High Discounts and High Unemployment

By Robert E. Hall

American Economic Review, February 2017

Unemployment is high when financial discounts are high. In recessions, the stock market falls and all types of investment fall, including employers' investment in job creation. The discount rate implicit in the stock market rises, and discounts for other ...

Is Free Trade Good for the Environment?

By Werner Antweiler, Brian R. Copeland, and M. Scott Taylor

American Economic Review, September 2001

This paper investigates how openness to international goods markets affects pollution concentrations. We develop a theoretical model to divide trade's impact on pollution into scale, technique, and composition effects and then examine this theory using da...

The Economic Future of Europe

[Symposium: The Transformation of Europe]

By Olivier Blanchard

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2004

After three years of near stagnation, the mood in Europe is definitely gloomy. Many doubt that the European model has a future. In this paper, I argue that things are not so bad, and there is room for optimism. Over the last thirty years, productivity gro...

Effects of Federal Policy to Insure Young Adults: Evidence from the 2010 Affordable Care Act's Dependent-Coverage Mandate

By Yaa Akosa Antwi, Asako S. Moriya, and Kosali Simon

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2013

Using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), we study the health insurance and labor market implications of the recent Affordable Care Act (ACA) provision that allows dependents to remain on parental policies until age 26. Our...

The Other Transformation in Econometric Practice: Robust Tools for Inference

[Symposium: Con out of Economics]

By James H. Stock

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2010

Angrist and Pischke highlight one aspect of the research that has positively transformed econometric practice and teaching. They emphasize the rise of experiments and quasi-experiments as credible sources of identification in microeconometric studies, whi...

Cash for Coolers: Evaluating a Large-Scale Appliance Replacement Program in Mexico

By Lucas W. Davis, Alan Fuchs, and Paul Gertler

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2014

This paper evaluates a large-scale appliance replacement program in Mexico that from 2009 to 2012 helped 1.9 million households replace their old refrigerators and air conditioners with energyefficient models. Using household-level billing records from...

IQ and Income Inequality in a Sample of Sibling Pairs from Advantaged Family Backgrounds

By Charles Murray

American Economic Review, May 2002

Quasi-Experimental Evidence on the Connection between Property Taxes and Residential Capital Investment

By Byron Lutz

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2015

Do low property taxes attract new home construction? This question is answered using a large shock to property tax burdens caused by an unusual school finance reform in the state of New Hampshire. The estimates suggest that, in most of the state, communit...

Patient Cost-Sharing and Hospitalization Offsets in the Elderly

By Amitabh Chandra, Jonathan Gruber, and Robin McKnight

American Economic Review, March 2010

In the Medicare program, increases in cost sharing by a supplemental insurer can exert financial externalities. We study a policy change that raised patient cost sharing for the supplemental insurer for retired public employees in California. We find t...

Implicit Discrimination

By Marianne Bertrand, Dolly Chugh, and Sendhil Mullainathan

American Economic Review, May 2005

Aid, Policies, and Growth: Reply

By Craig Burnside and David Dollar

American Economic Review, June 2004

Occupational Licensing

By Morris M. Kleiner

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2000

The study of the regulation of occupations has a long and distinguished tradition in economics. In this paper, I present the central arguments and unresolved issues involving the costs and benefits of occupational licensing. The main benefits that are sug...

Financial Factors in the Great Depression

[Symposium: The Great Depression]

By Charles W. Calomiris

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1993

Macroeconomists have long argued that financial markets were important sources and propagators of decline during the Great Depression. Turning points during the Depression often coincided with or were preceded by dramatic events in financial markets: stoc...

Dictating the Risk: Experimental Evidence on Giving in Risky Environments

By J. Michelle Brock, Andreas Lange, and Erkut Y. Ozbay

American Economic Review, February 2013

We study if and how social preferences extend to risky environments. We provide experimental evidence from different versions of dictator games with risky outcomes and establish that preferences that are exclusively based on ex post or on ex ante compa...

The Role of Connections in Academic Promotions

By Natalia Zinovyeva and Manuel Bagues

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2015

This paper analyzes how evaluators' private information and subjective biases affect evaluations in academia. We use evidence from centralized selection exams in Spain, where evaluators are randomly assigned to promotion committees. Candidates are signifi...

Testing Paternalism: Cash versus In-Kind Transfers

By Jesse M. Cunha

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2014

Welfare programs are often implemented in-kind to promote outcomes that might not be realized under cash transfers. This paper tests whether such paternalistically motivated transfers are justified compared to cash, using a randomized controlled trial ...

Symposium on the Monetary Transmission Mechanism

[Symposium: The Monetary Transmission Mechanism]

By Frederic S. Mishkin

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1995

Understanding of monetary transmission mechanisms is crucial to answering a broad range of questions. These transmission mechanisms include interest-rate effects, exchange-rate effects, other asset price effects, and the so-called credit channel. This int...

Biological Measures of the Standard of Living

By Richard H. Steckel

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2008

When economists investigate long-term trends and socioeconomic differences in the standard of living or quality of life, they have traditionally focused on monetary measures such as gross domestic product -- which has occupied center stage for over 50 yea...

Narrow Bracketing and Dominated Choices

By Matthew Rabin and Georg Weizsäcker

American Economic Review, September 2009

We show that any decision maker who "narrowly brackets" (evaluates decisions separately) and does not have constant-absolute-risk-averse preferences will make a first-order stochastically dominated combined choice in some simple pair of independent bin...

Do Consumers React to Anticipated Income Changes? Evidence from the Alaska Permanent Fund

By Chang-Tai Hsieh

American Economic Review, March 2003