Are the Effects of Monetary Policy Shocks Big or Small?

By Olivier Coibion

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2012

This paper studies the small estimated effects of monetary policy shocks from standard VARs versus the large effects from the Romer and Romer (2004) approach. The differences are driven by three factors: the different contractionary impetus, the period of...

Relational Contracts and the Value of Relationships

By Marina Halac

American Economic Review, April 2012

This article studies optimal relational contracts when the value of the relationship between contracting parties is not commonly known. I consider a principal-agent setting where the principal has persistent private information about her outside option. ...

Demand Side Secular Stagnation

By Lawrence H. Summers

American Economic Review, May 2015

The experience of first Japan and now Europe and the USA suggests that Hansen's concept of secular stagnation is highly relevant. Recovery has been anemic and follows a generation of financially unsustainable and often lackluster growth. Investment demand...

Would People Behave Differently If They Better Understood Social Security? Evidence from a Field Experiment

By Jeffrey B. Liebman and Erzo F. P. Luttmer

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2015

This paper presents the results of a randomized field experiment that provided information about key Social Security features to older workers. The experiment was designed to examine whether it is possible to affect individual behavior using a relatively ...

The Impact of Regulation on Mortgage Risk: Evidence from India

By John Y. Campbell, Tarun Ramadorai, and Benjamin Ranish

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2015

We employ loan-level data on over a million loans disbursed in India between 1995 and 2010 to understand how fast-changing regulation impacted mortgage lending and risk. Our paper uses changes in regulatory treatment discontinuities associated with loan s...

How Financial Incentives Induce Disability Insurance Recipients to Return to Work

By Andreas Ravndal Kostol and Magne Mogstad

American Economic Review, February 2014

Using a local randomized experiment that arises from a sharp discontinuity in Disability Insurance (DI) policy in Norway, we provide transparent and credible identification of how financial incentives induce DI recipients to return to work. We find that...

Sources of Wage Inequality

By Anders Akerman, Elhanan Helpman, Oleg Itskhoki, Marc-Andreas Muendler, and Stephen Redding

American Economic Review, May 2013

Recent theories of firm heterogeneity emphasize between-firm wage differences as a new mechanism through which trade can affect wage inequality. Using linked employer-employee data for Sweden, we show that many of the stylized facts about wage inequality ...

The U.S. Equity Return Premium: Past, Present, and Future

By J. Bradford DeLong and Konstantin Magin

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2009

For more than a century, diversified long-horizon investments in America's stock market have consistently received much higher returns than investors in bonds: a return gap averaging 6 percent per year. An enormous amount of creative and ingenious work by...

The Global Welfare Impact of China: Trade Integration and Technological Change

By Julian di Giovanni, Andrei A. Levchenko, and Jing Zhang

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2014

This paper evaluates the global welfare impact of China's trade integration and technological change in a multi-country quantitative Ricardian-Heckscher-Ohlin model. We simulate two alternative growth scenarios: a "balanced" one in which China's productiv...

Economic Effects of an Ocean Acidification Catastrophe

By Stephen G. Colt and Gunnar P. Knapp

American Economic Review, May 2016

We assess the potential magnitude of the economic effects of an ocean acidification (OA) catastrophe by focusing on marine ecosystem services most likely to be affected. It is scientifically plausible that by 2200 OA could cause a complete collapse of mar...

Connecting Student Loans to Labor Market Outcomes: Policy Lessons from Chile

By Harald Beyer, Justine Hastings, Christopher Neilson, and Seth Zimmerman

American Economic Review, May 2015

Rising student loan default rates and protests over debt suggest that many students make college enrollment and financing choices they regret. Policymakers have considered tying the availability of federally subsidized loans at degree programs to financia...

Toward a Cost-of-Living Index: Progress and Prospects

[Symposium: Consumer Price Index]

By Katharine G. Abraham

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2003

Job Displacement

By Lori G. Kletzer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1998

The past decade and a half has seen tremendous research growth in the area of job displacement. This paper discusses the state of knowledge on the issues and questions of job loss. The 1984-96 Displaced Worker Surveys are used to describe how the characte...

Disability Benefit Receipt and Reform: Reconciling Trends in the United Kingdom

[Symposium: Disability Insurance]

By James Banks, Richard Blundell, and Carl Emmerson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2015

The UK has enacted a number of reforms to the structure of disability benefits that has made it a major case study for other countries thinking of reform. The introduction of Incapacity Benefit in 1995 coincided with a strong decline in disability benefit...

Women in Economics: Moving Up or Falling Off the Academic Career Ladder?

By Donna K. Ginther and Shulamit Kahn

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2004

The percentage of economics doctorates awarded to women has increased over the past twenty years. This article considers whether women Ph.D. economists have increased their representation in academia, particularly at higher tenured ranks. Our study draws ...

Brexit: The Economics of International Disintegration

By Thomas Sampson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2017

On June 23, 2016, the United Kingdom held a referendum on its membership in the European Union. Although most of Britain's establishment backed remaining in the European Union, 52 percent of voters disagreed and handed a surprise victory to the "leave" ...

Playing the Boys Game: Golf Buddies and Board Diversity

By Sumit Agarwal, Wenlan Qian, David M. Reeb, and Tien Foo Sing

American Economic Review, May 2016

We study the participation of women in golf, a predominately male social activity, and its influence on their likelihood of serving on a board of directors. Exploiting a novel dataset of all golfers in Singapore, we find that woman golfers enjoy a 54% hig...

Doctoral Dissertations in Economics

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2016

Social Interactions in High School: Lessons from an Earthquake

By Piero Cipollone and Alfonso Rosolia

American Economic Review, June 2007

After an earthquake hit Southern Italy in 1980, young men from certain towns were exempted from compulsory military service. We show that the exemption raised high-school-graduation rates of boys by more than 2 percentage points. We do this by comparing h...

Doctoral Dissertations in Economics

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2015