Markups and Firm-Level Export Status

By Jan De Loecker and Frederic Warzynski

American Economic Review, October 2012

In this paper, we develop a method to estimate markups using plant-level production data. Our approach relies on cost-minimizing producers and the existence of at least one variable input of production. The suggested empirical framework relies on the est...

What Can Be Done to Improve Struggling High Schools?

[Symposium: Early and Later Interventions]

By Julie Berry Cullen, Steven D. Levitt, Erin Robertson, and Sally Sadoff

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2013

In spite of decades of well-intentioned efforts targeted at struggling high schools, outcomes today are little improved. A handful of innovative programs have achieved great success on a small scale, but more generally, the economic futures of the student...

The Effect of Disability Insurance Payments on Beneficiaries' Earnings

By Alexander Gelber, Timothy J. Moore, and Alexander Strand

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2017

A crucial issue is whether social insurance affects work decisions through income or substitution effects. We examine this in the context of US Social Security Disability Insurance (DI), exploiting discontinuous changes in the benefit formula with a regre...

An Early Application of the Average Total Cost Concept

By F. M. Scherer

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2001

Signals of Child Achievement as Determinants of Child Support

By Alison Aughinbaugh

American Economic Review, May 2001

Household Behavior and the Tax Reform Act of 1986

[Symposium: Tax Reform]

By Jerry A. Hausman and James M. Poterba

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1987

President Reagan's May 1985 letter to Congress, accompanying his tax reform proposal, argued that the existing tax system hindered economic growth because "most Americans labor under excessively high tax rates that discourage work and cut drastically into...

Demand Shocks and Open Economy Puzzles

By Yan Bai and José-Víctor Ríos-Rull

American Economic Review, May 2015

We pose good markets frictions on top of an otherwise standard two-country international real business cycle (IRBC) model. Shopping for goods takes effort, which prevents perfect matching between customers and producers. An increase in search effort impli...

Bailouts and the Preservation of Competition: The Case of the Federal Timber Contract Payment Modification Act

By James W. Roberts and Andrew Sweeting

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2016

We estimate the value of competition in United States Forest Service (USFS) timber auctions, in the context of the Reagan administration's bailout of firms that faced substantial losses on existing contracts. We use a model with endogenous entry by asymme...

Identifying the Aggregate Productivity Effects of Entry and Size Restrictions: An Empirical Analysis of License Reform in India

By A. V. Chari

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2011

Distortions in the allocation of resources between heterogeneous producers have the potential to generate large reductions in aggregate productivity, a point that has been stressed by recent studies. There is, however, little direct empirical evidence f...

Expansions in Maternity Leave Coverage and Children's Long-Term Outcomes

By Christian Dustmann and Uta Schönberg

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2012

This paper evaluates the impact of three major expansions in maternity leave coverage in Germany on children's long-run outcomes. To identify the causal impact of the reforms, we use a difference-indifference design that compares outcomes of children bor...

Economic Perspectives on Corporate Social Responsibility

By Markus Kitzmueller and Jay Shimshack

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2012

This paper synthesizes the expanding corporate social responsibility (CSR) literature. We define CSR from an economic perspective and develop a CSR taxonomy that connects disparate approaches to the subject. We explore whether CSR should exist and investi...

The Returns to Medical School: Evidence from Admission Lotteries

By Nadine Ketel, Edwin Leuven, Hessel Oosterbeek, and Bas van der Klaauw

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2016

We exploit admission lotteries to estimate the returns to medical school in the Netherlands. Using data from up to 22 years after the lottery, we find that in every single year after graduation doctors earn at least 20 percent more than people who end up ...

Conflicting Demands on the International Monetary Fund

By Anne O. Krueger

American Economic Review, May 2000

Early Childhood Human Capital and Development

By Todd Schoellman

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2016

A growing literature stresses the importance of early childhood human capital. I ask whether variation in early childhood investments can help explain cross-country income differences. I provide new empirical evidence: the adult outcomes of refugees are i...

Corporate Tax Integration: A View from the Treasury Department

By R. Glenn Hubbard

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1993

"Integration" of the corporate and individual income taxes refers to any plan in which corporate income is taxed only once, rather than taxed both when earned and when distributed to shareholders as dividends. A consensus is emerging from the ongoing stud...

The Taxing Task of Taxing Transnationals

By Thomas A. Gresik

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2001

Financial and real investment flexibility, tax competition, and superior economic information by transnationals both create a rationale for corporate income taxation and limit the effectiveness of such taxation. While these factors have led to a variety o...

Do Firms Underinvest in Long-Term Research? Evidence from Cancer Clinical Trials

By Eric Budish, Benjamin N. Roin, and Heidi Williams

American Economic Review, July 2015

We investigate whether private research investments are distorted away from long-term projects. Our theoretical model highlights two potential sources of this distortion: short-termism and the fixed patent term. Our empirical context is cancer research, w...

Giving Credit Where It Is Due

[Symposium: The Agenda for Development Economics]

By Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2010

In the last few years, field experiments have emerged as an attractive new tool in the effort to elaborate our understanding of economic issues relevant to poor countries and poor people. By enabling the researcher to precisely control the variation in th...

Long-Run Impacts of Childhood Access to the Safety Net

By Hilary Hoynes, Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, and Douglas Almond

American Economic Review, April 2016

We examine the impact of a positive and policy-driven change in economic resources available in utero and during childhood. We focus on the introduction of the Food Stamp Program, which was rolled out across counties between 1961 and 1975. We use the P...

Making Sense of Nonbinding Retail-Price Recommendations

By Stefan Buehler and Dennis L. Gärtner

American Economic Review, February 2013

We model retail-price recommendations (RPRs) as a communication device in vertical supply relations with private manufacturer information on production costs and consumer demand. With static trade, RPRs are irrelevant, and the equilibrium outcome is inef...