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...

Enforcement of Labor Regulation and Informality

By Rita Almeida and Pedro Carneiro

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2012

Enforcement of labor regulations in the formal sector may drive workers to informality because they increase the costs of formal labor. But better compliance with mandated benefits makes it attractive to be a formal employee. We show that, in locations wi...

Report of the Editor: Journal of Economic Literature

By Roger H. Gordon

American Economic Review, May 2010

Intermediaries in Two-Sided Markets: An Empirical Analysis of the US Cable Television Industry

By Andre Boik

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2016

Local television stations are platforms in a two-sided market connecting advertisers and viewers. This paper explicitly examines the effect that important intermediaries (such as cable, telephone, and satellite distributors) may have on a platform's prici...

Is There An Insider Advantage in Getting Tenure?

By Paul Oyer

American Economic Review, May 2007

Just Keep My Money! Supporting Tax-Time Savings with US Savings Bonds

By Peter Tufano

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2011

This paper reports the results of a 2007 experiment testing whether specific process simplification can foster increased take-up rates for savings products, particularly by low-to-moderate income (LMI) households. Tax refund recipients at certain H&R Bloc...

Competitive Wages in a Match with Ordered Contracts

By Muriel Niederle

American Economic Review, December 2007

Following the recently dismissed antitrust lawsuit against the National Residency Matching Program (NRMP), Jeremy Bulow and Jonathan Levin (2006) propose a simple matching model in which firms set impersonal salaries simultaneously before matching with...

Telecracy: Testing for Channels of Persuasion

By Guglielmo Barone, Francesco D'Acunto, and Gaia Narciso

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2015

We consider the long-lived slant towards Berlusconi in political information on Italian television (TV). We exploit a shock to the slanted exposure of viewers: idiosyncratic deadlines to switch to digital TV from 2008 to 2012, which increased the number o...

Israel, the Palestinian Factions, and the Cycle of Violence

By David A. Jaeger and M. Daniele Paserman

American Economic Review, May 2006

Small Steps for Workers, a Giant Leap for Productivity

By Igal Hendel and Yossi Spiegel

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2014

We document the evolution of productivity in a steel mini mill with fixed capital, producing an unchanged product with Leontief technology working 24/7. Despite—almost—unchanged production conditions, output doubled within the sample period (12 yea...

Robustly Ranking Mechanisms

By Tilman Börgers and Doug Smith

American Economic Review, May 2012

For a mechanism designer with an objective such as welfare we propose a method for robustly ranking mechanisms. The method is based on eliminating weakly dominated strategies only, and thus does not require any assumptions about agents' beliefs about each...

A Macroeconomic Model with a Financial Sector

By Markus K. Brunnermeier and Yuliy Sannikov

American Economic Review, February 2014

This article studies the full equilibrium dynamics of an economy with financial frictions. Due to highly nonlinear amplification effects, the economy is prone to instability and occasionally enters volatile crisis episodes. Endogenous risk, driven by a...

The Effects of "Girl-Friendly" Schools: Evidence from the BRIGHT School Construction Program in Burkina Faso

By Harounan Kazianga, Dan Levy, Leigh L. Linden, and Matt Sloan

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2013

We evaluate a 'girl-friendly' primary school program in Burkina Faso using a regression discontinuity design. After 2.5 years, the program increased enrollment by 19 percentage points and increased test scores by 0.41 standard deviations. For those cau...

Immigration and the Rise of American Ingenuity

By Ufuk Akcigit, John Grigsby, and Tom Nicholas

American Economic Review, May 2017

We build on the analysis in Akcigit, Grigsby, and Nicholas (2017) by using US patent and census data to examine the relationship between immigration and innovation. We construct a measure of foreign born expertise and show that technology areas where immi...

Assessing the Incidence and Efficiency of a Prominent Place Based Policy

By Matias Busso, Jesse Gregory, and Patrick Kline

American Economic Review, April 2013

This paper empirically assesses the incidence and efficiency of Round I of the federal urban Empowerment Zone (EZ ) program using confidential microdata from the Decennial Census and the Longitudinal Business Database. Using rejected and future applica...

Learning in a Medium-Scale DSGE Model with Expectations Based on Small Forecasting Models

By Sergey Slobodyan and Raf Wouters

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2012

This paper evaluates the empirical performance of a medium-scale DSGE model with agents forming expectations using small forecasting models updated by the Kalman filter. The adaptive learning model fits the data better than the rational expectations (RE) ...

The World Trade Organization and the Future of Multilateralism

[Symposium: The Bretton Woods Institutions]

By Richard Baldwin

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2016

When the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade was signed by 23 nations in 1947, the goal was to establish a rules-based world trading system and to facilitate mutually advantageous trade liberalization. As the GATT evolved over time and morphed into the...