Wells, Water, and Welfare: The Impact of Access to Groundwater on Rural Poverty and Conflict

By Sheetal Sekhri

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2014

This paper evaluates the impact of access to groundwater on poverty using data from rural India. The estimation exploits the fact that the technology required to access groundwater changes exogenously due to constraints imposed by laws of physics at a dep...

Rents, Technical Change, and Risk Premia Accounting for Secular Trends in Interest Rates, Returns on Capital, Earning Yields, and Factor Shares

By Ricardo J. Caballero, Emmanuel Farhi, and Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas

American Economic Review, May 2017

The secular decline in safe interest rates since the early 1980s has been the subject of considerable attention. In this short paper, we argue that it is important to consider the evolution of safe real rates in conjunction with three other first-order ma...

Mentoring and Diversity

By Susan Athey, Christopher Avery, and Peter Zemsky

American Economic Review, September 2000

We study how diversity evolves at a firm with entry-level and upper-level employees who vary in ability and "type" (gender or ethnicity). The ability of entry-level employees is increased by mentoring. An employ receives more mentoring when more upper-lev...

House Prices and Marital Stability

By Martin Farnham, Lucie Schmidt, and Purvi Sevak

American Economic Review, May 2011

We investigate the effect of house price changes on divorce using data for 1991-2010 from the Current Population Survey and the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Our findings suggest that changing house prices significantly affect the share of a cohort that...

The Retirement Consumption Puzzle in China

By Hongbin Li, Xinzheng Shi, and Binzhen Wu

American Economic Review, May 2015

Using data from China's Urban Household Survey and exploiting China's mandatory retirement policy, we use the regression discontinuity approach to estimate the impact of retirement on household expenditures. Retirement reduces total non-durable expenditur...

Menstruation, Sanitary Products, and School Attendance: Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation

By Emily Oster and Rebecca Thornton

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2011

Policy-makers have cited menstruation and lack of sanitary products as barriers to girls' schooling. We evaluate these claims using a randomized evaluation of sanitary products provision to girls in Nepal. We report two findings. First, menstruation has ...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Bernard Saffran

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1994

Exporter Dynamics and Partial-Year Effects

By Andrew B. Bernard, Esther Ann Boler, Renzo Massari, Jose-Daniel Reyes, and Daria Taglioni

American Economic Review, October 2017

Two identical firms who start exporting in different months, one each in January and December, will report dramatically different exports for the first calendar year. This partial-year effect biases down first-year export levels and biases up first-year e...

How Risky Are Recessions for Top Earners?

By Fatih Guvenen, Greg Kaplan, and Jae Song

American Economic Review, May 2014

How sensitive to business cycles are the earnings of top earners? And, how does the business cycle sensitivity of top earners vary by industry? We use a confidential dataset on earnings histories of US males from the Social Security Administration. On ave...

Tenure in Office and Public Procurement

By Decio Coviello and Stefano Gagliarducci

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2017

We study the impact of politicians' tenure in office on the outcomes of public procurement using a dataset on Italian municipal governments. To identify a causal relation, we first compare elections where the incumbent mayor barely won or barely lost anot...

Estimating Risk Preferences from Deductible Choice

By Alma Cohen and Liran Einav

American Economic Review, June 2007

We develop a structural econometric model to estimate risk preferences from data on deductible choices in auto insurance contracts. We account for adverse selection by modeling unobserved heterogeneity in both risk (claim rate) and risk aversion. We fi...

Do Teenagers Respond to HIV Risk Information? Evidence from a Field Experiment in Kenya

By Pascaline Dupas

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2011

We use a randomized experiment to test whether and what information changes teenagers' sexual behavior in Kenya. Providing information on the relative risk of HIV infection by partner's age led to a 28 percent decrease in teen pregnancy, an objective prox...

Social Learning with Coarse Inference

By Antonio Guarino and Philippe Jehiel

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2013

We study social learning by boundedly rational agents. Agents take a decision in sequence, after observing their predecessors and a private signal. They are unable to make perfect inferences from their predecessors' decisions: they only understand the r...

Sign Restrictions in Structural Vector Autoregressions: A Critical Review

By Renée Fry and Adrian Pagan

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2011

The paper provides a review of the estimation of structural vector autoregressions with sign restrictions. It is shown how sign restrictions solve the parametric identification problem present in structural systems but leaves the model identification prob...

Dictating the Risk: Experimental Evidence on Giving in Risky Environments: Reply

By J. Michelle Brock, Andreas Lange, and Erkut Y. Ozbay

American Economic Review, March 2016

In Brock, Lange, and Ozbay (2013), we experimentally investigate social preferences under risk. One of our conclusions is that a social preference model incorporating both ex ante and ex post fairness concerns may best describe behavior. Krawczyk and L...

Subsidizing Vocational Training for Disadvantaged Youth in Colombia: Evidence from a Randomized Trial

By Orazio Attanasio, Adriana Kugler, and Costas Meghir

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2011

This paper evaluates the impact of a randomized training program for disadvantaged youth introduced in Colombia in 2005. This randomized trial offers a unique opportunity to examine the impact of training in a middle income country. We use originally coll...

Promise and Pitfalls in the Use of "Secondary" Data-Sets: Income Inequality in OECD Countries As a Case Study

By Anthony B. Atkinson and Andrea Brandolini

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2001

This paper examines the role of secondary data-sets in empirical economic research, taking the field of income distribution as a case study. We illustrate problems faced by users of "secondary" statistics, showing how both cross-country comparisons and ti...

Putting Distribution Back at the Center of Economics: Reflections on Capital in the Twenty-First Century

[Symposium: Wealth and Inequality]

By Thomas Piketty

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2015

When a lengthy book is widely discussed in academic circles and the popular media, it is probably inevitable that the arguments of the book will be simplified in the telling and retelling. In the case of my book Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Retrospectives: The Coining of "Privatization" and Germany's National Socialist Party

By Germá Bel

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2006

The concept of privatization attracted much attention in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as Margaret Thatcher's privatization policies were implemented in the United Kingdom. My goal here is not to comment on the merits of privatization as a policy, but r...

The Life-Cycle Profile of Time Spent on Job Search

By Mark Aguiar, Erik Hurst, and Loukas Karabarbounis

American Economic Review, May 2013

Using time use survey data we document a hump-shaped profile of job search time in the United States across the life-cycle. The middle-aged unemployed spend roughly three times as much time in job search as the youngest group of unemployed. The hump-shape...