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...

Was Schumpeter Right after All?

By Robert Heilbroner

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1993

In Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1947) Schumpeter asks "Can capitalism survive?" He answers: "No. I do not think it can." In an essay I wrote in 1981 entitled "Was Schumpeter Right?" I began with the words: "No. I do not think he was." Now, over a...

Can Admissions Percent Plans Lead to Better Collegiate Fit for Minority Students?

By Kalena E. Cortes and Jane Arnold Lincove

American Economic Review, May 2016

Why do so many students mismatch when choosing a college? A plausible hypothesis is a lack of information about the likelihood of admission. This study contributes to the literature on mismatch by testing whether public university automatic admissions pol...

Economic Experts versus Average Americans

By Paola Sapienza and Luigi Zingales

American Economic Review, May 2013

We compare answers to policy questions by economic experts and a representative sample of the US population. We find a 35 percentage point difference between the two groups. This gap is only partially explained by differences in ideological or personal ch...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2014

Creative Destruction and Subjective Well-Being

By Philippe Aghion, Ufuk Akcigit, Angus Deaton, and Alexandra Roulet

American Economic Review, December 2016

In this paper we analyze the relationship between turnover-driven growth and subjective well-being. Our model of innovation-led growth and unemployment predicts that: (i) the effect of creative destruction on expected individual welfare should be unambigu...

Public Transfers and Domestic Violence: The Roles of Private Information and Spousal Control

By Gustavo J. Bobonis, Melissa González-Brenes, and Roberto Castro

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2013

We study whether transfer programs in which funds are targeted to women decrease the incidence of spousal abuse. We examine the impact of the Mexican Oportunidades program on spousal abuse rates and threats of violence using data from a specialized sur...

CSWEP: 25 Years at a Time

By Robin L. Bartlett

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1998

The history and achievements of the American Economic Association's (AEA) Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession (CSWEP) over the past twenty-five years are reviewed. A picture of women's standing in the economics profession in 1972 ...

Estimating the Top Tail of the Wealth Distribution

By Philip Vermeulen

American Economic Review, May 2016

This paper uses the Household Finance and Consumption Survey to construct new estimates of top wealth shares in Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Austria, Finland and The Netherlands. It provides a methodology to address simultaneously non-response ...

Birth Timing and Neonatal Health

By Cristina Borra, Libertad González, and Almudena Sevilla

American Economic Review, May 2016

We take advantage of a new natural experiment to evaluate the health effects of scheduling birth early for non-medical reasons on infant health. In 2010, the cancellation of a generous child benefit in Spain led may families to schedule birth early in ord...

Redesigning the Israeli Psychology Master's Match

By Avinatan Hassidim, Assaf Romm, and Ran I. Shorrer

American Economic Review, May 2017

We report on the centralization of a two-sided matching-with-contracts market, in which pre-existing choice functions violate the substitutes condition. The ability to accommodate these choice functions was critical for the success of our design. The new ...

Dynamic Procurement under Uncertainty: Optimal Design and Implications for Incomplete Contracts

By Malin Arve and David Martimort

American Economic Review, November 2016

We characterize the optimal dynamic contract for a long-term basic service when an uncertain add-on is required later on. Introducing firm risk aversion has two impacts. Profits for the basic service can be backloaded to induce cheaper information revelat...

The Gender Wage Gap: Extent, Trends, and Explanations

By Francine D. Blau and Lawrence M. Kahn

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2017

Using Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) microdata over the 1980-2010 period, we provide new empirical evidence on the extent of and trends in the gender wage gap, which declined considerably during this time. By 2010, conventional human capital vari...

This Job Is "Getting Old": Measuring Changes in Job Opportunities Using Occupational Age Structure

By David Autor and David Dorn

American Economic Review, May 2009

A Simple Model of Subprime Borrowers and Credit Growth

By Alejandro Justiniano, Giorgio E. Primiceri, and Andrea Tambalotti

American Economic Review, May 2016

The surge in credit and house prices that preceded the Great Recession was particularly pronounced in ZIP codes with a higher fraction of subprime borrowers (Mian and Sufi, 2009). We present a simple model with prime and subprime borrowers distributed acr...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Bernard Saffran

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1993

Health and Schooling Investments in Africa

[Symposium: Slow Growth in Africa]

By T. Paul Schultz

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1999

Intercountry comparisons show Africa's health and education falls short of other regions, controlling for income, women's educations, and urbanization, but growth regressions do not clarify whether this low human capital caused slow growth. Microeconometr...