The Political Resource Curse

By Fernanda Brollo, Tommaso Nannicini, Roberto Perotti, and Guido Tabellini

American Economic Review, August 2013

This paper studies the effect of additional government revenues on political corruption and on the quality of politicians, both with theory and data. The theory is based on a political agency model with career concerns and endogenous entry of candidate...

How Sovereign Is Sovereign Credit Risk?

By Francis A. Longstaff, Jun Pan, Lasse H. Pedersen, and Kenneth J. Singleton

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2011

We study the nature of sovereign credit risk using an extensive set of sovereign CDS data. We find that the majority of sovereign credit risk can be linked to global factors. A single principal component accounts for 64 percent of the variation in soverei...

Economics in the Laboratory

By Vernon L. Smith

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1994

The questions addressed in this paper include: What is a laboratory experiment? What are the reasons why economists conduct such experiments? What have we learned? Among the many findings of experiments are included: institutions (the rules of exchange) m...

Friends in High Places

By Lauren Cohen and Christopher J. Malloy

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2014

We demonstrate that personal connections amongst US politicians have a significant impact on Senate voting behavior. Networks based on alumni connections between politicians are consistent predictors of voting behavior. We estimate sharp measures that con...

Adverse Selection and Inertia in Health Insurance Markets: When Nudging Hurts

By Benjamin R. Handel

American Economic Review, December 2013

This paper investigates consumer inertia in health insurance markets, where adverse selection is a potential concern. We leverage a major change to insurance provision that occurred at a large firm to identify substantial inertia, and develop and estim...

The Effect of an Employer Health Insurance Mandate on Health Insurance Coverage and the Demand for Labor: Evidence from Hawaii

By Thomas C. Buchmueller, John DiNardo, and Robert G. Valletta

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2011

We examine the effects of the most durable employer health insurance mandate in the United States, Hawaii's Prepaid Health Care Act, using Current Population Survey data covering the years 1979 to 2005. Relying on a variation of the classical Fisher permu...

Heterogeneous Treatment Effects in Impact Evaluation

By Eva Vivalt

American Economic Review, May 2015

It is very important to know how much we can extrapolate from a study's results. This paper examines the issue using data from impact evaluations in development.

The Great Escape? A Quantitative Evaluation of the Fed's Liquidity Facilities

By Marco Del Negro, Gauti Eggertsson, Andrea Ferrero, and Nobuhiro Kiyotaki

American Economic Review, March 2017

We introduce liquidity frictions into an otherwise standard DSGE model with nominal and real rigidities and ask: can a shock to the liquidity of private paper lead to a collapse in short-term nominal interest rates and a recession like the one associated ...

Financial Constraints and Inflated Home Prices during the Real Estate Boom

By Itzhak Ben-David

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2011

During the housing boom, financially constrained home buyers artificially inflated transaction prices in order to draw larger mortgages. Using transaction data from Illinois that includes sellers' offers to inflate prices, I estimate that in 2005-2008, u...

Do Health Care Providers Respond to Demand-Side Incentives? Evidence from Indonesia

By Margaret Triyana

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2016

This paper exploits the subdistrict randomization of Indonesia's household Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) program to analyze how the program affects the local health care market. The CCT program is associated with increased use of midwives as the main de...

Excessive Volatility in Capital Flows: A Pigouvian Taxation Approach

By Olivier Jeanne and Anton Korinek

American Economic Review, May 2010

Saving, Risk Sharing, and Preferences for Risk

By Maurizio Mazzocco

American Economic Review, September 2004

Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2005

JEL Classification System

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2005

Corporate Governance, Economic Entrenchment, and Growth

By Randall Morck, Daniel Wolfenzon, and Bernard Yeung

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2005

Outside the United States and the United Kingdom, large corporations usually have controlling owners, who are usually very wealthy families. Pyramidal control structures, cross shareholding, and super-voting rights let such families control corporations w...

Allocation under Dictatorship: Research in Stalin's Archives

By Paul Gregory and Mark Harrison

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2005

We survey recent research on the Soviet economy in the state, party, and military archives of the Stalin era. The archives have provided rich new evidence on the economic arrangements of a command system under a powerful dictator including Stalin's role i...

Ethnic Diversity and Economic Performance

By Alberto Alesina and Eliana La Ferrara

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2005

We survey and assess the literature on the positive and negative effects of ethnic diversity on economic policies and outcomes. Our focus is on communities of different size and organizational structure, such as countries, cities in developed countries, a...

Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2005

JEL Classification System

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2005

Editor's Note

By Roger H. Gordon

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2005