the Announcer, has to communicate the value of a payoff relevant state of the world to a set of players who play a coordination game with multiple equilibria. While the Announcer and the players agree that coordination...

Policy Watch: Examining the Justification for Residential Recycling

By Thomas C. Kinnaman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2006

There are 8,875 municipalities in the United States that have initiated curbside recycling programs over the past two decades to help reduce residential solid waste. Four thousand of these municipalities encourage recycling by requiring households to pay...

Guaranteed Trouble: The Economic Effects of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation

By Jeffrey R. Brown

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2008

How did the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, a government corporation created to insure the pensions of workers and retirees in bankrupt firms, end up facing financial distress of its own? How did an organization designed to strengthen retirement sec...

On the Salience of Ethnic Conflict

By Joan Esteban and Debraj Ray

American Economic Review, December 2008

A classical theme in social analysis views economic class divisions as the main cause of social conflict. Yet many, if not most of the conflicts we observe today appear to be ethnic in nature. It appears that the "vertical" nature of class divisions is of...

American and European Economics and Economists

By Bruno S. Frey and Reiner Eichenberger

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1993

America and Europe differ with regard to what economics is understood to be, how it is practiced, and how professional academic economists behave. Specifically, 1) American (U.S. and Canadian) economists contribute by far the largest share of journal publ...

Testing Models of Consumer Search Using Data on Web Browsing and Purchasing Behavior

By Babur De Los Santos, Ali Hortaçsu, and Matthijs R. Wildenbeest

American Economic Review, October 2012

Using a large dataset on web browsing and purchasing behavior we test to what extent consumers are searching in accordance to various search models. We find that the benchmark model of sequential search with a known price distribution can be rejected base...

Accounting for Employee Stock Options

By Wayne Guay, S. P. Kothari, and Richard Sloan

American Economic Review, May 2003

Household Bargaining and Excess Fertility: An Experimental Study in Zambia

By Nava Ashraf, Erica Field, and Jean Lee

American Economic Review, July 2014

We posit that household decision-making over fertility is characterized by moral hazard since most contraception can only be perfectly observed by the woman. Using an experiment in Zambia that varied whether women were given access to contraceptives alone...

Doing Good or Doing Well? Image Motivation and Monetary Incentives in Behaving Prosocially

By Dan Ariely, Anat Bracha, and Stephan Meier

American Economic Review, March 2009

This paper experimentally examines image motivation--the desire to be liked and well regarded by others--as a driver in prosocial behavior (doing good), and asks whether extrinsic monetary incentives (doing well) have a detrimental effect on prosocial beh...

One Mandarin Benefits the Whole Clan: Hometown Favoritism in an Authoritarian Regime

By Quoc-Anh Do, Kieu-Trang Nguyen, and Anh N. Tran

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2017

We study patronage politics in authoritarian Vietnam, using an exhaustive panel of ranking officials from 2000 to 2010 to estimate their promotions' impact on infrastructure in their hometowns of patrilineal ancestry. Native officials' promotions lead to ...

Propensity-Score Matching with Instrumental Variables

By Hidehiko Ichimura and Christopher Taber

American Economic Review, May 2001

The New Deal, Race, and Home Ownership in the 1920s and 1930s

By Trevor M. Kollmann and Price V. Fishback

American Economic Review, May 2011

Many federal government housing policies began during the New Deal of the 1930s. Many claim that minorities benefited less from these policies than whites. We estimate the relationships between policies in the 1920s and 1930s and black and white home owne...

Credit Ratings Accuracy and Analyst Incentives

By Heski Bar-Isaac and Joel Shapiro

American Economic Review, May 2011

The financial crisis has brought a new focus on the accuracy of credit rating agencies (CRAs). In this paper, we highlight the incentives of analysts at the CRAs to provide accurate ratings. We construct a model in which analysts initially work at a CRA a...

Transferability of Skills across Sectors and Heterogeneous Displacement Costs

By Moises Yi, Steffen Mueller, and Jens Stegmaier

American Economic Review, May 2017

We use rich German administrative data to estimate new measures of skill transferability between manufacturing and other sectors. These measures capture the value of workers' human capital when applied in different sectors and are directly related to work...

International Migration and Gender Discrimination among Children Left Behind

By Francisca M. Antman

American Economic Review, May 2011

This paper considers how international migration of the head of household affects the allocation of resources toward boys relative to girls within households remaining in the home country. I address the endogeneity of migration with a differences-in-diffe...