Public Disagreement

By Rajiv Sethi and Muhamet Yildiz

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2012

We develop a model of deliberation under heterogeneous beliefs and incomplete information, and use it to explore questions concerning the aggregation of distributed information and the consequences of social integration. We show that when priors are corre...

Diversity and Trade

By Gene M. Grossman and Giovanni Maggi

American Economic Review, December 2000

We develop a competitive model of trade between countries with similar aggregate factor endowments. The trade pattern reflects differences in the distribution of talent across the labor forces of the two countries. The country with a relatively homogeneou...

Quality Adjustment for Health Care Spending on Chronic Disease: Evidence from Diabetes Treatment, 1999-2009

By Karen N. Eggleston, Nilay D. Shah, Steven A. Smith, Ernst R. Berndt, and Joseph P. Newhouse

American Economic Review, May 2011

Although US health care expenditures reached 17.6 percent of GDP in 2009, quality measurement in this important service sector remains limited. Studying quality changes associated with 11 years of health care for patients with diabetes, we find that the v...

Does Mestizaje Matter in the US? Economic Stratification of Mexican Immigrants

By Alberto Dávila, Marie T. Mora, and Sue K. Stockly

American Economic Review, May 2011

Using data from the 2003 New Immigrant Survey, this paper examines whether stratification as reflected by skin shade exists among newly legalized Mexican immigrants in the US. While we do not find evidence that skin color directly related to employment pr...

U.S. Economic Growth at the Industry Level

By Dale W. Jorgenson and Kevin J. Stiroh

American Economic Review, May 2000

Family Change among Black Americans: What Do We Know?

[Symposium: The Economic Status of African-Americans]

By David T. Ellwood and Jonathan Crane

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1990

The changes in family structures of black American households over the past three decades have been remarkable. In 1960, 33 percent of black children were not living with two parents. By 1988, the figure had risen to 61 percent. During the same period, th...

Transitions: Career and Family Life Cycles of the Educational Elite

By Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz

American Economic Review, May 2008

A Balls-and-Bins Model of Trade: Reply

By Roc Armenter and Miklós Koren

American Economic Review, March 2016

Blum, Claro, and Horstmann (2016) make two statements about the balls-and-bins model of Armenter and Koren (2014). First, that using firm-level shipment data changes some of our results. Second, that the balls-and-bins model is not an appropriate stati...

Should Generational Accounts Replace Public Budgets and Deficits?

[Symposium: Generational Accounting]

By Robert Haveman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1994

The author assesses the concept of 'generational accounts' and the specific accounts constructed by Alan Auerbach, Jagadeesh Gokhale, and Laurence Kotlikoff (1991). Although these accounts support the assertion of present-orientation in fiscal policy, the...

Devolution, Grants, and Fiscal Competition

[Symposium: Fiscal Federalism]

By Richard A. Musgrave

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1997

Following half a century of fiscal activism and federal leadership, the call now is for downsizing the federal budget and a devolution of fiscal responsibilities to states and localities. The call for "federalism," meant to secure a stronger center in Jam...

Killer Cities: Past and Present

By W. Walker Hanlon and Yuan Tian

American Economic Review, May 2015

The industrial cities of the 19th century were incredibly unhealthy places to live. How much progress has been made in reducing these negative health effects over the past 150 years? To help answer this question, we compare mortality patterns in 19th cent...

Delivering Public Health Insurance through Private Plan Choice in the United States

[Symposium: Health Insurance and Choice]

By Jonathan Gruber

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2017

The United States has seen a sea change in the way that publicly financed health insurance coverage is provided to low-income, elderly, and disabled enrollees. When programs such as Medicare and Medicaid were introduced in the 1960s, the government dire...

The Effect of Income on Religiousness

By Thomas Buser

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2015

How does income affect religiousness? Using self-collected survey data, we estimate the effects of income on religious behavior. As a source of exogenous income variation we use a change in the eligibility criteria for a government cash transfer in Ecuado...

Change, Consolidation, and Competition in Health Care Markets

By Martin Gaynor and Deborah Haas-Wilson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1999

In this paper, the authors summarize the nature of the changes in the structure of the health-care industry. They focus on the markets for health insurance, hospital services, and physician services. They discuss the potential implications of the restruct...

Disasters and the Welfare Cost of Uncertainty

By Ian W. R. Martin

American Economic Review, May 2008

A Theory of Deception

By David Ettinger and Philippe Jehiel

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2010

This paper proposes an equilibrium approach to belief manipulation and deception in which agents only have coarse knowledge of their opponent's strategy. Equilibrium requires the coarse knowledge available to agents to be correct, and the inferences an...

Overconfidence in Political Behavior

By Pietro Ortoleva and Erik Snowberg

American Economic Review, February 2015

This paper studies, theoretically and empirically, the role of overconfidence in political behavior. Our model of overconfidence in beliefs predicts that overconfidence leads to ideological extremeness, increased voter turnout, and stronger partisan ide...

World Income Components: Measuring and Exploiting Risk-Sharing Opportunities

By Stefano G. Athanasoulis and Robert J. Shiller

American Economic Review, September 2001

A method is constructed for decomposing the variance of changes in incomes in the world into components, to indicate the most important risk-sharing opportunities among people of the world. A constant absolute risk premium (CARP) model, an intertemporal g...

The Impact of the Transatlantic Slave Trade on Ethnic Stratification in Africa

By Warren Whatley and Rob Gillezeau

American Economic Review, May 2011

In the last 15 years, economists and economic historians have argued that Africa has undergone a "reversal of fortune" and that ethnic fragmentation is a significant cause of Africa's underdevelopment. In this article, we join these narratives by arguing ...

Debt Relief and the International Enforcement of Loan Contracts

[Symposium: New Institutions for Developing Country Debt]

By Jonathan Eaton

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1990

It is now apparent that the governments of many developing countries will not repay their debts as initially contracted. Creditors and creditor governments must now adjust to the realization that full repayment is either infeasible or that enforcing full ...