Happiness on Tap: Piped Water Adoption in Urban Morocco

By Florencia Devoto, Esther Duflo, Pascaline Dupas, William Parienté, and Vincent Pons

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2012

Connecting private dwellings to the water main is expensive and typically cannot be publicly financed. We show that households' willingness to pay for a private connection is high when it can be purchased on credit, not because a connection improves healt...

The Allocation of Resources in the Presence of Indivisibilities

By Herbert Scarf

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1994

A major theme of economic theory is that optimality, at the level of the firm or the economy as a whole, can be reached by profit maximization using competitive prices. The conclusion requires the assumption that the production possibility set be convex a...

Symposium on Democracy and Development

[Symposium: Democracy and Development]

By Pranab Bardhan

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1993

Clearing the Air? The Effects of Gasoline Content Regulation on Air Quality

By Maximilian Auffhammer and Ryan Kellogg

American Economic Review, October 2011

This paper examines whether US gasoline content regulations, which impose substantial costs on consumers, have successfully reduced ozone pollution. We take advantage of spatial and temporal variation in the regulations' implementation to show that federa...

Estimating Neighborhood Choice Models: Lessons from a Housing Assistance Experiment

By Sebastian Galiani, Alvin Murphy, and Juan Pantano

American Economic Review, November 2015

We use data from a housing-assistance experiment to estimate a model of neighborhood choice. The experimental variation effectively randomizes the rents which households face and helps identify a key structural parameter. Access to two randomly selected t...

Asset Pricing with Concentrated Ownership of Capital and Distribution Shocks

By Kevin J. Lansing

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2015

This paper develops a production-based asset pricing model with two types of agents and concentrated ownership of physical capital. A temporary but persistent "distribution shock" causes the income share of capital owners to fluctuate in a procyclical man...

What Linear Estimators Miss: The Effects of Family Income on Child Outcomes

By Katrine V. Løken, Magne Mogstad, and Matthew Wiswall

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2012

We assess the implications of nonlinearity for IV and FE estimation when the estimated model is inappropriately assumed to be linear. Our application is the causal link between family income and child outcomes. Our nonlinear IV and FE estimates show an ...

Fairness and Redistribution: Reply

By Alberto Alesina, George-Marios Angeletos, and Guido Cozzi

American Economic Review, February 2013

This paper responds to the comment of Di Tella and Dubra (2013). We first clarify that the model of Alesina and Angeletos (2005) admits two distinct types of multiplicity: one that is at the core of their contribution, and a separate one that is at work i...

Is There a Method of Neuroeconomics?

By Aldo Rustichini

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2009

This note tries to state, precisely, the method of neuroecomics, and is based on the discussion in B. Douglas Bernheim's (2009) appraisal. We claim that the theory formulates hypotheses modeling the choice process as an algorithmic procedure. The hypot...

Inflation Dynamics during the Financial Crisis

By Simon Gilchrist, Raphael Schoenle, Jae Sim, and Egon Zakrajšek

American Economic Review, March 2017

Using a novel dataset, which merges good-level prices underlying the PPI with the respondents' balance sheets, we show that liquidity constrained firms increased prices in 2008, while their unconstrained counterparts cut prices. We develop a model in whic...

Land Reform and Farm Restructuring: What Has Been Accomplished to Date?

By Zvi Lerman

American Economic Review, May 1999

Market Trade in Patents and the Rise of a Class of Specialized Inventors in the 19th-Century United States

By Naomi R. Lamoreaux and Kenneth L. Sokoloff

American Economic Review, May 2001

'Acting Wife': Marriage Market Incentives and Labor Market Investments

By Leonardo Bursztyn, Thomas Fujiwara, and Amanda Pallais

American Economic Review, November 2017

Do single women avoid career-enhancing actions because these actions signal undesirable traits, like ambition, to the marriage market? While married and unmarried female MBA students perform similarly when their performance is unobserved by classmates (...

Veterans' Labor Force Participation: What Role Does the VA's Disability Compensation Program Play?

By Courtney Coile, Mark Duggan, and Audrey Guo

American Economic Review, May 2015

We explore time trends in the labor force participation of veterans and non-veterans and investigate whether they are consistent with a rising role for the Department of Veterans Affairs' Disability Compensation (DC) program, which pays benefits to vetera...

What Do Instrumental Variable Models Deliver with Discrete Dependent Variables?

By Andrew Chesher and Adam M. Rosen

American Economic Review, May 2013

We compare nonparametric instrumental variables (IV) models with linear models and 2SLS methods when dependent variables are discrete. A 2SLS method can deliver a consistent estimator of a Local Average Treatment Effect but is not informative about other ...

Why Europe and the West? Why Not China?

[Symposium: Cultural Economics]

By David S. Landes

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2006

In the history of technological development, why didn't other regions keep up with Europe? This is an important question, as one learns almost as much from failure as from success. The one civilization that was in a position to match and even anticipate t...

The Ins and Outs of European Unemployment

By Barbara Petrongolo and Christopher A. Pissarides

American Economic Review, May 2008

Econometric Software: A User's View

By Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1992

For the social scientist, software is a tool, not an end in itself. My objective in this review is to help practicing economists decide which tool will best get the task done. To do this, I report on how seven programs performed on each of six different e...

Decentralized Organizational Learning: An Experimental Investigation

By Andreas Blume, John Duffy, and April M. Franco

American Economic Review, September 2009

We experimentally study decentralized organizational learning. Our objective is to understand how learning members of an organization cope with the confounding effects of the simultaneous learning of others. We test the predictions of a stylized, ratio...

A Reexamination of Exchange-Rate Exposure

By Kathryn M. E. Dominguez and Linda L. Tesar

American Economic Review, May 2001