The Role of Theory in Field Experiments

[Symposium: Field Experiments]

By David Card, Stefano DellaVigna, and Ulrike Malmendier

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2011

We classify all published field experiments in five top economics journals from 1975 to 2010 according to how closely the experimental design and analysis are linked to economic theory. We find that the vast majority of field experiments (68 percent) are ...

The 1918 Influenza Pandemic and Subsequent Health Outcomes: An Analysis of SIPP Data

By Douglas Almond and Bhashkar Mazumder

American Economic Review, May 2005

Symposium on the Economics of Liability

[Symposium: The Economics of Liability]

By Carl Shapiro

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1991

Has the U.S. liability system run amok? Many commentators feel it has, as do many executives who feel that the liability "tax" discourages innovation and ultimately fails to promote safety. On the other hand, economists have ceaselessly pointed out that w...

How Effective Is Green Regulatory Threat?

By Werner Antweiler

American Economic Review, May 2003

How General Are Risk Preferences? Choices under Uncertainty in Different Domains

By Liran Einav, Amy Finkelstein, Iuliana Pascu, and Mark R. Cullen

American Economic Review, October 2012

We analyze the extent to which individuals' choices over five employer-provided insurance coverage decisions and one 401(k) investment decision exhibit systematic patterns, as would be implied by a general utility component of risk preferences. We provide...

The Macroeconomics of Labor and Credit Market Imperfections

By Etienne Wasmer and Philippe Weil

American Economic Review, September 2004

Credit market imperfections influence the labor market and aggregate economic activity. In turn, macroeconomic factors have an impact on the credit sector. To assess these effects in a tractable general-equilibrium framework, we introduce endogenous searc...

Education, HIV, and Early Fertility: Experimental Evidence from Kenya

By Esther Duflo, Pascaline Dupas, and Michael Kremer

American Economic Review, September 2015

A seven-year randomized evaluation suggests education subsidies reduce adolescent girls' dropout, pregnancy, and marriage but not sexually transmitted infection (STI). The government's HIV curriculum, which stresses abstinence until marriage, does not red...

Distinguished Fellow: An Appreciation of Guy Orcutt

By Harold W. Watts

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1991

Guy Henderson Orcutt, Distinguished Fellow of our Association. has now moved to a new phase of his career (retirement). Most of Guy's career has been at four universities: Michigan, where he earned all three degrees, Harvard, Wisconsin, and Yale. In betwe...

Calculation of a Population Externality

By Henning Bohn and Charles Stuart

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2015

It is known that when people generate externalities, a birth also generates an externality and efficiency requires a Pigou tax/subsidy on having children. The size of the externality from a birth is important for studying policy. We calculate the size of ...

Macroeconomics and the Term Structure

By Refet S. Gürkaynak and Jonathan H. Wright

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2012

This paper provides an overview of the analysis of the term structure of interest rates with a special emphasis on recent developments at the intersection of macroeconomics and finance. The topic is important to investors and also to policymakers, who wis...

A Field Study on Matching with Network Externalities

By Mariagiovanna Baccara, Ayşe İmrohoroğlu, Alistair J. Wilson, and Leeat Yariv

American Economic Review, August 2012

We study the effects of network externalities within a protocol for matching faculty to offices in a new building. Using web and survey data on faculty's attributes and choices, we identify the different layers of the social network: institutional affili...

The Provision of Public Goods under Alternative Electoral Incentives

By Alessandro Lizzeri and Nicola Persico

American Economic Review, March 2001

Politicians who care about the spoils of office may underprovide a public good because its benefits cannot be targeted to voters as easily as pork-barrel spending. We compare a winner-take-all system--where all the spoils go to the winner--to a proportion...

Molecular Genetics and Economics

[Symposium: Genetics and Economics]

By Jonathan P. Beauchamp, David Cesarini, Magnus Johannesson, Matthijs J. H. M. van der Loos, Philipp D. Koellinger, Patrick J. F. Groenen, James H. Fowler, J. Niels Rosenquist, A. Roy Thurik, and Nicholas A. Christakis

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2011

The costs of comprehensively genotyping human subjects have fallen to the point where major funding bodies, even in the social sciences, are beginning to incorporate genetic and biological markers into major social surveys. How, if at all, should economis...

Team Incentives and Performance: Evidence from a Retail Chain

By Guido Friebel, Matthias Heinz, Miriam Krueger, and Nikolay Zubanov

American Economic Review, August 2017

In a field experiment with a retail chain (1,300 employees, 193 shops), randomly selected sales teams received a bonus. The bonus increases both sales and number of customers dealt with by 3 percent. Each dollar spent on the bonus generates $3.80 in sales...

Taxation of Couples under Assortative Mating

By Alexander Frankel

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2014

I present a simple and tractable model of the optimal taxation of married couples, working off of the multidimensional screening framework of Armstrong and Rochet (1999). In particular, I study how the tax code varies with the degree of assortative mating...

Chaos: Significance, Mechanism, and Economic Applications

By William J. Baumol and Jess Benhabib

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1989

Chaos has become a subject of great interest to specialists and nonspecialists alike. Besides economics, it has entered the literature of geometry, physics, ecology and meteorology. This article seeks to describe what it is, how it works, and what it mean...

The Past, Present, and Future of Macroeconomic Forecasting

By Francis X. Diebold

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1998

Broadly defined, macroeconomic forecasting is alive and well. Nonstructural forecasting, which is based largely on reduced-form correlations, has always been well and continues to improve. Structural forecasting, which aligns itself with economic theory a...

Taking the Pulse of the Economy: Measuring GDP

By J. Steven Landefeld, Eugene P. Seskin, and Barbara M. Fraumeni

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2008

This article provides a broad overview of the measurement techniques used in estimating GDP and the national accounts in the United States. In the United States, the GDP and the national accounts estimates are fundamentally based on detailed economic cen...

Institutions, Factor Prices, and Taxation: Virtues of Strong States?

By Daron Acemoglu

American Economic Review, May 2010

Evaluating Uncertain Evidence with Sir Thomas Bayes: A Note for Teachers

By Steven C. Salop

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1987

Consider the following problem: On the night of March 1, 1986, in Lorain, Ohio, John Doe was struck by a speeding taxi as he crossed the street. The taxi was driving the wrong way down a one-way street and did not stop. An eyewitness thought that the taxi...