Gibrat's Law for (All) Cities: Comment

By Moshe Levy

American Economic Review, September 2009

Jan Eeckhout (2004) reports that the empirical city size distribution is lognormal, consistent with Gibrat's Law. We show that for the top 0.6 percent of the largest cities, the empirical distribution is dramatically different from the lognormal, and foll...

Women, Wealth, and Mobility

By Lena Edlund and Wojciech Kopczuk

American Economic Review, March 2009

Using estate tax returns data, we observe that the share of women among the very wealthy in the United States peaked in the late 1960s at nearly one-half and then declined to one-third. We argue that this pattern reflects changes in the importance of d...

The Parallel-Currency Approach to Asian Monetary Integration

By Barry Eichengreen

American Economic Review, May 2006

Organizational Fragmentation and Care Quality in the U.S. Healthcare System

[Symposium: Health Care]

By Randall D. Cebul, James B. Rebitzer, Lowell J. Taylor, and Mark E. Votruba

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2008

Many goods and services can be readily provided through a series of unconnected transactions, but in health care, close coordination over time and within care episodes improves both health outcomes and efficiency. Close coordination is problematic in the ...

Saying no to energy savings

[Research Highlight]

December 01, 2017

Economics is helping to explain the energy-efficiency gap.

Exchange Rates and Wages in an Integrated World

By Prachi Mishra and Antonio Spilimbergo

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2011

We analyze how the pass-through from exchange rate to domestic wages depends on the degree of integration between domestic and foreign labor markets. Using data from 66 countries over the period 1981-2005, we find that the elasticity of domestic wages to ...

Separating Bayesian Updating from Non-Probabilistic Reasoning: An Experimental Investigation

By Dan Levin, James Peck, and Asen Ivanov

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2016

Through a series of decision tasks involving colored cards, we provide separate measures of Bayesian updating and non-probabilistic reasoning skills. We apply these measures to (and are the first to study) a common-value Dutch auction. This format is m...

How to Count Citations If You Must

By Motty Perry and Philip J. Reny

American Economic Review, September 2016

Citation indices are regularly used to inform critical decisions about promotion, tenure, and the allocation of billions of research dollars. Nevertheless, most indices (e.g., the h-index) are motivated by intuition and rules of thumb, resulting in undesi...

How Effective Are Public Policies to Increase Health Insurance Coverage among Young Adults?

By Phillip B. Levine, Robin McKnight, and Samantha Heep

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2011

This paper assesses the impact of policies to increase insurance coverage for young adults. The introduction of SCHIP in 1997 enabled low-income teens up to age 19 to gain access to public health insurance. More recent policies enabled young adults betwe...

Partner Uncertainty and the Dynamic Boundary of the Firm

By Thomas Hellmann and Veikko Thiele

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2017

We develop a new theory of the dynamic boundary of the firm where asset owners may want to change partners ex post. We identify a fundamental trade-off between (i) a "displacement externality" under non-integration, where a partner leaves a relationship e...

Access to Credit by Small Businesses: How Relevant Are Race, Ethnicity, and Gender?

By Elizabeth Asiedu, James A. Freeman, and Akwasi Nti-Addae

American Economic Review, May 2012

This paper employs data from the 1998 and 2003 Survey of Small Business Finances to analyze whether, after controlling for observable factors that influence loan decisions, there is a significant difference in the loan approval rate and the interest rate ...

Discounting Inside the Washington D.C. Beltway

By Coleman Bazelon and Kent Smetters

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1999

This article focuses on how the choice of discount rate can dramatically affect policy choices. These policies include whether to build a bridge, whether to privatize a Power Marketing Administration which sells electricity generated by government-owned f...

Did Expanding the EITC Promote Motherhood?

By Reagan Baughman and Stacy Dickert-Conlin

American Economic Review, May 2003

Intergenerational Occupational Mobility in Great Britain and the United States since 1850: Comment

By Michael Hout and Avery M. Guest

American Economic Review, August 2013

We reanalyze Long and Ferrie's data. We find that the association of occupational status across generations was quite similar over time and place. Two significant differences were: (i) American farms in 1880 were far more open to men who had nonfarm backg...

Andreas Steinmayr on how people choose their fields of study

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A little exposure to a new field can make a big difference

Capital Controls with International Reserve Accumulation: Can This Be Optimal?

By Philippe Bacchetta, Kenza Benhima, and Yannick Kalantzis

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2013

Motivated by the Chinese experience, we analyze an economy where the central bank has access to international capital markets, but the private sector does not. The central bank is modeled as a Ramsey planner who can choose the domestic interest rate an...

All-or-Nothing Monitoring: Comment

By Bo Chen

American Economic Review, March 2010

Zhao (2008) presents an interesting "all-or-nothing monitoring" result for a multitask moral hazard agency problem with partial effort observation. We argue that the optimal contract based on the non-verifiable observation of the agent's effort in Zhao (2...

Azhar Iqbal on measuring just how much a recession costs

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The detrimental impacts of a recession can last for years and cost trillions

How Vouchers Could Change the Market for Education

[Symposium: School Vouchers]

By Derek Neal

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2002

Bruce Weinberg on what makes for transformative science

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Is it true that only young minds can produce game-changing scientific discoveries?