Long-Term Impacts of Compensatory Preschool on Health and Behavior: Evidence from Head Start

By Pedro Carneiro and Rita Ginja

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2014

This paper provides new estimates of the medium- and long-term impacts of Head Start on health and behavioral problems. We identify these impacts using discontinuities in the probability of participation induced by program eligibility rules. Our strate...

HIV/AIDS and Fertility

By Jane G. Fortson

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2009

This paper studies the response of fertility to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa. I use repeated cross sections of the Demographic and Health Surveys for 12 countries in sub-Saharan Africa to examine this question empirically. Using individu...

Aggregate Savings and External Imbalances in China

[Symposium: China's Economy]

By Dennis Tao Yang

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2012

Over the last decade, the internal and external macroeconomic imbalances in China have risen to unprecedented levels. In 2008, China's national savings rate soared to over 53 percent of its GDP, whereas its current account surplus exceeded 9 percent of G...

Measuring the Effect of the Zero Lower Bound on Medium- and Longer-Term Interest Rates

By Eric T. Swanson and John C. Williams

American Economic Review, October 2014

According to standard macroeconomic models, the zero lower bound greatly reduces the effectiveness of monetary policy and increases the efficacy of fiscal policy. However, private-sector decisions depend on the entire path of expected future short-term...

Revenue and Incentive Effects of Basis Step-Up at Death: Lessons from the 2010 "Voluntary" Estate Tax Regime

By Robert Gordon, David Joulfaian, and James Poterba

American Economic Review, May 2016

In 2010, the U.S. estate tax expired and executors of wealthy decedents were not required to file estate tax returns. In the absence of the estate tax, beneficiaries received assets with carryover rather than stepped-up basis. Unrealized capital gains acc...

The Real Swing Voter's Curse

By James A. Robinson and Ragnar Torvik

American Economic Review, May 2009

Economic History and Modern India: Redefining the Link

[Symposium: India]

By Tirthankar Roy

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2002

This paper argues that to restore the link between economic history and modern India, a different narrative of Indian economic history is needed. An exclusive focus on colonialism as the driver of India's economic history misses those continuities that ar...

Optimal Risk Adjustment in Markets with Adverse Selection: An Application to Managed Care

By Jacob Glazer and Thomas G. McGuire

American Economic Review, September 2000

Profitability of Fertilizer: Experimental Evidence from Female Rice Farmers in Mali

By Lori Beaman, Dean Karlan, Bram Thuysbaert, and Christopher Udry

American Economic Review, May 2013

We conducted an experiment providing fertilizer grants to female rice farmers in Mali. We found that women who received fertilizer used both more fertilizer and more complementary inputs such as herbicides and hired labor. This shows that farmers respond ...

Oaxaca-Blinder as a Reweighting Estimator

By Patrick Kline

American Economic Review, May 2011

The classic regression based estimator of counterfactual means studied by Ronald Oaxaca (1973) and Alan Blinder (1973) is shown to constitute a propensity score reweighting estimator based upon a linear model for the conditional odds of being treated.

Price Indexes, Inequality, and the Measurement of World Poverty

By Angus Deaton

American Economic Review, March 2010

I discuss the measurement of world poverty and inequality, with particular attention to the role of purchasing power parity (PPP) price indexes from the International Comparison Project. Global inequality increased with the latest revision of the ICP, ...

Legal, Political, and Institutional Constraints on the Financial Crisis Policy Response

[Symposium: The Bailouts of 2007-2009]

By Phillip Swagel

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2015

As the financial crisis manifested itself and peaked in 2007 and 2008, the response of US policymakers and regulators was shaped in important ways by legal and political constraints. Policymakers lacked certain legal authorities that would have been usefu...

The Consequences of Radical Reform: The French Revolution

By Daron Acemoglu, Davide Cantoni, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson

American Economic Review, December 2011

The French Revolution had a momentous impact on neighboring countries. It removed the legal and economic barriers protecting oligarchies, established the principle of equality before the law, and prepared economies for the new industrial opportunities of ...

Persistence of Fortune: Accounting for Population Movements, There Was No Post-Columbian Reversal

By Areendam Chanda, C. Justin Cook, and Louis Putterman

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2014

Using data on place of origin of today's country populations and the indicators of level of development in 1500 used by Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2002), we confirm a reversal of fortune for colonized countries as territories, but find persistence o...

Malaria Eradication and Educational Attainment: Evidence from Paraguay and Sri Lanka

By Adrienne M. Lucas

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2010

Mid-twentieth century malaria eradication campaigns largely eliminated malaria from Paraguay and Sri Lanka. Using these interventions as quasi-experiments, I estimate malaria's effect on lifetime female educational attainment through the combination of...

Transportation Costs and International Trade in the Second Era of Globalization

By David Hummels

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2007

While the precise causes of postwar trade growth are not well understood, declines in transport costs top the lists of usual suspects. However, there is remarkably little systematic evidence documenting the decline. This paper brings to bear an eclectic m...

Free Trade Agreements and the Consolidation of Democracy

By Xuepeng Liu and Emanuel Ornelas

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2014

We study the relationship between participation in free trade agreements (FTAs) and the sustainability of democracy. Our model shows that FTAs can critically reduce the incentive of authoritarian groups to seek power by destroying protectionist rents, ...

Organizing for Synergies

By Wouter Dessein, Luis Garicano, and Robert Gertner

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2010

Large companies are usually organized into business units, yet some activities are almost always centralized in a company-wide functional unit. We first show that organizations endogenously create an incentive conflict between functional managers (who de...

How Richard Nixon Pressured Arthur Burns: Evidence from the Nixon Tapes

By Burton A. Abrams

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2006

Evidence from the Nixon tapes, now available to researchers, shows that President Richard Nixon pressured the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Arthur Burns, to engage in expansionary monetary policies in the run-up to the 1972 election. This paper quotes...

Cluster-Sample Methods in Applied Econometrics

By Jeffrey M. Wooldridge

American Economic Review, May 2003