What Do (and Don't) We Know about the Value Added Tax? A Review of Richard M. Bird and Pierre-Pascal Gendron's The VAT in Developing and Transitional Countries

By Michael Keen

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2009

The VAT has taken the tax world by storm over the last fifty years, but left little trace in the academic literature. Bird and Gendron provide an impressively informed and informative account of the VAT experience in lower income countries, largely vind...

The Dynamics of Open-Source Contributors

By Josh Lerner, Parag A. Pathak, and Jean Tirole

American Economic Review, May 2006

Marriage Laws and Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa

By Todd Schoellman and Michèle Tertilt

American Economic Review, May 2006

How Does Risk Selection Respond to Risk Adjustment? New Evidence from the Medicare Advantage Program

By Jason Brown, Mark Duggan, Ilyana Kuziemko, and William Woolston

American Economic Review, October 2014

To combat adverse selection, governments increasingly base payments to health plans and providers on enrollees' scores from risk-adjustment formulae. In 2004, Medicare began to risk-adjust capitation payments to private Medicare Advantage (MA) plans to ...

Beyond Work Ethic: Religion, Individual, and Political Preferences

By Christoph Basten and Frank Betz

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2013

We investigate the effect of Reformed Protestantism, relative to Catholicism, on preferences for leisure, and for redistribution and intervention in the economy. We use a Fuzzy Spatial Regression Discontinuity Design to exploit a historical quasi-experime...

Benefits of Neuroeconomic Modeling: New Policy Interventions and Predictors of Preference

By Ian Krajbich, Bastiaan Oud, and Ernst Fehr

American Economic Review, May 2014

Neuroeconomics strives to use knowledge from neuroscience to improve models of decisionmaking. Here we introduce a biologically plausible, drift-diffusion model that is able to jointly predict choice behavior and response times across different choice env...

Asymmetric Networks in Two-Sided Markets

By Attila Ambrus and Rossella Argenziano

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2009

This paper investigates pricing decisions and network choices in two-sided markets with network externalities. Consumers are heterogeneous in how much they value the externality. Imposing restrictions on the extent of coordination failure among consume...

Contagious Adverse Selection

By Stephen Morris and Hyun Song Shin

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2012

We illustrate the corrosive effect of even small amounts of adverse selection in an asset market and show how it can lead to the total breakdown of trade. The problem is the failure of "market confidence," defined as approximate common knowledge of an upp...

Anomalies: The January Effect

By Richard H. Thaler

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1987

This feature will report successful searches for disconfirming evidence -- economic anomalies. As suggested by Thomas Kuhn, an economic anomaly is a result inconsistent with the present economics paradigm. Economics is distinguished from other social scie...

The "Collapse in Quality" Hypothesis

By Andrei A. Levchenko, Logan T. Lewis, and Linda L. Tesar

American Economic Review, May 2011

This paper evaluates the hypothesis that during the 2008-2009 collapse in international trade, imports of higher quality goods experienced larger reductions compared to low-quality imports, using data on US imports disaggregated by HS-10 product category ...

From Sick Man of Europe to Economic Superstar: Germany's Resurgent Economy

By Christian Dustmann, Bernd Fitzenberger, Uta Schönberg, and Alexandra Spitz-Oener

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2014

In the late 1990s and into the early 2000s, Germany was often called "the sick man of Europe." Indeed, Germany's economic growth averaged only about 1.2 percent per year from 1998 to 2005, including a recession in 2003, and unemployment rates rose from ...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2012

Pareto and Piketty: The Macroeconomics of Top Income and Wealth Inequality

[Symposium: Wealth and Inequality]

By Charles I. Jones

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2015

Since the early 2000s, research by Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and their coauthors has revolutionized our understanding of income and wealth inequality. In this paper, I highlight some of the key empirical facts from this research and comment on how ...

Fraternities and Labor-Market Outcomes

By Sergey V. Popov and Dan Bernhardt

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2012

We model how student choices to rush a fraternity, and fraternity admission choices, interact with signals firms receive about student productivities to determine labor-market outcomes. The fraternity and students value wages and fraternity socializing va...

Recent Developments in Matching with Constraints

By Yuichiro Kamada and Fuhito Kojima

American Economic Review, May 2017

In an earlier work (Kamada and Kojima 2015), we introduced "matching with constraints," a two-sided matching problem in which the market is subject to feasibility constraints. That paper proposed and analyzed a possible solution to this problem and discus...

The Consumption Response to Seasonal Income: Evidence from Japanese Public Pension Benefits

By Melvin Stephens and Takashi Unayama

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2011

Japanese public pension benefits, which were distributed quarterly through February 1990, and every other month since then, induce substantial but predictable income fluctuations. The relative magnitude of the payments combined with the delay between paym...

Report of the Secretary

By Peter L. Rousseau

American Economic Review, May 2013

Immigrants' Effect on Native Workers: New Analysis on Longitudinal Data

By Mette Foged and Giovanni Peri

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2016

Using longitudinal data on the universe of workers in Denmark during the period 1991-2008, we track the labor market outcomes of low-skilled natives in response to an exogenous inflow of low- skilled immigrants. We innovate on previous identification str...

Contracting on Time

By Sergei Guriev and Dmitriy Kvasov

American Economic Review, December 2005

The paper shows how time considerations, especially those concerning contract duration, affect incomplete contract theory. Time is not only a dimension along which the relationship unfolds, but also a continuous verifiable variable that can be included in...

Anomalies: Foreign Exchange

By Kenneth A. Froot and Richard H. Thaler

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1990

In what follows, we discuss the efficiency of foreign exchange markets. To manage what would otherwise be an enormous task, the question of efficiency is viewed below from the perspective of a single type of test: the test for what is called the forward d...