Federal Reserve Information and the Behavior of Interest Rates

By Christina D. Romer and David H. Romer

American Economic Review, June 2000

This paper tests for the existence of asymmetric information between the Federal Reserve and the public by examining Federal Reserve and commercial inflation forecasts. It demonstrates that the Federal Reserve has considerable information about inflation ...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Bernard Saffran

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1995

Identity-Based Organizations

By Jean-Paul Carvalho

American Economic Review, May 2016

A single club model describes the collective production of both personal and social identity. Personal identity, how one perceives oneself, is formed through a process of cultural transmission. Social identity, how one is perceived by others, takes the fo...

Labor Contracts, Equal Treatment, and Wage-Unemployment Dynamics

By Andy Snell and Jonathan P. Thomas

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2010

This paper analyses a model in which firms cannot pay discriminate based on year of entry. It is assumed that workers can costlessly quit at any time, while firms are committed to contracts. We solve for the dynamics of wages and unemployment, and show th...

Policy Watch: Proposals for Time-Limited Welfare

By Rebecca M. Blank

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1994

This paper summarizes the Clinton administration's welfare reform proposal and views the available evidence on the effects of time-limiting cash assistance and requiring work among long-term Aid to Families with Dependent Children users. The reforms are d...

The Dividend Clientele Hypothesis: Evidence from the 2003 Tax Act

By Laura Kawano

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2014

This paper provides evidence that dividend and capital gains tax rates importantly influence household portfolio choices. Using data from the Surveys of Consumer Finances around the 2003 dividend tax reductions, I estimate the relationship between taxe...

Gridlock: Ethnic Diversity in Government and the Provision of Public Goods

By Brian Beach and Daniel B. Jones

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2017

How does ethnic diversity in government impact public good provision? We construct a novel dataset linking the ethnicity of California city council candidates to election outcomes and expenditure decisions. Using a regression discontinuity approach, we fi...

Structural Change, Growth, and Volatility

By Alessio Moro

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2015

I construct a two-sector general equilibrium model of structural change to study the impact of sectoral composition of gross domestic product (GDP) on cross-country differences in GDP growth and volatility. For an empirically relevant parametrization of s...

Market Maker Inventories and Stock Prices

By Terrence Hendershott and Mark S. Seasholes

American Economic Review, May 2007

The Demand for, and Impact of, Learning HIV Status

By Rebecca L. Thornton

American Economic Review, December 2008

This paper evaluates an experiment in which individuals in rural Malawi were randomly assigned monetary incentives to learn their HIV results after being tested. Distance to the HIV results centers was also randomly assigned. Without any incentive, 34 ...

Real Business Cycles: A New Keynesian Perspective

[Symposium: Real Business Cycles]

By N. Gregory Mankiw

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1989

Real business cycle theory is the latest incarnation of the classical view of economic fluctuations. It assumes that there are large random fluctuations in the rate of technological change. In response to these fluctuations, individuals rationally alter t...

Irving B. Kravis: Memoir of a Distinguished Fellow

By Lawrence R. Klein

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1993

The nomination of Irving Kravis as a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association in 1991 crowned a long and distinguished career. He would go on to no further accomplishments, for it was on the trip to the ASSA meetings in New Orleans to rec...

Gibrat's Law for (All) Cities: Reply

By Jan Eeckhout

American Economic Review, September 2009

This reply refutes the objection raised by Levy (2009) about the fit of the upper tail of the city size distribution in Eeckhout (2004). I show that the method on which his conclusion is based is unsubstantiated. The visual interpretation of the fit on lo...

Robust Control and Model Uncertainty

By LarsPeter Hansen and Thomas J. Sargent

American Economic Review, May 2001

VAT Base Broadening, Self Supply, and the Informal Sector

By John Piggott and John Whalley

American Economic Review, September 2001

Estimating Trade Elasticities: Demand Composition and the Trade Collapse of 2008-2009

By Matthieu Bussière, Giovanni Callegari, Fabio Ghironi, Giulia Sestieri, and Norihiko Yamano

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2013

This paper introduces a new empirical model of international trade flows based on an import intensity-adjusted measure of aggregate demand. We compute the import intensity of demand components by using the OECD Input-Output tables. We argue that the co...

A Century of Work and Leisure

By Valerie A. Ramey and Neville Francis

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2009

We develop comprehensive measures of time spent in market work, home production, schooling, and leisure in the United States for the last 106 years. We find that hours of work for prime age individuals are essentially unchanged, with the rise in women'...

Renegotiation Policies in Sovereign Defaults

By Cristina Arellano and Yan Bai

American Economic Review, May 2014

This paper studies an optimal renegotiation protocol designed by a benevolent planner when two countries renegotiate with the same lender. The solution calls for recoveries that induce each country to default or repay, trading off the deadweight costs and...

Gifts of Mars: Warfare and Europe's Early Rise to Riches

By Nico Voigtländer and Hans-Joachim Voth

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2013

Western Europe surged ahead of the rest of the world long before technological growth became rapid. Europe in 1500 already had incomes twice as high on a per capita basis as Africa, and one-third greater than most of Asia. In this essay, we explain how ...

Separations, Sorting, and Cyclical Unemployment

By Andreas I. Mueller

American Economic Review, July 2017

This paper establishes a new fact about the compositional changes in the pool of unemployed over the US business cycle. Using micro-data from the Current Population Survey for the years 1962-2012, it documents that in recessions the pool of unemployed shi...