Wealth Concentration in a Developing Economy: Paris and France, 1807-1994

By Thomas Piketty, Gilles Postel-Vinay, and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal

American Economic Review, March 2006

Using large samples of estate tax returns, we construct new series on wealth concentration in Paris and France from 1807 to 1994. Inequality increased until 1914 because industrial and financial estates grew dramatically. Then, adverse shocks, rather than...

The Effects of Global Shocks on Small Commodity-Exporting Economies: Lessons from Canada

By Valery Charnavoki and Juan J. Dolado

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2014

We propose a structural dynamic factor model of a small commodity-exporting economy, using Canada as a representative case study. Combining large panel data sets of the global and do- mestic economies, sign restrictions are used to identify relevant d...

Migration and Imperfect Monitoring: Implications for Intra-Household Allocation

By Joyce J. Chen

American Economic Review, May 2006

The Poverty Gap in School Spending Following the Introduction of Title I

By Elizabeth U. Cascio and Sarah Reber

American Economic Review, May 2013

Title I of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act explicitly directed more federal aid for K-12 education to poorer areas for the first time in US history, with a goal of promoting regional convergence in school spending. Using newly collected da...

Troubled Banks, Impaired Foreign Direct Investment: The Role of Relative Access to Credit

By Michael W. Klein, Joe Peek, and Eric S. Rosengren

American Economic Review, June 2002

During the 1980's, theories were developed to explain the striking correlation between real exchange rates and foreign direct investment (FDI). However, this relationship broke down for Japanese FDI in the 1990's, as the real exchange rate appreciated whi...

The Control Premium: A Preference for Payoff Autonomy

By David Owens, Zachary Grossman, and Ryan Fackler

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2014

We document individuals' willingness to pay to control their own payoff. Experiment participants choose whether to bet on themselves or on a partner answering a quiz question correctly. Given participants' beliefs, which we elicit separately, expected-mo...

A Reason for Quantity Regulation

By Edward L. Glaeser and Andrei Shleifer

American Economic Review, May 2001

Institutions versus Policies: A Tale of Two Islands

By Peter Blair Henry and Conrad Miller

American Economic Review, May 2009

Secrets of the Academy: The Drivers of University Endowment Success

By Josh Lerner, Antoinette Schoar, and Jialan Wang

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2008

University endowments have received much attention recently for their superior investment returns compared with other institutional investors. This study documents trends in college and university endowment returns and investments in the United States bet...

Information and Prices with Capacity Constraints

By Benjamin Lester

American Economic Review, June 2011

In the theoretical literature on consumer search, one conclusion is nearly universal: as buyers become better able to observe and compare prices ex ante, sellers will set lower prices in equilibrium. In this paper, I examine a standard consumer search mod...

Pathways to Adjustment: The Case of Information Technology Workers

By John Bound, Breno Braga, Joseph M. Golden, and Sarah Turner

American Economic Review, May 2013

One long-standing hypothesis about science and engineering labor markets is that the supply of highly skilled workers is likely to be inelastic in the short run. We consider the market for computer scientists and electrical engineers (IT workers) and the ...

Corrigendum: Psychological Pressure in Competitive Environments: Evidence from a Randomized Natural Experiment

By Jose Apesteguia and Ignacio Palacios-Huerta

American Economic Review, June 2011

Robustly Optimal Monetary Policy with Near-Rational Expectations

By Michael Woodford

American Economic Review, March 2010

The paper considers optimal monetary stabilization policy in a forward-looking model, when the central bank recognizes that private sector expectations need not be precisely model-consistent, and wishes to choose a policy that will be as good as possib...

What Has Economics to Say about Racial Discrimination?

[Symposium: Discrimination in Product, Credit and Labor Markets]

By Kenneth J. Arrow

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1998

Racial discrimination pervades every aspect of a society in which it is found. It is found above all in attitudes of both races, but also in social relations, in intermarriage, in residential location, and, frequently, in legal barriers. It is also found...

Input Constraints and the Efficiency of Entry: Lessons from Cardiac Surgery

By David M. Cutler, Robert S. Huckman, and Jonathan T. Kolstad

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2010

Prior studies suggest that with elastically supplied inputs free entry may lead to an inefficiently high number of firms in equilibrium. Under input scarcity, however, the welfare loss from free entry is reduced. Further, free entry may increase use of...

Fiscal Policy in a Financial Crisis: Standard Policy versus Bank Rescue Measures

By Robert Kollmann, Werner Roeger, and Jan in't Veld

American Economic Review, May 2012

A key dimension of fiscal policy during the financial crisis was massive government support for the banking system. The macroeconomic effects of that support have, so far, received little attention in the literature. This paper fills this gap, using a qua...

Tournaments and Office Politics: Evidence from a Real Effort Experiment

By Jeffrey Carpenter, Peter Hans Matthews, and John Schirm

American Economic Review, March 2010

Tournaments can elicit more effort but sabotage may attenuate the effect of competition. Because it is hard to separate effort and ability, the evidence on tournaments is thin. There is even less evidence on sabotage because these acts often consist of su...

Inflation Persistence, the NAIRU, and the Great Recession

By Mark W. Watson

American Economic Review, May 2014

The rate of inflation fell far less over the period 2007-2013 than in the period 1979-1985 despite similar large increases in the unemployment rate. This paper asks why. Possible explanations include a change in the persistence of inflation, changes in NA...

Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination

By Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan

American Economic Review, September 2004

We study race in the labor market by sending fictitious resumes to help-wanted ads in Boston and Chicago newspapers. To manipulate perceived race, resumes are randomly assigned African-American- or White-sounding names. White names receive 50 percent more...

On the Performance of the U.S. Transportation System: Caution Ahead

By Clifford Winston

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2013

Transportation is a vital sector of the U.S. economy based on consumers', firms', and government's enormous expenditures in money and time and on its effect on virtually all other sectors in the economy. I assess the performance of the transportation sy...