Where Does the Money Go? Best and Worst Practices in Foreign Aid

[Symposium: Development]

By William Easterly and Tobias Pfutze

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2008

This paper does not address the issue of aid effectiveness -- that is, the extent to which foreign aid dollars actually achieve their goals -- but on "best practices" in the way in which official aid is given, an important component of the wider debate. F...

Fiscal Policy in a Model with Financial Frictions

By Jesús Fernández-Villaverde

American Economic Review, May 2010

Improving College Performance and Retention the Easy Way: Unpacking the ACT Exam

By Eric P. Bettinger, Brent J. Evans, and Devin G. Pope

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2013

Improving college performance and retention can be difficult. We propose a simple and low-cost change in the way colleges use the ACT exam in their admission decisions that can greatly increase their ability to identify students at a high risk of under...

Public Provision and Protection of Natural Resources: Groundwater Irrigation in Rural India

By Sheetal Sekhri

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2011

This paper evaluates the effects of a public groundwater provision program on water tables in Northern India. I theorize that public provision leads to sustainable use of groundwater when the fixed costs for private well provision are high. I use village-...

State Censorship

By Mehdi Shadmehr and Dan Bernhardt

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2015

We characterize a ruler's decision of whether to censor media reports that convey information to citizens who decide whether to revolt. We find: (i) a ruler gains (his ex ante expected payoff increases) by committing to censoring slightly less than he doe...

The View from Above: Applications of Satellite Data in Economics

By Dave Donaldson and Adam Storeygard

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2016

The past decade or so has seen a dramatic change in the way that economists can learn by watching our planet from above. A revolution has taken place in remote sensing and allied fields such as computer science, engineering, and geography. Petabytes of sa...

Changes in Unemployment and Wage Inequality: An Alternative Theory and Some Evidence

By Daron Acemoglu

American Economic Review, December 1999

I present a model where firms decide what types of jobs to create and then search for suitable workers. When there are few skilled workers and the skilled-unskilled productivity gap is small, firms create a single type of job and recruit all workers. An i...

Financial Contracting

By Oliver Hart

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2001

This paper discusses how economists' views of firms' financial structure decisions have evolved, from treating firms' profitability as given, to acknowledging that managerial actions affect profitability, to recognizing that firm value depends on the allo...

Political Limits to Globalization

By Daron Acemoglu and Pierre Yared

American Economic Review, May 2010

Population, Technology, and Growth: From Malthusian Stagnation to the Demographic Transition and Beyond

By Oded Galor and David N. Weil

American Economic Review, September 2000

This paper develops a unified growth model that captures the historical evolution of population, technology, and output. It encompasses the endogenous transition between three regimes that have characterized economic development. The economy evolves from ...

Markets: Ready-Mixed Concrete

By Chad Syverson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2008

Concrete's natural color is gray. Its favored uses are utilitarian. Its very ubiquity causes it to blend into the background. But ready-mix concrete does have one remarkable characteristic: other than manufactured ice, perhaps no other manufacturing indus...

The Effect of State Taxes on the Geographical Location of Top Earners: Evidence from Star Scientists

By Enrico Moretti and Daniel J. Wilson

American Economic Review, July 2017

We quantify how sensitive is migration by star scientists to changes in personal and business tax differentials across states. We uncover large, stable, and precisely estimated effects of personal and corporate taxes on star scientists' migration patterns...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2017

What Do We Know about Global Income Inequality?

By Sudhir Anand and Paul Segal

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2008

In this paper, we review the recent literature on global interpersonal income inequality. While all estimates agree that the level is very high, with a Gini of between 0.630 and 0.686 in the 1990s, there is no consensus regarding the direction of change...

Valuing Alternative Work Arrangements

By Alexandre Mas and Amanda Pallais

American Economic Review, December 2017

We employ a discrete choice experiment in the employment process for a national call center to estimate the willingness to pay distribution for alternative work arrangements relative to traditional office positions. Most workers are not willing to pay for...

Report of the Editor: Journal of Economic Literature

By Steven Durlauf

American Economic Review, May 2016

The Effects of Regulation in the Presence of Multiple Unpriced Externalities: Evidence from the Transportation Sector

By Antonio Bento, Daniel Kaffine, Kevin Roth, and Matthew Zaragoza-Watkins

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2014

In transportation systems with unpriced congestion, allowing single-occupant low-emission vehicles in high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes to encourage their adoption exacerbates congestion costs for carpoolers. The resulting welfare effects of the policy a...

The Ricardian Approach to Budget Deficits

[Symposium: Budget Deficit]

By Robert J. Barro

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1989

In recent years there has been a lot of discussion about U.S. budget deficits. Many economists and other observers have viewed these deficits as harmful to the U.S. and world economies. The supposed harmful effects include high real interest rates, low sa...

Household Finance after a Natural Disaster: The Case of Hurricane Katrina

By Justin Gallagher and Daniel Hartley

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2017

Little is known about how affected residents are able to cope with the financial shock of a natural disaster. This paper investigates the impact of flooding on household finance. Spikes in credit card borrowing and overall delinquency rates for the most f...

Class-Size Caps, Sorting, and the Regression-Discontinuity Design

By Miguel Urquiola and Eric Verhoogen

American Economic Review, March 2009

This paper examines how schools' choices of class size and households' choices of schools affect regression-discontinuity-based estimates of the effect of class size on student outcomes. We build a model in which schools are subject to a class-size cap...