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...

A Review of Michael Tomz's Reputation and International Cooperation: Sovereign Debt across Three Centuries

By Mark Gersovitz

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2009

Repudiation and expropriation pose obstacles to the international mobility of capital and thereby to efficient international allocation of resources. Tomz discusses the determinants of lending in the face of the threat of repudiation. Using history, he ...

Contagion in Financial Networks

By Paul Glasserman and H. Peyton Young

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2016

The recent financial crisis has prompted much new research on the interconnectedness of the modern financial system and the extent to which it contributes to systemic fragility. Network connections diversify firms' risk exposures, but they also create cha...

Information and Extremism in Elections

By Raphael Boleslavsky and Christopher Cotton

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2015

We model an election in which parties nominate candidates with observable policy preferences prior to a campaign that produces information about candidate quality, a characteristic independent of policy. Informative campaigns lead to greater differentiati...

The Strategic Value of Carbon Tariffs

By Christoph Böhringer, Jared C. Carbone, and Thomas F. Rutherford

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2016

We ask whether the threat of carbon tariffs might lower the cost of reductions in world carbon emissions by inducing unregulated regions to adopt emission controls. We use a numerical model to generate payoffs of a game in which a coalition regulates emis...

Roads to Prosperity? Assessing the Link between Public Capital and Productivity

By John G. Fernald

American Economic Review, June 1999

Does the positive correlation between infrastructure and productivity reflect causation? If so, in which direction? The author finds that, when growth in roads (the largest component of infrastructure) changes, productivity growth changes disproportionate...

What Do Consumers Really Pay on Their Checking and Credit Card Accounts? Explicit, Implicit, and Avoidable Costs

By Victor Stango and Jonathan Zinman

American Economic Review, May 2009

Distributional and Efficiency Impacts of Increased US Gasoline Taxes

By Antonio M. Bento, Lawrence H. Goulder, Mark R. Jacobsen, and Roger H. von Haefen

American Economic Review, June 2009

We examine the impacts of increased US gasoline taxes in a model that links the markets for new, used, and scrapped vehicles and recognizes the considerable heterogeneity among households and cars. Household choice parameters derive from an estimation ...

Microfinance Meets the Market

By Robert Cull, Asli Demirgüç-Kunt, and Jonathan Morduch

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2009

In this paper, we examine the economic logic behind microfinance institutions and consider the movement from socially oriented nonprofit microfinance institutions to for-profit microfinance. Drawing on a large dataset that includes most of the world's lea...

Deleveraging and Monetary Policy: Japan since the 1990s and the United States since 2007

By Kazuo Ueda

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2012

As the U.S. economy works through a sluggish recovery several years after the Great Recession technically came to an end in June 2009, it can only look with horror toward Japan's experience of two decades of stagnant growth since the early 1990s. In contr...

Ambiguity Aversion: Implications for the Uncovered Interest Rate Parity Puzzle

By Cosmin Ilut

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2012

High interest rate currencies tend to appreciate in the future relative to low interest rate currencies instead of depreciating as uncovered interest parity (UIP) predicts. I construct a model of exchange rate determination in which ambiguity-averse agent...

Growth-Rate and Uncertainty Shocks in Consumption: Cross-Country Evidence

By Emi Nakamura, Dmitriy Sergeyev, and Jón Steinsson

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2017

We provide new estimates of the importance of growth-rate shocks and uncertainty shocks for developed countries. The shocks we estimate are large and correspond to well-known macroeconomic episodes such as the Great Moderation and the productivity slowdow...

The Dynamic Behavior of the Real Exchange Rate in Sticky Price Models

By Jón Steinsson

American Economic Review, March 2008

Existing empirical evidence suggests that real exchange rates exhibit hump-shaped dynamics. I show that this is a robust fact across nine large, developed economies. This fact can help explain why sticky price business cycle models have been unable to mat...

A Model of Positive Self-Image in Subjective Assessments

By Luís Santos-Pinto and Joel Sobel

American Economic Review, December 2005

This paper suggests a mechanism that describes individuals' positive self-image in subjective assessments of their relative abilities. The mechanism assumes individuals have heterogeneous production functions that determine ability as a function of multip...

The Econometrics of Matching Models

By Pierre-André Chiappori and Bernard Salanié

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2016

Many questions in economics can be fruitfully analyzed in the framework of matching models. Until recently, empirical work has lagged far behind theory in this area. This review reports on recent developments that have considerably expanded the range of m...

The Efficacy of Information Policy: A Review of Archon Fung, Mary Graham, and David Weil's Full Disclosure: The Perils and Promise of Transparency

By Clifford Winston

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2008

The economics of information has identified an important role for government to correct situations where competition is not sufficient to reveal valuable information to consumers. Archon Fung, Mary Graham, and David Weil's Full Disclosure: The Perils a...

Okun's Law and Productivity Innovations

By Robert J. Gordon

American Economic Review, May 2010