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?

Calebe de Roure on the rise of peer-to-peer lending

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Is online peer lending going to start encroaching on established banks' turf?

Costas Cavounidis on why racial discrimination in the workplace is still around

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Historical discrimination creates a vicious cycle that continues today

Immigrants' Labor Supply and Exchange Rate Volatility

By Arash Nekoei

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2013

Are an immigrant's decisions affected in real time by her home country's economy? I examine this question by exploiting exchange rate variations as exogenous price shocks to immigrants' budget constraints. I find that in response to a 10 percent dollar...

Dan Hamermesh on nonwork during work hours

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Evidence from the American Time Use Survey

Disparities in Wealth Accumulation and Loss from the Great Recession and Beyond

By Signe-Mary McKernan, Caroline Ratcliffe, Eugene Steuerle, and Sisi Zhang

American Economic Review, May 2014

Using over two decades of Survey of Consumer Finances data and a pseudo-panel technique, we measure the impact of the Great Recession on US family wealth relative to the counterfactual of what wealth would have been given wealth accumulation trajectories....

Informal Taxation

By Benjamin A. Olken and Monica Singhal

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2011

Informal payments are a frequently overlooked source of local public finance in developing countries. We use microdata from ten countries to establish stylized facts on the magnitude, form, and distributional implications of this "informal taxation." Inf...

Sacred versus Pseudo-sacred Values: How People Cope with Taboo Trade-Offs

By Philip E. Tetlock, Barbara A. Mellers, and J. Peter Scoblic

American Economic Review, May 2017

Psychologists have documented widespread public deference to "sacred values" that communities, formally or informally, exempt from tradeoffs with secular limits, like money. This work has, however, been largely confined to low-stakes settings. As the stak...

Are Idle Hands the Devil's Workshop? Incapacitation, Concentration, and Juvenile Crime

By Brian A. Jacob and Lars Lefgren

American Economic Review, December 2003

This paper examines the short-term effect of school on juvenile crime. To do so, we bring together daily measures of criminal activity and detailed school calendar information from 29 jurisdictions across the country, and utilize the plausibly exogenous v...

Two Illustrations of the Quantity Theory of Money: Breakdowns and Revivals

By Thomas J. Sargent and Paolo Surico

American Economic Review, February 2011

By extending his data, we document the instability of low-frequency regression coefficients that Lucas (1980) used to express the quantity theory of money. We impute the differences in these regression coefficients to differences in monetary policies acro...

Comparing Voting by Committees According to Their Manipulability

By R. Pablo Arribillaga and Jordi Massó

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2017

We consider the class of voting by committees to be used by a society to collectively choose a subset from a given set of objects. We offer a simple criterion to compare two voting by committees without dummy agents according to their manipulability. This...

David Gomtsyan on how the container revolution changed the economies of port cities

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Longshoreman jobs have mostly disappeared – but new jobs have been created, too

The Economics of Reparations

By William Darity Jr and Dania Frank

American Economic Review, May 2003

Falling through the Cracks? Grade Retention and School Dropout among Children of Likely Unauthorized Immigrants

By Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes and Mary J. Lopez

American Economic Review, May 2015

We evaluate how intensified interior immigration enforcement impacts the likelihood that children of unauthorized immigrants will repeat a grade or drop out of school. Using a weighted index of the intensity of interior immigration enforcement at the MSA ...

David Ong on the subtle role of beauty in college admissions

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Why do top U.S. colleges have more attractive students on average?

Erin McGuire on how crowdfunding can open doors for female entrepreneurs

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How can crowdfunding help close the gender gap among entrepreneurs?

The Catch-22 of External Validity in the Context of Constraints to Firm Growth

By Greg Fischer and Dean Karlan

American Economic Review, May 2015

We document the presence of multiple and varied constraints to small and medium firm growth. This presents both a practical problem for business training programs and a challenge to academic economists trying to identify mechanisms though which these p...