Inheritance Law and Investment in Family Firms

By Andrew Ellul, Marco Pagano, and Fausto Panunzi

American Economic Review, December 2010

Entrepreneurs may be legally bound to bequeath a minimal stake to noncontrolling heirs. The size of this stake can reduce investment in family firms, by reducing the future income they can pledge to external financiers. Using a purpose-built indicator of ...

State Misallocation and Housing Prices: Theory and Evidence from China

By Shing-Yi Wang

American Economic Review, August 2011

This paper examines the equilibrium price effects of the privatization of housing assets that were previously owned and allocated by the state. I develop a theoretical framework that shows that privatization can have ambiguous effects on prices in the pri...

Do We Follow Others When We Should? A Simple Test of Rational Expectations: Comment

By Anthony Ziegelmeyer, Christoph March, and Sebastian Krügel

American Economic Review, October 2013

The payoff of actions is estimated and the resulting empirical payoff is controlled for in regression analyses to formulate a test of rational expectations in information cascade experiments. We show that the empirical payoff of actions is a function of e...

What Do You Think Would Make You Happier? What Do You Think You Would Choose?

By Daniel J. Benjamin, Ori Heffetz, Miles S. Kimball, and Alex Rees-Jones

American Economic Review, August 2012

Would people choose what they think would maximize their subjective well-being (SWB)? We present survey respondents with hypothetical scenarios and elicit both choice and predicted SWB rankings of two alternatives. While choice and predicted SWB rankings ...

Education and Labor Market Discrimination

By Kevin Lang and Michael Manove

American Economic Review, June 2011

Using a model of statistical discrimination and educational sorting, we explain why blacks get more education than whites of similar cognitive ability, and we explore how the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT), wages, and education are related. The...

Structural Transformation, the Mismeasurement of Productivity Growth, and the Cost Disease of Services

By Alwyn Young

American Economic Review, November 2014

If workers self-select into industries based upon their relative productivity in different tasks, and comparative advantage is aligned with absolute advantage, then the average efficacy of a sector's workforce will be negatively correlated with its emp...

Effective Exchange Rates and the Classical Gold Standard Adjustment

By Luis A. V. Catão and Solomos N. Solomou

American Economic Review, September 2005

Using a new international dataset of trade-weighed exchange rates, this paper highlights a neglected adjustment mechanism in the classical gold standard literature. Since gold-pegged countries traded extensively with economies operating more flexible mone...

Tax Reform as Political Choice

[Symposium: Tax Reform]

By James M. Buchanan

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1987

Public choice theory explains and interprets politics as the interaction among constituents and agents seeking to advance or to express their own interests. Applied to an observed political event like the 1986 tax reform legislation, any such analysis mus...

The Enigma of India

By Kaushik Basu

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2008

India's high growth over the last fifteen years has inspired several recent books and papers to examine the growth's source and sustainability--the two-volume study by Arvind Virmani being a case in point. This paper evaluates these recent works. It is ...

Dividend Taxes and Firm Valuation: New Evidence

By Alan J. Auerbach and Kevin A. Hassett

American Economic Review, May 2006

Report of the Director: Job Openings for Economists

By John J. Siegfried

American Economic Review, May 2016

Paying on the Margin for Medical Care: Evidence from Breast Cancer Treatments

By Liran Einav, Amy Finkelstein, and Heidi Williams

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2016

We present a simple graphical framework to illustrate the potential welfare gains from a "top-up" health insurance policy requiring patients to pay the incremental price for more expensive treatment options. We apply this framework to breast cancer treatm...

The Multitask Theory of State Enterprise Reform: Empirical Evidence from China

By Chong-En Bai, Jiangyong Lu, and Zhigang Tao

American Economic Review, May 2006

Price and Quality of Desktop and Mobile Personal Computers: A Quarter-Century Historical Overview

By Ernst R. Berndt and Neal J. Rappaport

American Economic Review, May 2001

Mistaken Play in the Deferred Acceptance Algorithm: Implications for Positive Assortative Matching

By Alex Rees-Jones

American Economic Review, May 2017

Recent literature has documented failures of truthful preference reporting in the strategy-proof deferred acceptance algorithm. I consider the implications of these strategic mistakes for a common welfare consideration: the ability of the mechanism to sor...

To Work or Not to Work? Child Development and Maternal Labor Supply

By Paul Frijters, David W. Johnston, Manisha Shah, and Michael A. Shields

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2009

We estimate the effect of early child development on maternal labor force participation. Mothers of poorly developing children may remain at home to care for their children. Alternatively, mothers may enter the labor force to pay for additional educati...

Achieving Escape Velocity: Neighborhood and School Interventions to Reduce Persistent Inequality

By Roland G. Fryer Jr. and Lawrence F. Katz

American Economic Review, May 2013

This paper reviews the evidence on the efficacy of neighborhood and school interventions in improving the long-run outcomes of children growing up in poor families. We focus on studies exploiting exogenous sources of variation in neighborhoods and schools...

The Ins and Outs of Cyclical Unemployment

By Michael W. L. Elsby, Ryan Michaels, and Gary Solon

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2009

A dominant trend in recent modeling of labor market fluctuations is to treat unemployment inflows as acyclical. This trend has been encouraged by recent influential papers that stress the role of longer unemployment spells, rather than more unemploymen...

Sudden Stops and Phoenix Miracles in Emerging Markets

By Guillermo A. Calvo, Alejandro Izquierdo, and Ernesto Talvi

American Economic Review, May 2006

The Economic and Policy Consequences of Catastrophes

By Robert S. Pindyck and Neng Wang

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2013

How likely is a catastrophic event that would substantially reduce the capital stock, GDP, and wealth? How much should society be willing to pay to reduce the probability or impact of a catastrophe? We answer these questions and provide a framework for...