Why Do Skilled Immigrants Struggle in the Labor Market? A Field Experiment with Thirteen Thousand Resumes

By Philip Oreopoulos

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2011

Thousands of randomly manipulated resumes were sent in response to online job postings in Toronto to investigate why immigrants, allowed in based on skill, struggle in the labor market. The study finds substantial discrimination across a variety of occupa...

Social Learning with Costly Search

By Manuel Mueller-Frank and Mallesh M. Pai

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2016

We study a sequential social learning model where agents privately acquire information by costly search. Search costs of agents are private, and are independently and identically distributed. We show that asymptotic learning occurs if and only if search c...

The Compromise Game: Two-Sided Adverse Selection in the Laboratory

By Juan D. Carrillo and Thomas R. Palfrey

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2009

We analyze a game of two-sided private information where players have privately known "strengths" and can decide to fight or compromise. If either chooses to fight, the stronger player receives a high payoff and the weaker player receives a low payoff....

Capital-Skill Complementarity and the Skill Premium in a Quantitative Model of Trade

By Fernando Parro

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2013

Technological change has reduced the relative price of capital goods. Reductions in trade costs make it cheaper to import capital goods. With capital-skill complementarity, both can increase the skill premium. I construct a general-equilibrium trade mo...

On the Relationship between Preferential and Multilateral Trade Liberalization: The Case of Customs Unions

By Kamal Saggi, Alan Woodland, and Halis Murat Yildiz

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2013

This paper compares equilibrium outcomes of two games of trade liberalization. In the Bilateralism game, countries choose whether to liberalize trade preferentially via a customs union (CU ), multilaterally, or not at all. The Multilateralism game is a...

Policy-Relevant Treatment Effects

By James J. Heckman and Edward Vytlacil

American Economic Review, May 2001

Dynamic Agenda Setting

By Ying Chen and Hülya Eraslan

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2017

A party in power can address a limited number of issues. What issues to address--the party's agenda--has dynamic implications because it affects what issues will be addressed in the future. We analyze a model in which the incumbent addresses one issue amo...

The Economic Importance of Financial Literacy: Theory and Evidence

By Annamaria Lusardi and Olivia S. Mitchell

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2014

This paper undertakes an assessment of a rapidly growing body of economic research on financial literacy. We start with an overview of theoretical research, which casts financial knowledge as a form of investment in human capital. Endogenizing financial k...

Privacy-Preserving Methods for Sharing Financial Risk Exposures

By Emmanuel A. Abbe, Amir E. Khandani, and Andrew W. Lo

American Economic Review, May 2012

The financial industry relies on trade secrecy to protect its business processes and methods, which can obscure critical financial risk exposures from regulators and the public. Using results from cryptography, we develop computationally tractable protoc...

Neuroeconomic Studies of Impulsivity: Now or Just as Soon as Possible?

By Paul William Glimcher, Joseph Kable, and Kenway Louie

American Economic Review, May 2007

Stock Prices, News, and Economic Fluctuations

By Paul Beaudry and Franck Portier

American Economic Review, September 2006

We show that the joint behavior of stock prices and TFP favors a view of business cycles driven largely by a shock that does not affect productivity in the short run – and therefore does not look like a standard technology shock – but affects productivi...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Bernard Saffran

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1998

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2006

The 1/d Law of Giving

By Jacob K. Goeree, Margaret A. McConnell, Tiffany Mitchell, Tracey Tromp, and Leeat Yariv

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2010

We combine survey data on friendship networks and individual characteristics with experimental observations from dictator games. Dictator offers are primarily explained by social distance, giving follows a simple inverse distance law. While student dem...

Informal Risk Sharing, Index Insurance, and Risk Taking in Developing Countries

By Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak and Mark R. Rosenzweig

American Economic Review, May 2013

Preliminary findings are presented from a research project which examined the interactions between informal risk sharing, index insurance and risk-taking. Rainfall insurance contracts were randomly offered to cultivating and landless households in a set o...

Commitment and Conflict in Bilateral Bargaining

By Tore Ellingsen and Topi Miettinen

American Economic Review, September 2008

Building on previous work by Schelling and Crawford, we study a model of bilateral bargaining in which negotiators can make binding commitments at a low positive cost c. Most of our results concern outcomes that survive iterated strict dominance. If com...

Medicaid Insurance in Old Age

By Mariacristina De Nardi, Eric French, and John Bailey Jones

American Economic Review, November 2016

The old age provisions of the Medicaid program were designed to insure retirees against medical expenses. We estimate a structural model of savings and medical spending and use it to compute the distribution of lifetime Medicaid transfers and Medicaid val...

Financial Contracts and the Political Economy of Investor Protection

By Pavel Ševčík

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2012

This paper studies the joint dynamics of investor protection and economic development in a political economy model with capital accumulation and occupational choice. Less investor protection implies higher costs of external financing for entrepreneurs. T...

Trade and the Global Recession

By Jonathan Eaton, Samuel Kortum, Brent Neiman, and John Romalis

American Economic Review, November 2016

We develop a dynamic multicountry general equilibrium model to investigate forces acting on the global economy during the Great Recession and ensuing recovery. Our multisector framework accounts completely for countries' trade, investment, production, and...

Information, Preferences, and Public Benefit Participation: Experimental Evidence from the Advance EITC and 401(k) Savings

By Damon Jones

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2010

Within a field experiment, I present a treatment group with reductions in information, administrative, stigma, and procrastination costs associated with the Advance EITC. The treatment increases Advance participation from 0.3 to 1.2 percent. Another tr...