Foreword

By Robert E. Hall

American Economic Review, May 2010

Productivity Levels and International Competitiveness between Canadian and U.S. Industries

By Frank C. Lee and Jianmin Tang

American Economic Review, May 2000

An Empirical Examination of Information Barriers to Trade in Insurance

By John Cawley and Tomas Philipson

American Economic Review, September 1999

This paper uses direct evidence to evaluate whether asymmetric information is a barrier to trade in the largest market for private insurance in the world: life insurance. We report several findings that seem difficult to reconcile with the conventional th...

Improving Climate-Change Modeling of US Migration

By Mark D. Partridge, Bo Feng, and Mark Rembert

American Economic Review, May 2017

Manmade climate change (CC) has catastrophic consequences. The United States has already experienced wholesale population realignment due to climate as households have relocated to the Sunbelt and West. The irony is that people are moving toward the heat ...

Regulation, Capital, and the Evolution of Organizational Form in US Life Insurance

By George Zanjani

American Economic Review, June 2007

This paper studies the association between regulation and the organizational form of new life insurers between 1900 and 1949. The mutual form was popular in states with low initial capital requirements for mutual companies and differentially higher requir...

Wage Rigidity and Disinflation in Emerging Countries

By Julián Messina and Anna Sanz-de-Galdeano

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2014

This paper examines the consequences of rapid disinflation for downward wage rigidities in two emerging countries, Brazil and Uruguay. Although wage rigidities are altered by disinflation, in neither of the two countries does price stability eliminate ...

The Choice between Formal and Informal Intellectual Property: A Review

By Bronwyn Hall, Christian Helmers, Mark Rogers, and Vania Sena

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2014

We survey the economic literature, both theoretical and empirical, on the choice of intellectual property protection by firms. Our focus is on the trade-offs between using patents and disclosing versus the use of secrecy, although we also look briefly at ...

The Effect of Patient Cost Sharing on Utilization, Health, and Risk Protection

By Hitoshi Shigeoka

American Economic Review, July 2014

This paper exploits a sharp reduction in patient cost sharing at age 70 in Japan, using a regression discontinuity design to examine its effect on utilization, health, and financial risk arising from out-of-pocket expenditures. Due to the national policy,...

Reassessing Discretionary Fiscal Policy

[Symposium: Fiscal Policy]

By John B. Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2000

Recent changes in policy research and in policy-making call for a reassessment of countercyclical fiscal policy. Such a reassessment indicates that countercyclical fiscal policy should focus on automatic stabilizers rather than discretionary actions. Mone...

State Capacity and Economic Development: A Network Approach

By Daron Acemoglu, Camilo García-Jimeno, and James A. Robinson

American Economic Review, August 2015

We study the direct and spillover effects of local state capacity in Colombia. We model the determination of state capacity as a network game between municipalities and the national government. We estimate this model exploiting the municipality network an...

The Empirical Foundations of Calibration

[Symposium: Computational Experiments in Macroeconomics]

By Lars Peter Hansen and James J. Heckman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1996

Interest in simulating recently developed dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models of the economy stimulated a demand for parameters. This has given rise to calibration as advocated by Finn E. Kydland and Edward C. Prescott (1982). This paper explore...

Inferring Strategic Voting

By Kei Kawai and Yasutora Watanabe

American Economic Review, April 2013

We estimate a model of strategic voting and quantify the impact it has on election outcomes. Because the model exhibits multiplicity of outcomes, we adopt a set estimator. Using Japanese general-election data, we find a large fraction (63.4 percent, 84...

It's about Space, It's about Time, Neuroeconomics and the Brain Sublime

[Symposium: Neuroeconomics]

By Marieke van Rooij and Guy Van Orden

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2011

Neuroeconomics has investigated which regions of the brain are associated with the factors contributing to economic decision making, emphasizing the position in space of brain areas associated with the factors of decision making—cognitive or emotive...

Price Dynamics and Production Lags

By Assar Lindbeck and Dennis J. Snower

American Economic Review, May 1999

Group Affiliation and Altruistic Norm Enforcement

By Helen Bernhard, Ernst Fehr, and Urs Fischbacher

American Economic Review, May 2006

The Net Worth of the US Federal Government, 1784-1802

By Farley Grubb

American Economic Review, May 2007

The Iceberg Theory of Campaign Contributions: Political Threats and Interest Group Behavior

By Marcos Chamon and Ethan Kaplan

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2013

We present a model where special interest groups condition contributions on the receiving candidate's support and also her opponent's. This allows interest groups to obtain support from contributions as well as from threats of contributing. Out-of-equilib...

Sorting in Experiments with Application to Social Preferences

By Edward P. Lazear, Ulrike Malmendier, and Roberto A. Weber

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2012

Individuals sort into and out of economic environments based on their preferences and in response to relative prices. We demonstrate the importance of such sorting for the measurement of social preferences, using two laboratory experiments. First, allowin...

Why Do Developing Countries Tax So Little?

[Symposium: Tax Enforcement and Compliance]

By Timothy Besley and Torsten Persson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2014

Low-income countries typically collect taxes of between 10 to 20 percent of GDP while the average for high-income countries is more like 40 percent. In order to understand taxation, economic development, and the relationships between them, we need to thin...

Current Federal Reserve Policy under the Lens of Economic History: A Review Essay

By Stephen D. Williamson

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2016

This review essay reviews the volume edited by Owen Humpage, Current Federal Reserve Policy under the Lens of Economic History: Essays to Commemorate the Federal Reserve System’s Centennial, and provides a broader perspective on central-banking i...