The Quality of Medical Advice in Low-Income Countries

[Symposium: Development]

By Jishnu Das, Jeffrey Hammer, and Kenneth Leonard

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2008

This paper documents the quality of medical advice in low-income countries. Our evidence on health care quality in low-income countries is drawn primarily from studies in four countries: Tanzania, India, Indonesia, and Paraguay. We provide an overview of...

Fact-Free Learning

By Enriqueta Aragones, Itzhak Gilboa, Andrew Postlewaite, and David Schmeidler

American Economic Review, December 2005

People may be surprised to notice certain regularities that hold in existing knowledge they have had for some time. That is, they may learn without getting new factual information. We argue that this can be partly explained by computational complexity. We...

The Quantitative Role of Capital Goods Imports in US Growth

By Michele Cavallo and Anthony Landry

American Economic Review, May 2010

Mergers and Sunk Costs: An Application to the Ready-Mix Concrete Industry

By Allan Collard-Wexler

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2014

Horizontal mergers have a large impact by inducing a long-lasting change in market structure. Only in an industry with substantial entry barriers is a merger not immediately counteracted by post-merger entry. To evaluate the duration of the effects of a...

Geographic Variation in the Gender Differences in Test Scores

[Symposium: Tests and Gender]

By Devin G. Pope and Justin R. Sydnor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2010

The causes and consequences of gender disparities in standardized test scores -- especially in the high tails of achievement -- have been a topic of heated debate. The existing evidence on standardized test scores largely confirms the prevailing stereoty...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2008

The Flow Approach to Labor Markets: New Data Sources and Micro-Macro Links

[Symposium: American Employment]

By Steven J. Davis, R. Jason Faberman, and John Haltiwanger

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2006

New data sources and products developed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Bureau of the Census highlight the fluid character of U.S. labor markets. Private sector job creation and destruction rates average nearly 8 percent of employment per quarte...

The IBM and Microsoft Cases: What's the Difference?

By Franklin M. Fisher

American Economic Review, May 2000

A Procurement Auction for Toxic Assets with Asymmetric Information

By Olivier Armantier, Charles A. Holt, and Charles R. Plott

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2013

The proposed 2008 TARP auction was intended to remove "toxic" assets from portfolios of financially stressed banks. The Treasury selected a design whereby bids to sell different securities would be normalized by "reference prices" that reflect relative...

Top Incomes in the Long Run of History

By Anthony B. Atkinson, Thomas Piketty, and Emmanuel Saez

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2011

A recent literature has constructed top income shares time series over the long run for more than twenty countries using income tax statistics. Top incomes represent a small share of the population but a very significant share of total income and total ta...

How Credible Is the Federal Reserve? A Structural Estimation of Policy Re-optimizations

By Davide Debortoli and Aeimit Lakdawala

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2016

The paper proposes a new measure of the degree of credibility of the Federal Reserve. We estimate a medium-scale macroeconomic model, where the central bank has access to a commitment technology, but where a regime-switching process governs occasional re-...

Universal Health Insurance in the Clinton Plan: Coverage as a Tax-Financed Public Good

[Symposium: Health Care Reform]

By Mark V. Pauly

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1994

The financing arrangements embodied in the Clinton health reform plan involve some important differences in the way in which public goods are usually financed. The subsidies to small, low-wage firms mandated to provide benefits distort markets in both lab...

Exports and Within-Plant Wage Distributions: Evidence from Mexico

By Judith A. Frías, David S. Kaplan, and Eric Verhoogen

American Economic Review, May 2012

This short paper examines the effect of exporting on within-plant wage distributions in employer-employee data on Mexican manufacturing plants. Using the late-1994 peso devaluation interacted with initial plant size as a source of exogenous variation in e...

Achieving Cooperation under Privacy Concerns

By Wioletta Dziuda and Ronen Gradwohl

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2015

Two players choose whether to cooperate on a project. Each of them is endowed with some evidence, and if both possess a sufficient amount, then cooperation is profitable. In order to facilitate cooperation, the players reveal evidence to one another. Howe...

Mistakes in Choice-Based Welfare Analysis

By Botond Kőszegi and Matthew Rabin

American Economic Review, May 2007

Report of the Editor: American Economic Journal: Applied Economics

By Esther Duflo

American Economic Review, May 2011

Markets and Inequality in Rural China: Parallels with the Past

By Dwayne Benjamin and Loren Brandt

American Economic Review, May 1999

Tax Reform: Implications for the State-Local Public Sector

[Symposium: Tax Reform]

By Paul N. Courant and Daniel L. Rubinfeld

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1987

We analyze the effects of the Tax Reform Act of 1986 on the level and distribution of state and local spending, and on the mix of revenue sources employed by state and local governments. We expect state and local spending to fall by between 0.9 percent an...

The Gender Gap in Secondary School Mathematics at High Achievement Levels: Evidence from the American Mathematics Competitions

[Symposium: Tests and Gender]

By Glenn Ellison and Ashley Swanson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2010

This paper uses a new data source, American Mathematics Competitions, to examine the gender gap among high school students at very high achievement levels. The data bring out several new facts. There is a large gender gap that widens dramatically at perce...

Evolution of Time Preferences and Attitudes toward Risk

By Nick Netzer

American Economic Review, June 2009

This paper explores a general model of the evolution and adaption of hedonic utility. It is shown that optimal utility will be increasing strongly in regions where choices have to be made often and decision mistakes have a severe impact on fitness. Sev...