The Impact of Entrepreneurship Programs on Minorities

By Elizabeth Lyons and Laurina Zhang

American Economic Review, May 2017

We document the impact of an entrepreneurship training program on startup activity of minorities (females and non-Caucasians). We compare entrepreneurial activity between applicants who are accepted into the program with applicants who are program finalis...

Politician Family Networks and Electoral Outcomes: Evidence from the Philippines

By Cesi Cruz, Julien Labonne, and Pablo Querubín

American Economic Review, October 2017

We demonstrate the importance of politician social networks for electoral outcomes. Using large-scale data on family networks from over 20 million individuals in 15,000 villages in the Philippines, we show that candidates for public office are disproporti...

Are Big-Time Sports a Threat to Student Achievement?

By Jason M. Lindo, Isaac D. Swensen, and Glen R. Waddell

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2012

We consider the relationship between collegiate football success and non-athlete student performance. We find that the team's success significantly reduces male grades relative to female grades, and only in fall quarters, which coincides with the footbal...

Tax Policy and Economic Growth: Lessons from the 1980s

[Symposium: The Slowdown in Productivity Growth]

By Michael J. Boskin

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1988

The past seven years of U.S. economic policy and performance constitute a truly remarkable, if confusing, experiment. Few would have guessed in 1980 that inflation would fall rapidly to 4 percent and hold pretty steady during a lengthy recovery; that prod...

How Did Health Care Reform in Massachusetts Impact Insurance Premiums?

By John A. Graves and Jonathan Gruber

American Economic Review, May 2012

It is widely recognized that the 2006 Massachusetts health reforms served as a blueprint for national reform under the 2010 Affordable Care Act (ACA). As such, there is interest in using the Massachusetts experience to understand how insurance premiums m...

Debt Relief and Debtor Outcomes: Measuring the Effects of Consumer Bankruptcy Protection

By Will Dobbie and Jae Song

American Economic Review, March 2015

Consumer bankruptcy is one of the largest social insurance programs in the United States, but little is known about its impact on debtors. We use 500,000 bankruptcy filings matched to administrative tax and foreclosure data to estimate the impact of Chapt...

Policy Reversal

By Espen R. Moen and Christian Riis

American Economic Review, June 2010

We analyze the existence of policy reversal, the phenomenon sometimes observed that a certain policy (say extreme left-wing) is implemented by the "unlikely" (right-wing) party. We formulate a Downsian signaling model where the incumbent government, throu...

Why Economists Should Conduct Field Experiments and 14 Tips for Pulling One Off

[Symposium: Field Experiments]

By John A. List

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2011

In this introduction to the symposium, I first offer an overview of the spectrum of experimental methods in economics, from laboratory experiments to the field experiments that are the subject of this symposium. I then offer some thoughts about the potent...

CoVaR

By Tobias Adrian and Markus K. Brunnermeier

American Economic Review, July 2016

CoVaR, defined as the change in the value at risk of the financial system conditional on an institution being under distress relative to its median state. Our estimates show that characteristics such as leverage, size, maturity mismatch, and asset price b...

The Long-Run Impact of Cash Transfers to Poor Families

By Anna Aizer, Shari Eli, Joseph Ferrie, and Adriana Lleras-Muney

American Economic Review, April 2016

We estimate the long-run impact of cash transfers to poor families on children's longevity, educational attainment, nutritional status, and income in adulthood. To do so, we collected individual- level administrative records of applicants to the Mother...

Persuading Voters

By Ricardo Alonso and Odilon Câmara

American Economic Review, November 2016

In a symmetric information voting model, an individual (politician) can influence voters' choices by strategically designing a policy experiment (public signal). We characterize the politician's optimal experiment. With a nonunanimous voting rule, she exp...

Auctions and Bidding: A Primer

[Symposium: Auctions]

By Paul Milgrom

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1989

The "Winner's Curse," is just one of the surprising and puzzling conclusions turned up by modern research into auctions. Another is the theoretical proposition that, for example, a sealed-bid Treasury bill auction in which each buyer pays a price equal to...

How Important Can the Non-violation Clause Be for the GATT/WTO?

By Robert W. Staiger and Alan O. Sykes

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2017

The "non-violation" clause of GATT is Exhibit A for the proposition that international trade agreements are incomplete contracts. According to the terms-of-trade theory of trade agreements, it underpins the success of the GATT/WTO's "shallow integration" ...

Stories of the Twentieth Century for the Twenty-First

By Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas and Maurice Obstfeld

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2012

A key precursor of twentieth-century financial crises in emerging and advanced economies alike was the rapid buildup of leverage. Those emerging economies that avoided leverage booms during the 2000s also were most likely to avoid the worst effects of the...

Race and Home Ownership from the End of the Civil War to the Present

By William J. Collins and Robert A. Margo

American Economic Review, May 2011

We present new estimates of home ownership for black and white households from 1870 to 2007. Black ownership increased by 46 percentage points, whereas white ownership increased by 20 points. Remarkably, 25 of the 26 point narrowing occurred between 1870 ...

Cash Transfers, Behavioral Changes, and Cognitive Development in Early Childhood: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment

By Karen Macours, Norbert Schady, and Renos Vakis

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2012

Cash transfer programs have become extremely popular in the developing world. A large literature analyzes their effects on schooling, health and nutrition, but relatively little is known about possible impacts on child development. This paper analyzes the...

Is American Health Care Uniquely Inefficient? Evidence from Prescription Drugs

By Margaret Kyle and Heidi Williams

American Economic Review, May 2017

Alan Garber and Jonathan Skinner (2008) famously conjectured that the US health care system was "uniquely inefficient" relative to other countries. We test this idea using cross-country data on prescription drug sales newly linked with an arguably objecti...

The Effect of Public Insurance Coverage for Childless Adults on Labor Supply

By Laura Dague, Thomas DeLeire, and Lindsey Leininger

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2017

This study provides plausibly causal estimates of the effect of public insurance coverage on the employment of non-elderly, nondisabled adults without dependent children ("childless adults"). We take advantage of the sudden imposition of an enrollment cap...

Optimal Taxation in Theory and Practice

By N. Gregory Mankiw, Matthew Weinzierl, and Danny Yagan

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2009

The optimal design of a tax system is a topic that has long fascinated economic theorists and flummoxed economic policymakers. This paper explores the interplay between tax theory and tax policy. It identifies key lessons policymakers might take from the ...

Retrospectives: A Dismal Romantic

By Joseph Persky

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1990

Economists like to think of their discipline as queen of the social sciences. Unfortunately, our vocation is more likely to be berated as "the dismal science." This witticism has a checkered history. In the popular mind, economists are viewed as "dismal" ...