Health Insurance Mandates, Mammography, and Breast Cancer Diagnoses

By Marianne P. Bitler and Christopher S. Carpenter

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2016

We examine the effects of state health insurance mandates requiring coverage of screening mammograms. We find evidence that mammography mandates significantly increased mammography screenings by 4.5-25 percent. Effects are larger for women with less than ...

From "Made in China" to "Innovated in China": Necessity, Prospect, and Challenges

[Symposium: China]

By Shang-Jin Wei, Zhuan Xie, and Xiaobo Zhang

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2017

After more than three decades of high growth based on its low-wage advantage and relatively favorable demographics--in combination with market-oriented reforms and openness to the world economy--China is at a crossroads with a much higher wage and a shr...

Incentives and Services for College Achievement: Evidence from a Randomized Trial

By Joshua Angrist, Daniel Lang, and Philip Oreopoulos

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2009

This paper reports on an experimental evaluation of strategies designed to improve academic performance among college freshmen. One treatment group was offered academic support services. Another was offered financial incentives for good grades. A third...

The Economics of the Climate

By Geoffrey Heal

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2017

I review the economic characteristics of the climate problem, focusing on the choice of discount rates in the presence of a stock externality, risk and uncertainty/ambiguity, and the role of integrated assessment models (IAMs) in analyzing policy choices....

The Determinants of Productivity in Medical Testing: Intensity and Allocation of Care

By Jason Abaluck, Leila Agha, Chris Kabrhel, Ali Raja, and Arjun Venkatesh

American Economic Review, December 2016

A large body of research has investigated whether physicians overuse care. There is less evidence on whether, for a fixed level of spending, doctors allocate resources to patients with the highest expected returns. We assess both sources of inefficiency, ...

Factoryless Goods Producing Firms

By Andrew B. Bernard and Teresa C. Fort

American Economic Review, May 2015

This paper documents the existence and characteristics of US firms that do not manufacture themselves, but nonetheless are heavily involved in the production of goods. These factoryless goods producing firms (FGPFs) are formally in the wholesale sector bu...

Spousal Control and Intra-household Decision Making: An Experimental Study in the Philippines

By Nava Ashraf

American Economic Review, September 2009

I elicit causal effects of spousal observability and communication on financial choices of married individuals in the Philippines. When choices are private, men put money into their personal accounts. When choices are observable, men commit money to co...

Corporate Culture, Societal Culture, and Institutions

By Luigi Guiso, Paola Sapienza, and Luigi Zingales

American Economic Review, May 2015

While both cultural and legal norms (institutions) help foster cooperation, culture is the more primitive of the two and itself sustains formal institutions. Cultural changes are rarer and slower than changes in legal institutions, which makes it difficul...

Thar She Bursts: Reducing Confusion Reduces Bubbles

By Michael Kirchler, Jürgen Huber, and Thomas Stöckl

American Economic Review, April 2012

To explore why bubbles frequently emerge in the experimental asset market model of Smith, Suchanek, and Williams (1988), we vary the fundamental value process (constant or declining) and the cash-to-asset value ratio (constant or increasing). We observe h...

Optimal Monetary and Prudential Policies

By Fabrice Collard, Harris Dellas, Behzad Diba, and Olivier Loisel

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2017

The recent financial crisis has highlighted the interconnectedness between macroeconomic and financial stability, raising questions about how to combine monetary and prudential policies. This paper characterizes the jointly optimal monetary and prudential...

The Effect of Health Insurance Coverage on the Use of Medical Services

By Michael Anderson, Carlos Dobkin, and Tal Gross

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2012

Substantial uncertainty exists regarding the causal effect of health insurance on the utilization of care. We exploit a sharp change in insurance coverage rates that results from young adults "aging out" of their parents' insurance plans to estimate the ...

Marry for What? Caste and Mate Selection in Modern India

By Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, Maitreesh Ghatak, and Jeanne Lafortune

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2013

This paper analyzes how preferences for a noneconomic characteristic (e.g., caste) can affect equilibrium patterns of matching, and empirically evaluates this in the context of middle-class Indian arranged marriages. We show theoretically how the equil...

The Global Economics of Water: Is Water a Source of Comparative Advantage?

By Peter Debaere

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2014

With newly available data, I investigate to what extent countries' international trade exploits the very uneven water resources on a global scale. I find that water is a source of comparative advantage and that relatively water abundant countries expor...

Time Preference, Noncognitive Skills and Well Being across the Life Course: Do Noncognitive Skills Encourage Healthy Behavior?

By Ngina Chiteji

American Economic Review, May 2010

A Real Estate Boom with Chinese Characteristics

[Symposium: China]

By Edward Glaeser, Wei Huang, Yueran Ma, and Andrei Shleifer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2017

Chinese housing prices rose by over 10 percent per year in real terms between 2003 and 2014 and are now between two and ten times higher than the construction cost of apartments. At the same time, Chinese developers built 100 billion square feet of reside...

Credit Risk and Disaster Risk

By François Gourio

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2013

Credit spreads are large, volatile, and countercyclical, and recent empirical work suggests that risk premia, not expected credit losses, are responsible for these features. Building on the idea that corporate debt, while fairly safe in ordinary recess...

The Worldwide Standard of Living since 1800

[Symposium: Looking Backward at Economics and the Economy]

By Richard A. Easterlin

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2000

By many measures a revolution in living conditions is sweeping the world. Most people today are better fed, clothed, and house than their predecessors two centuries ago. They are healthier, live longer, and are better educated. Women's lives are less cent...

Green Infrastructure: The Effects of Urban Rail Transit on Air Quality

By Yihsu Chen and Alexander Whalley

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2012

The transportation sector is a major source of air pollution worldwide, yet little is known about the effects of transportation infrastructure on air quality. This paper quantifies the effects of one major type of transportation infrastructure—urban...

Overconfident Consumers in the Marketplace

[Symposium: Overconfidence]

By Michael D. Grubb

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2015

The term overconfidence is used broadly in the psychology literature, referring to both overoptimism and overprecision. Overoptimistic individuals overestimate their own abilities or prospects. In contrast, overprecise individuals place overly narro...

Naïve Learning in Social Networks and the Wisdom of Crowds

By Benjamin Golub and Matthew O. Jackson

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2010

We study learning in a setting where agents receive independent noisy signals about the true value of a variable and then communicate in a network. They naïvely update beliefs by repeatedly taking weighted averages of neighbors' opinions. We show ...