Keeping It Simple: Financial Literacy and Rules of Thumb

By Alejandro Drexler, Greg Fischer, and Antoinette Schoar

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2014

Micro-entrepreneurs often lack the financial literacy required to make important financial decisions. We conducted a randomized evaluation with a bank in the Dominican Republic to compare the impact of two distinct programs: standard accounting trainin...

Organizing Debt Relief: The Need for a New Institution

[Symposium: New Institutions for Developing Country Debt]

By Peter B. Kenen

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1990

In March 1989, the new U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, Nicholas Brady, endorsed a change in strategy for dealing with developing country debt, calling for a three-year waiver of clauses in existing loan agreements that stand in the way of debt reduction "...

Policy Watch: Tax Credits for Low-Income Workers with Children

By C. Eugene Steuerle

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1990

The most important tax credits available to low-income households with children are the earned income tax credit (EITC), the child tax credit, and the child and dependent care tax credit (hereafter, child-care credit). Only the EITC and the child-care cre...

Women's Quest for Economic Equality

[Symposium: Women in the Labor Market]

By Victor R. Fuchs

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1989

The persistence of substantial gender inequality a quarter-century after the passage of major antidiscrimination legislation and several decades of massive social change poses a major problem for economic analysis and policy. Why are women at an economic ...

Fixed Effects, Invariance, and Spatial Variation in Intergenerational Mobility

By Gary Chamberlain

American Economic Review, May 2016

Chetty et al. (2014) document variation across commuting zones in intergenerational mobility. With over 700 commuting zones, the task of estimating place effects involves a high-dimension parameter space. I develop a fixed-effects model along with an orac...

Getting Prices Right: What Should Be Done?

[Symposium: Measuring the CPI]

By Angus Deaton

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1998

Much of the profession accepts that the CPI likely overstates the rate of increase of the cost-of-living. It is less clear that there are sound and feasible steps that the BLS can adopt to improve matters in the short run. There are unresolved conceptual ...

Optimal Life-Cycle Investing with Flexible Labor Supply: A Welfare Analysis of Life-Cycle Funds

By Francisco J. Gomes, Laurence J. Kotlikoff, and Luis M. Viceira

American Economic Review, May 2008

A Comment on CSWEP

By Milton Friedman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1998

Milton Friedman corresponded with Carolyn Shaw Bell about the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession (CSWEP) in 1973. What follows is a distillation of those remarks.

Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2008

Standardization in Decentralized Economies

By Emmanuelle Auriol and Michel Benaim

American Economic Review, June 2000

This paper presents a dynamic model, inspired by evolutionary game theory, of how standards and norms emerge in decentralized economies. It shows that standardization outcomes depend on adopters' attitudes to problems caused by incompatibility. If individ...

Some Lessons from the Yield Curve

By John Y. Campbell

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1995

This paper reviews the literature on the relation between short- and long-term interest rates. It summarizes the mixed evidence on the expectation hypothesis of the term structure: when long rates are high relative to short rates, short rates tend to rise...

Inertia and Overwithholding: Explaining the Prevalence of Income Tax Refunds

By Damon Jones

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2012

Over three-quarters of US taxpayers receive income tax refunds, which are effectively zero-interest loans to the government. Previous explanations include precautionary and/or forced savings motives. I present evidence on a third explanation: inertia. I f...

Rethinking the Role of Fiscal Policy

By Martin Feldstein

American Economic Review, May 2009

A Theory of Charitable Fund-Raising with Costly Solicitations

By Alvaro J. Name-Correa and Huseyin Yildirim

American Economic Review, April 2013

We present a theory of charitable fund-raising in which it is costly to solicit donors. We fully characterize the solicitation strategy that maximizes donations net of fund-raising costs. It is optimal for the fund-raiser to target only the "net contribut...

Growth and Capital Flows with Risky Entrepreneurship

By Damiano Sandri

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2014

We show that the behavior of entrepreneurs facing incomplete financial markets and risky investment can explain why accelerations of productivity growth in developing countries tend to be associated with current account improvements. Under uninsurable inv...

Using Lagged Outcomes to Evaluate Bias in Value-Added Models

By Raj Chetty, John N. Friedman, and Jonah Rockoff

American Economic Review, May 2016

Value-added (VA) models measure agents' productivity based on the outcomes they produce. The utility of VA models for performance evaluation depends on the extent to which VA estimates are biased by selection. One common method of evaluating bias in VA is...

Debt Consolidation and Fiscal Stabilization of Deep Recessions

By Giancarlo Corsetti, Keith Kuester, André Meier, and Gernot J. Müller

American Economic Review, May 2010

Implementing Anti-discrimination Policies in Statistical Profiling Models

By Devin G. Pope and Justin R. Sydnor

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2011

How should statistical models used for assigning prices or eligibility be implemented when there is concern about discrimination? In many settings, factors such as race, gender, and age are prohibited. However, the use of variables that correlate with the...

The Rising Instability of U.S. Earnings

[Symposium: Household Risks]

By Peter Gottschalk and Robert Moffitt

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2009

The inequality of earnings and of family incomes in the United States has increased since the late 1970s. The large rise in earnings inequality between the 1970s and the 1990s could reflect either a rise in disparity of permanent incomes, a rise in earnin...

Private Information and the Allocation of Land Use Subsidies in Malawi

By B. Kelsey Jack

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2013

Efficient targeting of public programs is difficult when the cost or benefit to potential recipients is private information. This study illustrates the potential of self-selection to improve allocational outcomes in the context of a program that subsid...