Gamma Discounting

By Martin L. Weitzman

American Economic Review, March 2001

By incorporating the probability distribution directly into the analysis, this paper proposes a new theoretical approach to resolving the perennial dilemma of being uncertain about what discount rate to use in cost-benefit analysis. A numerical example is...

The Economics of Child Labor: Reply

By Kaushik Basu and Pham Hoang Van

American Economic Review, December 1999

What "Triggers" Mortgage Default?

By Ronel Elul, Nicholas S. Souleles, Souphala Chomsisengphet, Dennis Glennon, and Robert Hunt

American Economic Review, May 2010

The Market for Training Services: A Demand Experiment with Bangladeshi Garment Factories

By Rocco Macchiavello, Atonu Rabbani, and Christopher Woodruff

American Economic Review, May 2015

We marketed a training program for lower level managers (line supervisors) to large factories in the Bangladeshi ready-made garment industry. Take-up of the program (even for a free slot) was low, due to intense production pressures, fire-fighting and con...

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...