Why Does the Economy Fall to Pieces after a Financial Crisis?

[Symposium: Macroeconomics after the Financial Crisis]

By Robert E. Hall

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2010

The worst financial crisis in the history of the United States and many other countries started in 1929. The Great Depression followed. The second-worst struck in the fall of 2008 and the Great Recession followed. Commentators have dwelt endlessly on the ...

Incentives and Stability in Large Two-Sided Matching Markets

By Fuhito Kojima and Parag A. Pathak

American Economic Review, June 2009

A number of labor markets and student placement systems can be modeled as many-to-one matching markets. We analyze the scope for manipulation in many-to-one matching markets under the student-optimal stable mechanism when the number of participants is ...

The Causes and Costs of Misallocation

By Diego Restuccia and Richard Rogerson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2017

Why do living standards differ so much across countries? A consensus in the development literature is that differences in productivity are a dominant source of these differences. But what accounts for productivity differences across countries? One explana...

Efficient Pollution Regulation: Getting the Prices Right: Comment

By Art Fraas and Randall Lutter

American Economic Review, February 2012

The cost-effectiveness of cap-and-trade emissions regulations has become widely accepted. A 2009 proposal by Muller and Mendelsohn would replace conventional ton-for-ton trading with trading based on estimates of marginal damages by pollutant and by sour...

Yours, Mine, and Ours: Do Divorce Laws Affect the Intertemporal Behavior of Married Couples?

By Alessandra Voena

American Economic Review, August 2015

This paper examines how divorce laws affect couples' intertemporal choices and well-being. Exploiting panel variation in US laws, I estimate the parameters of a model of household decision-making. Household survey data indicate that the introduction of un...

Are Women More Credit Constrained? Experimental Evidence on Gender and Microenterprise Returns

By Suresh de Mel, David McKenzie, and Christopher Woodruff

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2009

We report on a field experiment providing random grants to microenterprise owners. The grants generated large profit increases for male owners but not for female owners. We show that the gender gap does not simply mask differences in ability, risk aver...

Financing Innovation: Evidence from R&D Grants

By Sabrina T. Howell

American Economic Review, April 2017

Governments regularly subsidize new ventures to spur innovation. This paper conducts the first large-sample, quasi-experimental evaluation of R&D subsidies. I use data on ranked applicants to the US Department of Energy's SBIR grant program. An early-...

Put Your Money Where Your Butt Is: A Commitment Contract for Smoking Cessation

By Xavier Giné, Dean Karlan, and Jonathan Zinman

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2010

We designed and tested a voluntary commitment product to help smokers quit smoking. The product (CARES) offered smokers a savings account in which they deposit funds for six months, after which they take a urine test for nicotine and cotinine. If they pas...

Do Taxpayers Bunch at Kink Points?

By Emmanuel Saez

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2010

This paper uses tax return data to analyze bunching at the kink points of the US income tax schedule. We estimate the compensated elasticity of reported income with respect to (one minus) the marginal tax rate using bunching evidence. We find clear eviden...

Placebo Reforms

By Ran Spiegler

American Economic Review, June 2013

I study a dynamic model of strategic reform decisions that potentially affect the stochastic evolution of a publicly observed economic variable. Policy makers maximize their evaluation by a boundedly rational public. Specifically, the public follows a rul...

Home Equity Lending and Retail Spending: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Texas

By Chadi S. Abdallah and William D. Lastrapes

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2012

We estimate how spending in Texas responded to a 1997 constitutional amendment that relaxed severe restrictions on home equity lending. We use this event as a natural experiment to estimate the importance of credit constraints. If households are credit-...

Naked Exclusion: An Experimental Study of Contracts with Externalities

By Claudia M. Landeo and Kathryn E. Spier

American Economic Review, December 2009

This paper reports the results of an experiment on exclusive contracts. We replicate the strategic environment described by Rasmusen, Ramseyer, and Wiley (1991) and Segal and Whinston (2000). Our findings are as follows. First, when the buyers can comm...

Repeated Interaction and Rating Inflation: A Model of Double Reputation

By Sivan Frenkel

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2015

Credit rating agencies have an incentive to maintain a public reputation for credibility among investors but also have an incentive to develop a second, private reputation for leniency among issuers. We show that in markets with few issuers, such as marke...

Diagnostics before Prescription

[Symposium: The Agenda for Development Economics]

By Dani Rodrik

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2010

Development economists should stop acting as categorical advocates (or detractors) for specific approaches to development. They should instead be diagnosticians, helping decisionmakers choose the right model (and remedy) for their specific realities, amon...

Optimal Inflation Targets, "Conservative" Central Banks, and Linear Inflation Contracts: Comment

By Roel M. W. J. Beetsma and Henrik Jensen

American Economic Review, March 1999

The Impact of Unexpected Maternal Death on Education: First Evidence from Three National Administrative Data Links

By Stacey H. Chen, Yen-Chien Chen, and Jin-Tan Liu

American Economic Review, May 2009

Using School Choice Lotteries to Test Measures of School Effectiveness

By David J. Deming

American Economic Review, May 2014

Value-added models (VAMs) are increasingly used to measure school effectiveness. Yet, random variation in school attendance is necessary to test the validity of VAMs and to guide the selection of models for measuring causal effects of schools. In this pap...

JEL Classification System

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2016

American Economic Association Universal Academic Questionnaire Summary Statistics

By Charles E. Scott and John J. Siegfried

American Economic Review, May 2015

Sovereign Defaults: The Price of Haircuts

By Juan J. Cruces and Christoph Trebesch

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2013

A main puzzle in the sovereign debt literature is that defaults have only minor effects on subsequent borrowing costs and access to credit. This paper comes to a different conclusion. We construct the first complete database of investor losses ("haircu...