Distinguished Lecture on Economics in Government-What We Don't Know Could Hurt Us: Some Reflections on the Measurement of Economic Activity

By Katharine G. Abraham

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2005

The routine production of U.S. economic statistics dates back to the early part of the twentieth century. But in recent decades, as services output has continued to expand a system of economic statistics that had been designed during the manufacturing era...

The Vulnerability of Minority Homeowners in the Housing Boom and Bust: Corrigendum

By Patrick Bayer, Fernando Ferreira, and Stephen L. Ross

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2017

Population Size Effects in the Structural Development of England

By Oksana M. Leukhina and Stephen J. Turnovsky

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2016

The English structural transformation from farming to manufacturing was accompanied by rapid technological change, expansion of trade, and massive population growth. While the roles of technology and trade in this process have been investigated, the liter...

Extreme Wage Inequality: Pay at the Very Top

By Brian D. Bell and John Van Reenen

American Economic Review, May 2013

We provide new evidence on the growth in pay at the very top of the wage distribution in the United Kingdom. Sectoral decompositions show that workers in the financial sector have accounted for the majority of the gains at the top over the last decade. Ne...

Measuring Returns on Investments in Collectibles

By Benjamin J. Burton and Joyce P. Jacobsen

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1999

This paper considers the question of how to measure and interpret the financial return to investing in collectibles. We review various methodologies for creating priced indexes and then discuss studies that explicitly calculate a rate of return to some se...

Sticky Prices and Monetary Policy: Evidence from Disaggregated US Data

By Jean Boivin, Marc P. Giannoni, and Ilian Mihov

American Economic Review, March 2009

This paper shows that the recent evidence that disaggregated prices are volatile does not necessarily challenge the hypothesis of price rigidity used in a large class of macroeconomic models. We document the effect of macroeconomic and sectoral disturb...

International Unions

By Alberto Alesina, Ignazio Angeloni, and Federico Etro

American Economic Review, June 2005

We model an international union as a group of countries deciding to centralize the provision of public goods, or policies, that generate externalities across union members. The trade-off between the benefits of coordination and the loss of independent pol...

Effects of Tax Reform on Labor Supply, Investment, and Saving

[Symposium: Tax Reform Act of 1986]

By Barry Bosworth and Gary Burtless

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1992

The U.S. tax system received two major overhauls during the 1980s: the tax cuts of 1981 and the Tax Reform Act of 1986. Supporters of both reforms argued that major changes in tax policy could boost saving, investment, labor supply, and entrepreneurship. ...

The Cross-Section of Foreign Currency Risk Premia and Consumption Growth Risk: Reply

By Hanno Lustig and Adrien Verdelhan

American Economic Review, December 2011

The consumption growth beta of an investment strategy that goes long in high interest rate currencies and short in low interest rate currencies is large and significant. Consumption risk price differs significantly from zero, even after accounting for the...

Some Evolutionary Foundations for Price Level Rigidity

By Gilles Saint-Paul

American Economic Review, June 2005

This paper shows that price rigidity evolves in an economy populated by imperfectly rational agents who experiment with alternative rules of thumb. In the model, firms must set their prices in face of aggregate demand shocks. Their payoff depends on the l...

Local Responses to Federal Grants: Evidence from the Introduction of Title I in the South

By Elizabeth U. Cascio, Nora Gordon, and Sarah Reber

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2013

We analyze the effects of the introduction of Title I of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, a large federal grants program designed to increase poor students' educational services and achievement. We focus on the South, the poorest region of...

Identity-Based Policies and Identity Manipulation: Evidence from Colonial Punjab

By Guilhem Cassan

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2015

I study identity-marker based policies and demonstrate the existence of identity manipulation. I analyze the impact of the Punjab Alienation of Land Act (1901), a caste-based legislation, on identity manipulation. Using data from the colonial census, I sh...

Trust and Reciprocity between Spouses in India

By Carolina Castilla

American Economic Review, May 2015

I present results from the first trust game conducted among married couples. The experiment consisted of a one-shot trust game where spouses were taken into separate rooms, not allowed to communicate, given a significant endowment, and both strategies and...

Offshoring and the Role of Trade Agreements

By Pol Antràs and Robert W. Staiger

American Economic Review, December 2012

The rise of offshoring of intermediate inputs raises important questions for commercial policy. Do the distinguishing features of offshoring introduce novel reasons for trade policy intervention? Does offshoring create new problems of global policy coo...

Equilibrium Investment and Asset Prices under Imperfect Corporate Control

By James Dow, Gary Gorton, and Arvind Krishnamurthy

American Economic Review, June 2005

We integrate a widely accepted version of the separation of ownership and control—Michael Jensen's (1986) free cash flow theory—into a dynamic equilibrium model, and study the effect of imperfect corporate control on asset prices and investment. Aggre...

Height, Health, and Inequality: The Distribution of Adult Heights in India

By Angus Deaton

American Economic Review, May 2008

An Experimental Test of Flexible Combinatorial Spectrum Auction Formats

By Christoph Brunner, Jacob K. Goeree, Charles A. Holt, and John O. Ledyard

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2010

This paper reports laboratory experiments that evaluate the performance of a flexible package bidding format developed by the FCC, in comparison with other combinatorial formats. In general, the interest of policy makers in combinatorial auctions is ju...

Dynamic Scoring: An Introduction to the Issues

By Alan J. Auerbach

American Economic Review, May 2005

Minimax Play at Wimbledon: Comment

By Shih-Hsun Hsu, Chen-Ying Huang, and Cheng-Tao Tang

American Economic Review, March 2007

Efficiency and Information Aggregation in Auctions

By Wolfgang Pesendorfer and Jeroen M. Swinkels

American Economic Review, June 2000

The tension between allocative efficiency and information aggregation is explored in the context of an auction: k identical objects of unknown quality are auctioned off to n bidders whose tastes affect their valuation of an object of given quality. Bidder...