Consumption Responses to Temporary Tax Incentives: Evidence from State Sales Tax Holidays

By Sumit Agarwal, Nathan Marwell, and Leslie McGranahan

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2017

States offer sales tax holidays (STHs) temporarily exempting items like clothes, shoes, and school supplies from the state sales tax. Spending response to these temporary tax changes are investigated using two datasets: the Diary portion of the Consumer E...

Can America Stay on Top?

[Symposium: Forecasts for the Future of the Economy]

By Paul Krugman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2000

The United States has long enjoyed a unique position of economic supremacy. By the early 1990s, however, almost everyone believed that the age of U.S. supremacy was nearing its end. Circa 1992 few people would have dared to suggest that a second "American...

Will International Rules on Subsidies Disrupt the World Trading System?

By Kyle Bagwell and Robert W. Staiger

American Economic Review, June 2006

We provide a first formal analysis of the international rules that govern the use of subsidies to domestic production. Our analysis highlights the impact of the new subsidy disciplines that were added to GATT rules with the creation of the WTO. While GATT...

Risk Pooling, Risk Preferences, and Social Networks

By Orazio Attanasio, Abigail Barr, Juan Camilo Cardenas, Garance Genicot, and Costas Meghir

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2012

Using data from an experiment conducted in 70 Colombian communities, we investigate who pools risk with whom when trust is crucial for enforcing risk pooling arrangements. We explore the roles played by risk attitudes and social networks. Both empirically...

The Realization Effect: Risk-Taking after Realized versus Paper Losses

By Alex Imas

American Economic Review, August 2016

Understanding how prior outcomes affect risk attitudes is critical for the study of choice under uncertainty. A large literature documents the significant influence of prior losses on risk attitudes. The findings appear contradictory: some studies find gr...

Female Hires and the Success of Start-Up Firms

By Andrea Weber and Christine Zulehner

American Economic Review, May 2010

Discounting State and Local Pension Liabilities

By Jeffrey R. Brown and David W. Wilcox

American Economic Review, May 2009

Pitfalls of a Minimax Approach to Model Uncertainty

By Christopher A. Sims

American Economic Review, May 2001

Experimental Evidence on the Effects of Home Computers on Academic Achievement among Schoolchildren

By Robert W. Fairlie and Jonathan Robinson

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2013

Computers are an important part of modern education, yet many schoolchildren lack access to a computer at home. We test whether this impedes educational achievement by conducting the largest-ever field experiment that randomly provides free home comput...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2009

Testing for a Reference Consumer in International Comparisons of Living Standards

By Ian Crawford and J. Peter Neary

American Economic Review, September 2008

Do Individual Retirement Accounts Increase Savings?

By Jane G. Gravelle

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1991

Do IRAs increase savings or are they merely a windfall for otherwise well-off taxpayers? A major objective of universal IRAs was to encourage saving for retirement. A spirited debate has ensued over the use of IRA tax deductions as a means of promoting pr...

Religious Workers' Density and the Racial Earnings Gap

By Fernando Lozano and Jessica Shiwen Cheng

American Economic Review, May 2016

We explore differences between Black and White Non-Hispanic workers in the relationship between childhood exposure to religious workers and a worker's labor market outcomes thirty years later. We identify this relationship by exploiting two sources of var...

Report of the Editor: American Economic Review (with Appendix by Philip J. Glandon)

By Robert A. Moffitt

American Economic Review, May 2011

Psychologists at the Gate: A Review of Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow

By Andrei Shleifer

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2012

The publication of Daniel Kahneman's book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, is a major intellectual event. The book summarizes, but also integrates, the research that Kahneman has done over the past forty years, beginning with his path-breaking work with...

Asian Growth and African Development

By Marcos de Carvalho Chamon and Michael R. Kremer

American Economic Review, May 2006

Testing for Factor Price Equality with Unobserved Differences in Factor Quality or Productivity

By Andrew B. Bernard, Stephen J. Redding, and Peter K. Schott

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2013

We develop a method for identifying departures from relative factor price equality that is robust to unobserved variation in factor productivity. We implement this method using data on the relative wage bills of nonproduction and production workers acros...

Information Spillovers in Asset Markets with Correlated Values

By Vladimir Asriyan, William Fuchs, and Brett Green

American Economic Review, July 2017

We study information spillovers in a dynamic setting with correlated assets owned by privately informed sellers. In the model, a trade of one asset can provide information about the value of other assets. Importantly, the information content of trading be...

Patents and Research Investments: Assessing the Empirical Evidence

By Eric Budish, Benjamin N. Roin, and Heidi Williams

American Economic Review, May 2016

A well-developed theoretical literature--dating back at least to Nordhaus (1969)--has analyzed optimal patent policy design. We re-present the core trade-off of the Nordhaus model and highlight an empirical question which emerges from the Nordhaus framewo...

A Letter to Ben Bernanke

By N. Gregory Mankiw

American Economic Review, May 2006