Longevity Complementarities under Competing Risks

By William H. Dow, Tomas J. Philipson, and Xavier Sala-i-Martin

American Economic Review, December 1999

Mortality Reductions, Educational Attainment, and Fertility Choice

By Rodrigo R. Soares

American Economic Review, June 2005

This paper develops a model where reductions in mortality are the main force behind economic development. The model generates a pattern of changes similar to the demographic transition, where gains in life expectancy at birth are followed by reductions in...

Property Taxation, Zoning, and Efficiency in a Dynamic Tiebout Model

By Levon Barseghyan and Stephen Coate

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2016

This paper presents a dynamic Tiebout model and uses it to revisit a classic argument in public finance. The argument, due to Hamilton (1975), is that a system of governments financing services with property taxes will produce an efficient allocation of h...

Climate Shocks and Exports

By Benjamin F. Jones and Benjamin A. Olken

American Economic Review, May 2010

Monitoring, Motivation, and Management: The Determinants of Opportunistic Behavior in a Field Experiment

By Daniel S. Nagin, James B. Rebitzer, Seth Sanders, and Lowell J. Taylor

American Economic Review, September 2002

Economic models of incentives in employment relationships are based on a specific theory of motivation: employees are "rational cheaters," who anticipate the consequences of their actions and shirk when the marginal benefits exceed costs. We investigate t...

Patent Quality and Examination in Europe

By Dietmar Harhoff

American Economic Review, May 2016

This paper reports on effects of recent administrative reforms at the European Patent Office (EPO). In EPO-granted patents, claims numbers started to decline in 2008 when new claims fees became effective, claims sections in patents became shorter, and ind...

High Unemployment Yet Few Small Firms: The Role of Centralized Bargaining in South Africa

By Jeremy R. Magruder

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2012

South Africa has very high unemployment, yet few adults work informally in small firms. This paper tests whether centralized bargaining, by which unionized large firms extend arbitration agreements to nonunionized smaller firms, contributes to this probl...

Governance Institutions and Economic Activity

By Avinash Dixit

American Economic Review, March 2009

Physicians Treating Physicians: Information and Incentives in Childbirth

By Erin M. Johnson and M. Marit Rehavi

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2016

This paper provides new evidence on the interaction between patient information and physician financial incentives. Using rich microdata on childbirth, we compare the treatment of physicians when they are patients with that of comparable nonphysicians. We...

Fiscal Consolidation in an Open Economy

By Christopher J. Erceg and Jesper Lindé

American Economic Review, May 2012

his paper uses a New Keynesian DSGE model of a small open economy to compare how the effects of fiscal consolidation differ depending on whether monetary policy is constrained by currency union membership or by the zero lower bound on policy rates. We sho...

Is the Impact of Health Shocks Cushioned by Socioeconomic Status? The Case of Low Birthweight

By Janet Currie and Rosemary Hyson

American Economic Review, May 1999

Human Capital Prices, Productivity, and Growth

By Audra J. Bowlus and Chris Robinson

American Economic Review, December 2012

Separate identification of the price and quantity of human capital has important implications for understanding key issues in economics. Price and quantity series are derived for four education levels. The price series are highly correlated and they ex...

Time to Build and Fluctuations in Bulk Shipping

By Myrto Kalouptsidi

American Economic Review, February 2014

This paper explores the nature of fluctuations in world bulk shipping by quantifying the impact of time to build and demand uncertainty on investment and prices. We examine the impact of both construction lags and their lengthening in periods of high i...

The Value of Democracy: Evidence from Road Building in Kenya

By Robin Burgess, Remi Jedwab, Edward Miguel, Ameet Morjaria, and Gerard Padró i Miquel

American Economic Review, June 2015

Ethnic favoritism is seen as antithetical to development. This paper provides credible quantification of the extent of ethnic favoritism using data on road building in Kenyan districts across the 1963-2011 period. Guided by a model, it then examines wheth...

Momentum Traders in the Housing Market: Survey Evidence and a Search Model

By Monika Piazzesi and Martin Schneider

American Economic Review, May 2009

The Effect of Grade Retention on High School Completion

By Brian A. Jacob and Lars Lefgren

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2009

Low-achieving students in many school districts are retained in a grade to allow them to gain the academic or social skills that teachers believe are necessary to succeed academically. In this paper, we use plausibly exogenous variation in retention ge...

Stock Market Wealth and Consumption

By James M. Poterba

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2000

This paper explores the link between changes in the aggregate value of corporate stock and changes in consumer spending. It presents data on the distribution of corporate stock ownership based on the 1998 Survey of Consumer Finances. It also uses time-ser...

Conflicts and Common Interests in Committees

By Hao Li, Sherwin Rosen, and Wing Suen

American Economic Review, December 2001

Committees improve decisions by pooling members' independent information, but promote manipulation, obfuscation, and exaggeration of private information when members have conflicting preferences. Committee decision procedures transform continuous data int...

Character Endorsements and Electoral Competition

By Archishman Chakraborty and Parikshit Ghosh

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2016

When an elite-controlled media strategically endorses candidates in order to promote its own ideological agenda, office-seeking parties may completely pander to the media, under moderate ideological conflict between voters and the elite. Larger ideolog...

Consumer Confidence and Consumer Spending

[Symposium: Consumer Confidence]

By Sydney C. Ludvigson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2004

Despite the widespread attention given to surveys of consumer confidence, the mechanisms by which household attitudes influence the real economy are less well understood. This paper begins with an overview of how consumer confidence is measured and report...