Estimating Average Treatment Effects with Continuous and Discrete Covariates: The Case of Swan-Ganz Catheterization

By Qi Li, Jeffrey S. Racine, and Jeffrey M. Wooldridge

American Economic Review, May 2008

Texting Bans and Fatal Accidents on Roadways: Do They Work? Or Do Drivers Just React to Announcements of Bans?

By Rahi Abouk and Scott Adams

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2013

Since 2007, many states passed laws prohibiting text messaging while driving. Using vehicular fatality data from across the United States and standard difference-in-differences techniques, bans appear moderately successful at reducing single-vehicle, si...

Investment and Usage of New Technologies: Evidence from a Shared ATM Network

By Stijn Ferrari, Frank Verboven, and Hans Degryse

American Economic Review, June 2010

The success of new technologies depends on both the firms' investment and consumers' usage decisions. We study this problem in a shared ATM network. Inefficiencies may arise because banks coordinate investment, and consumers may not make proper use of t...

An Empirical Investigation of the Option Value of College Enrollment

By Kevin M. Stange

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2012

This paper quantifies the option value arising from sequential schooling decisions made in the presence of uncertainty and learning about academic ability. College attendance has option value since enrolled students have the option, but not obligation, to...

Egalitarianism and Competitiveness

By Bjorn Bartling, Ernst Fehr, Michel Andre Marechal, and Daniel Schunk

American Economic Review, May 2009

Generalizing the Taylor Principle: Reply

By Troy Davig and Eric M. Leeper

American Economic Review, March 2010

Farmer, Waggoner, and Zha (2009) (FWZ) show that a new Keynesian model with regime-switching monetary policy can support multiple solutions, appearing to contradict findings in Davig and Leeper (2007) (DL). The explanation is straightforward: FWZ derive s...

Defending the One Percent

[Symposium: The Top 1 Percent]

By N. Gregory Mankiw

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2013

Imagine a society with perfect economic equality. Then, one day, this egalitarian utopia is disturbed by an entrepreneur with an idea for a new product. Think of the entrepreneur as Steve Jobs as he develops the iPod, J. K. Rowling as she writes her Har...

Phased-In Tax Cuts and Economic Activity

By Christopher L. House and Matthew D. Shapiro

American Economic Review, December 2006

This paper uses a dynamic general equilibrium model to analyze and quantify the aggregate effects of the timing of tax rate changes enacted in 2001 (which called for successive rate reductions through 2006) and 2003 (which made immediate tax rate cuts sch...

The Evolution of China's One-Child Policy and Its Effects on Family Outcomes

[Symposium: China]

By Junsen Zhang

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2017

In 1979, China introduced its unprecedented one-child policy, under which households exceeding the birth quota were penalized. However, estimating the effect of this policy on family outcomes turns out to be complicated. China had already enacted an agg...

Vocational Training for Disadvantaged Youth in Colombia: A Long-Term Follow-Up

By Orazio Attanasio, Arlen Guarín, Carlos Medina, and Costas Meghir

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2017

We evaluate the long-term impacts of a randomized Colombian training and job placement program. Following the large short-term effects, we now find that the program effects persist, increasing formal participation and earnings contributions to social secu...

Intertemporal Price Discrimination in Storable Goods Markets

By Igal Hendel and Aviv Nevo

American Economic Review, December 2013

We study intertemporal price discrimination when consumers can store for future consumption needs. We offer a simple model of demand dynamics, which we estimate using market-level data. Optimal pricing involves temporary price reductions that enable sell...

Precommitment, Cash Transfers, and Timely Arrival for Birth: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial in Nairobi Kenya

By Jessica Cohen, Katherine Lofgren, and Margaret McConnell

American Economic Review, May 2017

Maternal and neonatal mortality rates in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya are among the highest in the world. Mounting evidence suggests that delivering in a facility is not enough to ensure mortality reductions: women must deliver in high-quality facilities a...

American Government Finance in the Long Run: 1790 to 1990

[Symposium: Looking Backward at Economics and the Economy]

By John Joseph Wallis

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2000

Government in America has gone through three distinct fiscal systems in the last two hundred years. Each system utilized a dominant revenue source, and had a distinctly active level of government. The changing structure of government by level seems to be ...

How Elastic Are Preferences for Redistribution? Evidence from Randomized Survey Experiments

By Ilyana Kuziemko, Michael I. Norton, Emmanuel Saez, and Stefanie Stantcheva

American Economic Review, April 2015

We analyze randomized online survey experiments providing interactive, customized information on US income inequality, the link between top income tax rates and economic growth, and the estate tax. The treatment has large effects on views about inequality...

Accounting for the Rise in Consumer Bankruptcies

By Igor Livshits, James MacGee, and Michèle Tertilt

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2010

Personal bankruptcies in the United States have increased dramatically, rising from 1.4 per thousand working age adults in 1970 to 8.5 in 2002. We use a heterogeneous agent life-cycle model with competitive lenders to evaluate several commonly offered ...

Re-examining Economic Shocks and Civil Conflict

By Edward Miguel and Shanker Satyanath

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2011

Miguel, Satyanath, and Ernest Sergenti (2004), henceforth MSS, show that economic growth is negatively related to civil conflict in Africa, using annual rainfall variation as an IV for growth. Antonio Ciccone (2011) argues that thanks to rainfall's mean-r...

Tariff Revenue and Tariff Caps

By Manuel Amador and Kyle Bagwell

American Economic Review, May 2012

We characterize the design of an optimal trade agreement when governments are privately informed about the value of tariff revenue. We show that the problem of designing an optimal trade agreement in this setting can be represented as an optimal delegatio...

Teaching Practices and Social Capital

By Yann Algan, Pierre Cahuc, and Andrei Shleifer

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2013

In cross-country data, teaching practices (such as copying from the board versus working on projects together) are related to various dimensions of social capital. In micro-data from three datasets, teaching practices are also strongly correlated with ...

Modern Medicine and the Twentieth Century Decline in Mortality: Evidence on the Impact of Sulfa Drugs

By Seema Jayachandran, Adriana Lleras-Muney, and Kimberly V. Smith

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2010

This paper studies the contribution of sulfa drugs, a groundbreaking medical innovation in the 1930s, to declines in US mortality. For several infectious diseases, sulfa drugs represented the first effective treatment. Using time-series and difference-...

Intertemporal Price Discrimination: Dynamic Arrivals and Changing Values

By Daniel F. Garrett

American Economic Review, November 2016

We study the profit-maximizing price path of a monopolist selling a durable good to buyers who arrive over time and whose values for the good evolve stochastically. The setting is completely stationary with an infinite horizon. Contrary to the case with c...