Details Matter: The Impact of Presentation and Information on the Take-Up of Financial Incentives for Retirement Saving

By Emmanuel Saez

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2009

We examine the effects of presentation and information on the take-up of financial subsidies for retirement saving in a large randomized experiment carried out with H&R Block. The subsidies raise take-up and contributions with larger effects when the s...

The Economics of Treasury Securities Markets

By Sushil Bikhchandani and Chi-fu Huang

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1993

The market for Treasury securities attracted considerable attention recently, after alleged infringements by Salomon Brothers. Several questions have been raised about the best way of selling U.S. government debt. One issue is whether altering the auction...

Affirmative Action: One Size Does Not Fit All

By Kala Krishna and Alexander Tarasov

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2016

This paper identifies a new reason for giving preferences to the disadvantaged using a model of contests. There are two forces at work: the effort effect working against giving preferences and the selection effect working in favor of them. When educati...

Child Health and Conflict in Côte d'Ivoire

By Camelia Minoiu and Olga Shemyakina

American Economic Review, May 2012

We examine the impact of the 2002-07 civil conflict in Côte d'Ivoire on children's health status measured by height-for-age. We use pre- and post-war survey data coupled with information on the location of violent incidents to capture exposure to th...

Gender and Race Heterogeneity: The Impact of Students with Limited English on Native Students' Performance

By Timothy M. Diette and Ruth Uwaifo Oyelere

American Economic Review, May 2014

Recent evidence suggests that exposure to a larger share of Limited English (LE) students is associated with a slight decline in performance for students at the top of the achievement distribution. In this paper we explore whether LE peer effects differ b...

(Indirect) Input Linkages

By Marcela Eslava, Ana Cecília Fieler, and Daniel Yi Xu

American Economic Review, May 2015

Relative to backward firms, technologically-advanced firms source inputs from other advanced firms. These sourcing patterns lead to a magnification effect of technology adoption. A firm that adopts higher-technology increases the relative supply and deman...

How Wages Change: Micro Evidence from the International Wage Flexibility Project

By William T. Dickens, Lorenz Goette, Erica L. Groshen, Steinar Holden, Julian Messina, Mark E. Schweitzer, Jarkko Turunen, and Melanie E. Ward

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2007

Workers' wages are not set in a spot market. Instead, the wages of most workers -- at least those who do not switch jobs -- typically change only annually and are mediated by a complex set of institutions and factors such as contracts, unions, standards o...

Gender and Performance: Evidence from School Assignment by Randomized Lottery

By Justine S. Hastings, Thomas J. Kane, and Douglas O. Staiger

American Economic Review, May 2006

Exchange-Rate Policy and the Zero Bound on Nominal Interest Rates

By Günter Coenen and Volker W. Wieland

American Economic Review, May 2004

How Do Teachers Improve? The Relative Importance of Specific and General Human Capital

By Ben Ost

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2014

One of the most consistent findings in the literature on teacher quality is that teachers improve with experience, especially in the first several years. This study extends this research by separately identifying the benefits of general teaching experi...

Retrospectives: Ceteris Paribus

By Joseph Persky

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1990

In Webster's Dictionary is an example of how to use "ceteris paribus": [S]taple-growing states are, ceteris paribus, more favorable to slave labor than manufacturing states." I suspect it would take a minor treatise to elucidate fully the ceteris paribus ...

Behavior Policies and Teen Traffic Safety

By Thomas S. Dee and William N. Evans

American Economic Review, May 2001

Selective versus Universal Vouchers: Modelling Median Voter Preferences in Education

By Zhiqi Chen and Edwin G. West

American Economic Review, December 2000

The Politics of Financial Development: A Review of Calomiris and Haber's Fragile by Design

By Peter L. Rousseau

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2016

Fragile by Design by Charles W. Calomiris and Stephen H. Haber introduces a framework for understanding financial crises and credit abundance with politics at its center. Using the historical experiences of five nations to illustrate, the authors...

Polarization and Ambiguity

By Sandeep Baliga, Eran Hanany, and Peter Klibanoff

American Economic Review, December 2013

We offer a theory of polarization as an optimal response to ambiguity. Suppose individual A's beliefs first-order stochastically dominate individual B's. They observe a common signal. They exhibit polarization if A's posterior dominates her prior and B'...

Tax-Motivated Trading by Individual Investors

By Zoran Ivković, James Poterba, and Scott Weisbenner

American Economic Review, December 2005

We analyze stock trades made by individuals holding stock in both taxable and tax-deferred accounts. By comparing trades across these two types of accounts, we uncover a capital gains lock-in effect in taxable accounts. The lock-in effect is more pronounc...

Freedom Fries

By Guy Michaels and Xiaojia Zhi

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2010

Do firms always choose the cheapest suitable inputs, or can group attitudes affect their choices? To investigate this question, we examine the deterioration of relations between the United States and France from 2002-2003, when France's favorability ratin...

New Directions in National Economic Accounting

By William D. Nordhaus

American Economic Review, May 2000

Forecasting the Recovery from the Great Recession: Is This Time Different?

By Kathryn M. E. Dominguez and Matthew D. Shapiro

American Economic Review, May 2013

This paper asks whether the slow recovery of the US economy from the trough of the Great Recession was anticipated, and identifies some of the factors that contributed to surprises in the course of the recovery. We construct a narrative using news reports...

Generalizing the Taylor Principle: Comment

By Roger E. A. Farmer, Daniel F. Waggoner, and Tao Zha

American Economic Review, March 2010

Troy Davig and Eric Leeper (2007) have proposed a condition they call the generalized Taylor principle to rule out indeterminate equilibria in a version of the new-Keynesian model where the parameters of the policy rule follow a Markov-switching process....