Capital Taxation under Political Constraints

By Florian Scheuer and Alexander Wolitzky

American Economic Review, August 2016

This paper studies optimal dynamic tax policy under the threat of political reform. A policy will be reformed ex post if a large enough coalition of citizens supports reform; thus, sustainable policies are those that will continue to attract enough politi...

The Role of Prices in Measuring the Poor's Living Standards

[Symposium: Price Variation for Households]

By Christian Broda, Ephraim Leibtag, and David E. Weinstein

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2009

In this paper, we revisit two pieces of conventional wisdom in the current debate about poverty, paying close attention to the price data underlying these findings: that the poor pay more than households of higher income for the goods and services they pu...

Early Retirement Incentives and Student Achievement

By Maria D. Fitzpatrick and Michael F. Lovenheim

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2014

Early retirement incentives (ERIs) are increasingly prevalent in education as districts seek to close budget gaps by replacing expensive experienced teachers with lower cost newer teachers. Combined with the aging of the teacher workforce, these ERIs are ...

A Nobel Prize for Game Theorists: The Contributions of Harsanyi, Nash and Selten

By Faruk Gul

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1997

The purpose of this essay is to celebrate the contributions of John C. Harsanyi, John F. Nash, and Reinhard Selten to economics. The emphasis is on tracing the influence of their work on economic analysis rather than giving a detailed account of each of t...

Understanding the Great Recession

By Lawrence J. Christiano, Martin S. Eichenbaum, and Mathias Trabandt

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2015

We argue that the vast bulk of movements in aggregate real economic activity during the Great Recession were due to financial frictions. We reach this conclusion by looking through the lens of an estimated New Keynesian model in which firms face moderate ...

Economic Liberalization and Indian Economic Growth: What's the Evidence?

By Ashok Kotwal, Bharat Ramaswami, and Wilima Wadhwa

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2011

India's growth and poverty performance over the last three decades has been a subject of great curiosity. Unlike the East Asian countries, India's growth spurt is not associated with exceptionally high domestic savings or foreign capital inflows or manufa...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Bernard Saffran

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1989

Do the Effects of Temporary Ethnic Group Quotas Persist? Evidence from India

By Rikhil R. Bhavnani

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2017

Do electoral quotas for ethnic groups continue to improve their chances of winning elections after quotas are withdrawn? This is an important question since ethnic group quotas are common, and are often intended to be temporary. Using natural experiments,...

How Much Energy Do Building Energy Codes Save? Evidence from California Houses

By Arik Levinson

American Economic Review, October 2016

Regulations governing the energy efficiency of new buildings have become a cornerstone of US environmental policy. California enacted the first such codes in 1978 and has tightened them every few years since. I evaluate the resulting energy savings three ...

Technological Change, Depletion, and the U.S. Petroleum Industry

By John T. Cuddington and Diana L. Moss

American Economic Review, September 2001

The China Syndrome: Local Labor Market Effects of Import Competition in the United States

By David H. Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon H. Hanson

American Economic Review, October 2013

We analyze the effect of rising Chinese import competition between 1990 and 2007 on US local labor markets, exploiting cross- market variation in import exposure stemming from initial differences in industry specialization and instrumenting for US imp...

American Economic Association Universal Academic Questionnaire Summary Statistics

By Charles E. Scott and John J. Siegfried

American Economic Review, May 2006

Credible Sales Mechanisms and Intermediaries

By David McAdams and Michael Schwarz

American Economic Review, March 2007

We consider a seller who faces several buyers and lacks access to an institution to credibly close a sale. If buyers anticipate that the seller may negotiate further, they will prefer to wait before making their best and final offers. This in turn induc...

Report of the Editor: Journal of Economic Perspectives

By Enrico Moretti

American Economic Review, May 2016

The Business Cycle in a Changing Economy: Conceptualization, Measurement, Dating

By Allen Sinai

American Economic Review, May 2010

The Impact of Commissions on Home Sales in Greater Boston

By Panle Jia and Parag A. Pathak

American Economic Review, May 2010

Do Poverty Traps Exist? Assessing the Evidence

[Symposium: Classic Ideas in Development]

By Aart Kraay and David McKenzie

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2014

A "poverty trap" can be understood as a set of self-reinforcing mechanisms whereby countries start poor and remain poor: poverty begets poverty, so that current poverty is itself a direct cause of poverty in the future. The idea of a poverty trap has this...

Report: Ad Hoc Search Committee for the Editor of the Journal of Economic Literature

By Anil Kashyap

American Economic Review, May 2013

Replications in Development Economics

By Sandip Sukhtankar

American Economic Review, May 2017

I examine replications of empirical papers in development economics published in the top-5 and next-5 general interest journals between the years 2000 through 2015. Of the 1,138 empirical papers, 71 papers (6.2 percent) were replicated in another publishe...

Campaign Contributions over CEOs' Careers

By Adam Fremeth, Brian Kelleher Richter, and Brandon Schaufele

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2013

Individuals dominate money in politics, accounting for over 90 percent of campaign contributions, yet studies of drivers of individuals' giving are scarce. We analyze data on all contributions made between 1991 and 2008 by all 1,556 people who became S...