Trade Wars and Trade Talks with Data

By Ralph Ossa

American Economic Review, December 2014

How large are optimal tariffs? What tariffs would prevail in a worldwide trade war? How costly would a breakdown of international trade policy cooperation be? And what is the scope for future multilateral trade negotiations? I address these and other qu...

The Pay of Corporate Executives and Financial Professionals as Evidence of Rents in Top 1 Percent Incomes

[Symposium: The Top 1 Percent]

By Josh Bivens and Lawrence Mishel

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2013

The debate over the extent and causes of rising inequality of American incomes and wages has now raged for at least two decades. In this paper, we will make four arguments. First, the increase in the incomes and wages of the top 1 percent over the last ...

The Caloric Costs of Culture: Evidence from Indian Migrants

By David Atkin

American Economic Review, April 2016

Anthropologists have documented substantial and persistent differences in food preferences across social groups. My paper asks whether such food cultures can constrain caloric intake? I first document that interstate migrants within India consume fewe...

Deterrence and Geographical Externalities in Auto Theft

By Marco Gonzalez-Navarro

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2013

Understanding the degree of geographical crime displacement is crucial for the design of crime prevention policies. This paper documents changes in automobile theft risk that were generated by the plausibly exogenous introduction of Lojack, a highly ef...

The American Economic Association Dues Structure

By Richard O. Beil and David N. Laband

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1996

Because consumers have an incentive to misrepresent their incomes and accurate information about consumers' incomes is costly for sellers to obtain, income-based pricing of goods or services seems unlikely to survive for long. Indeed, income-based pricing...

Female Socialization: How Daughters Affect Their Legislator Fathers

By Ebonya L. Washington

American Economic Review, March 2008

Parenting daughters, sociologists have shown, increases feminist sympathies. I test the hypothesis that children, much like neighbors or peers, can influence parental behavior. I demonstrate that conditional on total number of children, each daughter i...

China's Gradualistic Economic Approach and Financial Markets

By Markus K. Brunnermeier, Michael Sockin, and Wei Xiong

American Economic Review, May 2017

China's gradualistic approach allowed the government to learn how the economy reacts to small policy changes, and to adjust its reforms before implementing them in full. With fully developed financial markets, however, private actors may front-run future ...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2016

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2014

Retirement Security in an Aging Population

By James M. Poterba

American Economic Review, May 2014

Elderly individuals exhibit wide disparities in their sources of income. For those in the bottom half of the income distribution, Social Security is the most important source of support; program changes would directly affect their well-being. Income from ...

Tunneling

By Simon Johnson, Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, and Andrei Shleifer

American Economic Review, May 2000

Inflation Is Always and Everywhere a Monetary Phenomenon: Richmond vs. Houston in 1864

By Richard C. K. Burdekin and Marc D. Weidenmier

American Economic Review, December 2001

Competitive Nonlinear Taxation and Constitutional Choice

By Massimo Morelli, Huanxing Yang, and Lixin Ye

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2012

In an economy where agents have different productivities and mobility, we compare a unified nonlinear optimal taxation with the equilibrium taxation that would be chosen by two competing tax authorities if the same economy were divided into two states. T...

A Context-Robust Measure of the Disincentive Cost of Unemployment Insurance

By Johannes F. Schmieder and Till von Wachter

American Economic Review, May 2017

This paper proposes a new measure of the disincentive cost of unemployment insurance (UI): the ratio of the behavioral cost (BC) to the mechanical cost (MC) of a UI reform. This measure represents the labor supply distortion relative to the additional (me...

Slum Clearance and Urban Renewal in the United States

By William J. Collins and Katharine L. Shester

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2013

We study the local effects of a federal program that helped cities clear areas for redevelopment, rehabilitate structures, complete city plans, and enforce building codes. We use an instrumental variable strategy to estimate the program's effects on ci...

Performance and Turnover in a Stochastic Partnership

By David McAdams

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2011

Suppose that players in a stochastic partnership have the option to quit and rematch anonymously. If stage-game payoffs are subject to a persistent initial shock, the (unique) social welfare-maximizing equilibrium induces a "dating" process in which all p...

When They're Sixty-Four: Peer Effects and the Timing of Retirement

By Kristine M. Brown and Ron A. Laschever

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2012

This paper examines the effect of peers on an individual's likelihood of retirement using an administrative dataset of all retirement-eligible Los Angeles teachers for the years 1998-2001. We use two large unexpected pension reforms that differentially im...

Aggregate Implications of a Credit Crunch: The Importance of Heterogeneity

By Francisco J. Buera and Benjamin Moll

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2015

We take an off-the-shelf model with financial frictions and heterogeneity, and study the mapping from a credit crunch, modeled as a shock to collateral constraints, to simple aggregate wedges. We study three variants of this model that only differ in the ...

The For-Profit Postsecondary School Sector: Nimble Critters or Agile Predators?

[Symposium: Higher Education]

By David J. Deming, Claudia Goldin, and Lawrence F. Katz

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2012

Private for-profit institutions have been the fastest-growing part of the U.S. higher education sector. For-profit enrollment increased from 0.2 percent to 9.1 percent of total enrollment in degree-granting schools from 1970 to 2009, and for-profit insti...

Input and Output Inventory Dynamics

By Yi Wen

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2011

This paper develops an analytically tractable general equilibrium model of inventory dynamics based on a precautionary stockout-avoidance motive. The model's predictions are broadly consistent with the US business cycle and key features of inventory beha...