Welfare-Enhancing Technological Change and the Growth of Obesity

By Darius Lakdawalla, Tomas Philipson, and Jay Bhattacharya

American Economic Review, May 2005

The Mystery of Monogamy

By Eric D. Gould, Omer Moav, and Avi Simhon

American Economic Review, March 2008

We examine why developed societies are monogamous while rich men throughout history have typically practiced polygyny. Wealth inequality naturally produces multiple wives for rich men in a standard model of the marriage market. However, we demonstrate ...

Lending Booms, Smart Bankers, and Financial Crises

By Anjan Thakor

American Economic Review, May 2015

This paper develops a theory that explains why financial crises follow profitable lending booms. When agents exhibit the "availability heuristic" and there is a long period of banking profitability, all agents—banks, their investors, and regulators&...

Understanding the Changing Structure of Scientific Inquiry

By Ajay Agrawal, Avi Goldfarb, and Florenta Teodoridis

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2016

The fall of the Iron Curtain led to an influx of new mathematical ideas into western science. We show that research teams grew disproportionately in size in subfields of mathematics in which the Soviets were strongest. This is consistent with the knowledg...

Social Culture and Economic Performance

By Hanming Fang

American Economic Review, September 2001

The connection between obtaining higher paying jobs and undertaking some seemingly irrelevant activity is interpreted as "social culture." In the context of a society trying to adopt a new technology, I show that by allowing the firms to give preferential...

Achieving Efficiency in Dynamic Contribution Games

By Jakša Cvitanić and George Georgiadis

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2016

We analyze a game in which a group of agents exerts costly effort over time to make progress on a project. The project is completed once the cumulative effort reaches a prespecified threshold, at which point it generates a lump-sum payoff. We characterize...

Oil and the Macroeconomy Since the 1970s

By Robert B. Barsky and Lutz Kilian

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2004

Increases in oil prices have been held responsible for recessions, periods of excessive inflation, reduced productivity and lower economic growth. In this paper, we review the arguments supporting such views. First, we highlight some of the conceptual dif...

Religious Conversion in Colonial Africa

By Nathan Nunn

American Economic Review, May 2010

Persistence of Population Shocks: Evidence from the Occupation of West Germany after World War II

By Abel Schumann

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2014

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, millions of German expellees were resettled into the new borders of Germany, but not into the parts of Germany that were occupied by France. Using a spatial regression discontinuity framework, I estimate the per...

Read All about It!! What Happens Following a Technology Shock?

By Michelle Alexopoulos

American Economic Review, June 2011

Existing indicators of technical change are plagued by shortcomings. I present new measures based on books published in the field of technology that resolve many of these problems and use them to identify the impact of technology shocks on economic act...

Contracts and Technology Adoption

By Daron Acemoglu, Pol Antràs, and Elhanan Helpman

American Economic Review, June 2007

We develop a tractable framework for the analysis of the relationship between contractual incompleteness, technological complementarities, and technology adoption. In our model, a firm chooses its technology and investment levels in contractible activi...

Comparisons of Weekly Hours over the Past Century and the Importance of Work-Sharing Policies in the 1930s

By Todd C. Neumann, Jason E. Taylor, and Price Fishback

American Economic Review, May 2013

Changes in the work week drove a larger portion of changes in total labor input during the Great Depression of the 1930s than during other decades. Work-sharing policies appear to be responsible. Herbert Hoover created various work-sharing committees--led...

Puzzles: On the Economics of Crime and Confiscation

By Ted Bergstrom

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1990

The puzzles in this column focus on the issues of crime and confiscation. Answers to all three puzzles can be found at the end of the column.

Is Monetary Policy Effective during Financial Crises?

By Frederic S. Mishkin

American Economic Review, May 2009

Thinking and Feeling

By Paul M. Romer

American Economic Review, May 2000

Payday Loans and Credit Cards: New Liquidity and Credit Scoring Puzzles?

By Sumit Agarwal, Paige Marta Skiba, and Jeremy Tobacman

American Economic Review, May 2009

Gains from Trade When Firms Matter

[Symposium: International Trade]

By Marc J. Melitz and Daniel Trefler

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2012

The rising prominence of intra-industry trade and huge multinationals has transformed the way economists think about the gains from trade. In the past, we focused on gains that stemmed either from endowment differences (wheat for iron ore) or inter-indust...

Liquidity Constraints and Deforestation: The Limitations of Payments for Ecosystem Services

By Seema Jayachandran

American Economic Review, May 2013

A popular environmental policy is to pay forest owners for avoiding deforestation on their land. This is an example of "payments for ecosystem services" (PES). This paper shows that liquidity constraints can limit the effectiveness of PES programs. If an ...

Retrospectives: How Joan Robinson and B. L. Hallward Named Monopsony

By Robert J. Thornton

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2004

The term "monopsony" was introduced by Joan Robinson in her 1932 classic The Economics of Imperfect Competition, although she gives credit to classics scholar B.L. Hallward of Cambridge for the actual coining of the term. Even though the term has become w...

Health Insurance and Income Inequality

[Symposium: Inequality Beyond Income]

By Robert Kaestner and Darren Lubotsky

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2016

Health insurance and other in-kind forms of compensation and government benefits are typically not included in measures of income and analyses of inequality. This omission is important. Given the large and growing cost of health care in the United States...