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...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Bernard Saffran

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2000

Evidence for Countercyclical Risk Aversion: An Experiment with Financial Professionals

By Alain Cohn, Jan Engelmann, Ernst Fehr, and Michel André Maréchal

American Economic Review, February 2015

Countercyclical risk aversion can explain major puzzles such as the high volatility of asset prices. Evidence for its existence is, however, scarce because of the host of factors that simultaneously change during financial cycles. We circumvent these p...

Report of the Director: Job Openings for Economists

By John J. Siegfried

American Economic Review, May 2013

Saving whilst Gambling: An Empirical Analysis of UK Premium Bonds

By Peter Tufano

American Economic Review, May 2008

Self-Enforcing Trade Agreements: Evidence from Time-Varying Trade Policy

By Chad P. Bown and Meredith A. Crowley

American Economic Review, April 2013

The Bagwell and Staiger (1990) theory of cooperative trade agreements predicts new tariffs (i) increase with imports, (ii) increase with the inverse of the sum of the import demand and export supply elasticities, and (iii) decrease with the variance of im...

The Rise of Female Professionals: Are Women Responding to Skill Demand?

By Sandra E. Black and Chinhui Juhn

American Economic Review, May 2000

Assessing the Property Rights and Transaction-Cost Theories of Firm Scope

By Michael D. Whinston

American Economic Review, May 2001

Consumption Inequality and Family Labor Supply

By Richard Blundell, Luigi Pistaferri, and Itay Saporta-Eksten

American Economic Review, February 2016

We examine the link between wage and consumption inequality using a life-cycle model incorporating consumption and family labor supply decisions. We derive analytical expressions for the dynamics of consumption, hours, and earnings of two earners in the p...

The Evolutionary Basis of Time Preference: Intergenerational Transfers and Sex

By Arthur J. Robson, Balazs Szentes, and Emil Iantchev

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2012

We consider the evolutionary basis of time discounting with intergenerational transfers. We show that the notion of "reproductive value" from biology provides the utility criterion for a parent to optimize the allocation of resources between transfers to...

The Economic Impacts of Climate Change: Evidence from Agricultural Output and Random Fluctuations in Weather: Comment

By Anthony C. Fisher, W. Michael Hanemann, Michael J. Roberts, and Wolfram Schlenker

American Economic Review, December 2012

In a series of studies employing a variety of approaches, we have found that the potential impact of climate change on US agriculture is likely negative. Deschênes and Greenstone (2007) report dramatically different results based on regressions of agr...

Hyperbolic Discounting and the Sustainability of Rotational Savings Arrangements

By Karna Basu

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2011

People across the developing world join rotational savings and credit associations (roscas) to fund repeated purchases of nondivisible goods. When the scope for punishment is weak, there is a natural question about why agents not defect from roscas. This ...

Behavioral Responses to Wealth Taxes: Evidence from Sweden

By David Seim

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2017

This paper provides an empirical assessment of an annual wealth tax. Using Swedish administrative data, I estimate net-of-tax-rate elasticities of taxable wealth in the range [0.09, 0.27]. Cross-checking self-reported assets against asset data unavailable...

Declining Business Dynamism: What We Know and the Way Forward

By Ryan A. Decker, John Haltiwanger, Ron S. Jarmin, and Javier Miranda

American Economic Review, May 2016

A growing body of evidence indicates that the U.S. economy has become less dynamic in recent years. This trend is evident in declining rates of gross job and worker flows as well as declining rates of entrepreneurship and young firm activity, and the tren...

Elasticity Optimism

By Jean Imbs and Isabelle Mejean

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2015

On average, estimates of trade elasticities are smaller in aggregate data than at sector level. This is an artifact of aggregation. Estimations performed on aggregate data constrain sector elasticities to homogeneity, which creates a heterogeneity bias. T...

The Quiet Revolution That Transformed Women's Employment, Education, and Family

By Claudia Goldin

American Economic Review, May 2006

An Interview with William J. Baumol

By Alan B. Krueger

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2001