Using Internet Data for Economic Research

By Benjamin Edelman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2012

The data used by economists can be broadly divided into two categories. First, structured datasets arise when a government agency, trade association, or company can justify the expense of assembling records. The Internet has transformed how economists int...

Mindless Eating and Healthy Heuristics for the Irrational

By Brian Wansink, David R. Just, and Collin R. Payne

American Economic Review, May 2009

Killing Me Softly: The Fetal Origins Hypothesis

By Douglas Almond and Janet Currie

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2011

In the epidemiological literature, the fetal origins hypothesis associated with David J. Barker posits that chronic, degenerative conditions of adult health, including heart disease and type 2 diabetes, may be triggered by circumstances decades earlier, p...

Optimal Sticky Prices under Rational Inattention

By Bartosz Mackowiak and Mirko Wiederholt

American Economic Review, June 2009

This paper presents a model in which price setting firms decide what to pay attention to, subject to a constraint on information flow. When idiosyncratic conditions are more variable or more important than aggregate conditions, firms pay more attention...

Do Democratic Transitions Produce Bad Economic Outcomes?

By Dani Rodrik and Romain Wacziarg

American Economic Review, May 2005

Health and the Political Agency of Women

By Sonia Bhalotra and Irma Clots-Figueras

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2014

We investigate whether women's political representation in state legislatures improves public provision of antenatal and childhood health services in the districts from which they are elected, arguing that the costs of poor services in this domain fall...

Peer Effects, Teacher Incentives, and the Impact of Tracking: Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation in Kenya

By Esther Duflo, Pascaline Dupas, and Michael Kremer

American Economic Review, August 2011

To the extent that students benefit from high-achieving peers, tracking will help strong students and hurt weak ones. However, all students may benefit if tracking allows teachers to better tailor their instruction level. Lower-achieving pupils are partic...

Pride and Prejudice: The Human Side of Incentive Theory

By Tore Ellingsen and Magnus Johannesson

American Economic Review, June 2008

Desire for social esteem is a source of prosocial behavior. We develop a model in which actors' utility of esteem depends on the audience. In a principal agent setting, we show that the model can account for motivational crowding out. Control systems a...

Retrospectives: The Law of Diminishing Returns

By Stanley L. Brue

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1993

From introductory economics to theoretical papers, the law of diminishing returns is a part of every economist's tool kit. But the evolution of this law in the history of economic analysis reveals more complexity than is perhaps generally understood. Even...

Coping with Terms-of-Trade Shocks: Pegs versus Floats

By Christian Broda

American Economic Review, May 2001

Consumption Inequality

[Symposium: Inequality Beyond Income]

By Orazio P. Attanasio and Luigi Pistaferri

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2016

In this essay, we discuss the importance of consumption inequality in the debate concerning the measurement of disparities in economic well-being. We summarize the advantages and disadvantages of using consumption as opposed to income for measuring trends...

Comparing the Costs of Intermittent and Dispatchable Electricity Generating Technologies

By Paul L. Joskow

American Economic Review, May 2011

Economic evaluations of alternative electric generating technologies typically rely on comparisons between their expected "levelized cost" per MWh supplied. I demonstrate that this metric is inappropriate for comparing intermittent generating technologies...

The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation: Reply

By Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson

American Economic Review, October 2012

Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2001) established that economic institutions today are correlated with expected mortality of European colonialists. David Albouy argues this relationship is not robust. He drops all data from Latin America and much of the ...

New Evidence and Perspectives on Mergers

[Symposium: Changes in Corporate Structure]

By Gregor Andrade, Mark Mitchell, and Erik Stafford

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2001

As in previous decades, merger activity clusters by industry during the 1990s. One particular kind of industry shock, deregulation, becomes a dominant factor, accountings for nearly half of the merger activity since the late 1980s. In contrast to the 1980...

Selection and Economic Gains in the Great Migration of African Americans: New Evidence from Linked Census Data

By William J. Collins and Marianne H. Wanamaker

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2014

The onset of World War I spurred the "Great Migration" of African Americans from the US South, arguably the most important internal migration in US history. We create a new panel dataset of more than 5,000 men matched from the 1910 to 1930 census manus...

Measuring Duopoly Power in the British Electricity Spot Market

By Catherine D. Wolfram

American Economic Review, September 1999

This article presents an empirical study of market power in the British electricity industry. Estimates of price-cost markups are derived using direct measures of marginal cost and several approaches that do not rely on cost data. Since two suppliers faci...

The Spike at Benefit Exhaustion: Leaving the Unemployment System or Starting a New Job?

By David Card, Raj Chetty, and Andrea Weber

American Economic Review, May 2007

The Impact of Medicaid on Labor Market Activity and Program Participation: Evidence from the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment

By Katherine Baicker, Amy Finkelstein, Jae Song, and Sarah Taubman

American Economic Review, May 2014

In 2008, a group of uninsured low-income adults in Oregon was selected by lottery for the chance to apply for Medicaid. Using this randomized design and 2009 administrative data, we find no significant effect of Medicaid on employment or earnings. Our 95 ...

The Significance of Federal Taxes as Automatic Stabilizers

[Symposium: Fiscal Policy]

By Alan J. Auerbach and Daniel R. Feenberg

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2000

Using the TAXSIM model for the period 1962-95, we consider the federal tax system's impact as an automatic stabilizer. Despite the many changes in the tax system, there has been relatively little change in its role as an automatic stabilizer. We estimate ...

How Far Has the Transition Progressed?

[Symposium: Transition from Socialism]

By Peter Murrell

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1996

As the opening contribution to a four-page symposium, this paper provides an overview of the economic transformation in reforming countries of eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, describing reforms, their consequences, and lessons economists might...