The Test of Understanding of College Economics

By William B. Walstad and Ken Rebeck

American Economic Review, May 2008

Disability Screening and Labor Supply: Evidence from South Africa

By Sophie Mitra

American Economic Review, May 2009

Privacy and Data-Based Research

[Symposium: Big Data]

By Ori Heffetz and Katrina Ligett

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2014

What can we, as users of microdata, formally guarantee to the individuals (or firms) in our dataset, regarding their privacy? We retell a few stories, well-known in data-privacy circles, of failed anonymization attempts in publicly released datasets. We t...

From Inflation to More Inflation, Disinflation, and Low Inflation

By Allan H. Meltzer

American Economic Review, May 2006

Equity Effects of the Tax Reform Act of 1986

[Symposium: Tax Reform Act of 1986]

By Jane G. Gravelle

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1992

The major goals of the Tax Reform Act of 1986 included an increase in the equity of the tax system. We will consider the effects of the tax reform on vertical equity, horizontal equity, and intergenerational equity.

Using Tax Expenditures to Achieve Energy Policy Goals

By Gilbert E. Metcalf

American Economic Review, May 2008

Consumption Insurance: An Evaluation of Risk-Bearing Systems in Low-Income Economies

[Symposium: Consumption Smoothing in Developing Countries]

By Robert M. Townsend

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1995

The hypothesis of full risk sharing can be taken to data from low-income countries and evaluate formal and informal financial systems. In many contexts, idiosyncratic risks are high, so credit/insurance arrangements could be beneficial. Statistical tests ...

Wasteful Sanctions, Underperformance, and Endogenous Supervision

By David A. Miller and Kareen Rozen

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2014

We study optimal contracting in team settings where agents have many opportunities to shirk, task-level monitoring is needed to provide useful incentives, and it is difficult to write individual performance into formal contracts. Incentives are provided ...

Unemployment Benefits, Unemployment Duration, and Post-Unemployment Jobs: A Regression Discontinuity Approach

By Rafael Lalive

American Economic Review, May 2007

Is the Taxable Income Elasticity Sufficient to Calculate Deadweight Loss? The Implications of Evasion and Avoidance

By Raj Chetty

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2009

Martin Feldstein's (1999) widely used taxable income formula for deadweight loss assumes the marginal social cost of evasion and avoidance equals the tax rate. This condition is likely to be violated in practice for two reasons. First, some of the cost...

Trust in Public Institutions over the Business Cycle

By Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers

American Economic Review, May 2011

We document that trust in public institutions—and particularly trust in banks, business and government—has declined over recent years. US time series evidence suggests that this partly reflects the pro-cyclical nature of trust in institutions....

Structural Models of Nonequilibrium Strategic Thinking: Theory, Evidence, and Applications

By Vincent P. Crawford, Miguel A. Costa-Gomes, and Nagore Iriberri

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2013

Most applications of game theory assume equilibrium, justified by presuming either that learning will have converged to one, or that equilibrium approximates people's strategic thinking even when a learning justification is implausible. Yet several recent...

Comparing Apples to Oranges: Productivity Convergence and Measurement across Industries and Countries: Comment

By Anders Sorensen

American Economic Review, September 2001

Computer Mediated Transactions

By Hal R. Varian

American Economic Review, May 2010

Universal Banking

By George J. Benston

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1994

Universal banks can offer the entire range of financial services within the bank or through subsidiaries. Most countries permit universal banking. In contrast, the United States is served only by specialized banks. Universal banking, particularly in Germa...

Mechanisms and Impacts of Gender Peer Effects at School

By Victor Lavy and Analia Schlosser

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2011

We present in this paper evidence about the effects and mechanisms of gender peer effects in elementary, middle, and high schools. For identification, we rely on idiosyncratic variations in gender composition across adjacent cohorts within the same school...

Unemployment and Small Cap Returns: The Nexus

By Giuseppe Moscarini and Fabien Postel-Vinay

American Economic Review, May 2010

Affine Disagreement and Asset Pricing

By Hui Chen, Scott Joslin, and Ngoc-Khanh Tran

American Economic Review, May 2010

Consumption and Saving: Models of Intertemporal Allocation and Their Implications for Public Policy

By Orazio P. Attanasio and Guglielmo Weber

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2010

This paper provides a critical survey of the large literature on the life cycle model of consumption, both from an empirical and a theoretical point of view. It discusses several approaches that have been taken in the literature to bring the model to the ...

Was There Really a Hawthorne Effect at the Hawthorne Plant? An Analysis of the Original Illumination Experiments

By Steven D. Levitt and John A. List

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2011

The "Hawthorne effect" draws its name from a landmark set of studies conducted at the Hawthorne plant in the 1920s. The data from the first and most influential of these studies, the "Illumination Experiment," were never formally analyzed and were thought...