Doctoral Dissertations in Economics

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2011

The Cambridge History of "Capitalism"

By Peter Temin

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2015

This review essay of the two-volume Cambridge History of Capitalism (2014), edited by Larry Neal and Jeffrey G. Williamson, is divided into three parts. First, I describe three chapters from the second volume that I recommend for all economists to add dep...

Using Causal Forests to Predict Treatment Heterogeneity: An Application to Summer Jobs

By Jonathan M.V. Davis and Sara B. Heller

American Economic Review, May 2017

To estimate treatment heterogeneity in two randomized controlled trials of a youth summer jobs program, we implement Wager and Athey's (2015) causal forest algorithm. We provide a step-by-step explanation targeted at applied researchers of how the algorit...

Getting at Systemic Risk via an Agent-Based Model of the Housing Market

By John Geanakoplos, Robert Axtell, J. Doyne Farmer, Peter Howitt, Benjamin Conlee, Jonathan Goldstein, Matthew Hendrey, Nathan M. Palmer, and Chun-Yi Yang

American Economic Review, May 2012

Systemic risk must include the housing market, though economists have not generally focused on it. We begin construction of an agent-based model of the housing market with individual data from Washington, DC. Twenty years of success with agent-based mod...

Index of Authors of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2010

How Trade Hurt Unskilled Workers

[Symposium: Income Inequality and Trade]

By Adrian Wood

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1995

This paper argues that the main cause of the deteriorating economic position of unskilled workers in the United States and other developed countries has been expansion of trade with developing countries. In the framework of a Heckscher-Ohlin model, it out...

Selection in Health Insurance Markets and Its Policy Remedies

[Symposium: Health Insurance and Choice]

By Michael Geruso and Timothy J. Layton

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2017

Selection (adverse or advantageous) is the central problem that inhibits the smooth, efficient functioning of competitive health insurance markets. Even—and perhaps especially—when consumers are well-informed decision makers and insurance mark...

Term Premia and Inflation Uncertainty: Empirical Evidence from an International Panel Dataset: Comment

By Michael D. Bauer, Glenn D. Rudebusch, and Jing Cynthia Wu

American Economic Review, January 2014

Term premia implied by maximum likelihood estimates of affine term structure models are misleading because of small-sample bias. We show that accounting for this bias alters the conclusions about the trend, cycle, and macroeconomic determinants of the ...

Corrective Taxation versus Liability

By Steven Shavell

American Economic Review, May 2011

Taxation and liability are compared as means of controlling harmful externalities, with a view toward explaining why the use of liability predominates over taxation. Taxation suffers from a disadvantage in the analysis: because taxes do not reflect all th...

Charters without Lotteries: Testing Takeovers in New Orleans and Boston

By Atila Abdulkadiroğlu, Joshua D. Angrist, Peter D. Hull, and Parag A. Pathak

American Economic Review, July 2016

Charter takeovers are traditional public schools restarted as charter schools. We develop a grandfathering instrument for takeover attendance that compares students at schools designated for takeover with a matched sample of students attending similar sch...

Self-Control and the Development of Work Arrangements

By Supreet Kaur, Michael Kremer, and Sendhil Mullainathan

American Economic Review, May 2010

The Mirage of Fixed Exchange Rates

[Symposium: The Monetary Transmission Mechanism]

By Maurice Obstfeld and Kenneth Rogoff

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1995

This paper discusses the profound difficulties of maintaining fixed exchange rates in a world of expanding global capital markets. Contrary to popular wisdom, industrialized-country monetary authorities easily have the resources to defend exchange paritie...

Doctoral Dissertations in Economics

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2014

Incentives, Commitments, and Habit Formation in Exercise: Evidence from a Field Experiment with Workers at a Fortune-500 Company

By Heather Royer, Mark Stehr, and Justin Sydnor

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2015

Financial incentives have shown strong positive short-run effects for problematic health behaviors that likely stem from time inconsistency. However, the effects often disappear once incentive programs end. This paper analyzes the results of a large-scale...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2013

Immigration and the Neighborhood

By Albert Saiz and Susan Wachter

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2011

Within metropolitan areas, neighborhoods of growing immigrant settlement are becoming relatively less desirable to natives. We deploy a geographic diffusion model to instrument for the growth of immigrant density in a neighborhood. Our approach deals ex...

Can Hiring Quotas Work? The Effect of the Nitaqat Program on the Saudi Private Sector

By Jennifer R. Peck

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2017

This paper studies the effects of quota-based labor regulations on firms in the context of Saudi Arabia's Nitaqat program, which imposed quotas for Saudi hiring at private firms. I use a comprehensive firm-level administrative dataset and exploit kinks in...

Doctoral Dissertations in Economics

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2013

Safe Asset Scarcity and Aggregate Demand

By Ricardo J. Caballero, Emmanuel Farhi, and Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas

American Economic Review, May 2016

We explore the consequences of safe asset scarcity on aggregate demand in a stylized IS-LM/Mundell Fleming style environment. Acute safe asset scarcity forces the economy into a "safety trap" recession. In the open economy, safe asset scarcity spreads fro...

Social Capital and Social Quilts: Network Patterns of Favor Exchange

By Matthew O. Jackson, Tomas Rodriguez-Barraquer, and Xu Tan

American Economic Review, August 2012

We examine the informal exchange of favors in societies such that any two individuals interact too infrequently to sustain exchange, but such that the social pressure of the possible loss of multiple relationships can sustain exchange. Patterns of exchang...