Financial Intermediation without Exclusivity

By Tano Santos and Jose A. Scheinkman

American Economic Review, May 2001

Efficiency and Redistribution: An Evaluative Review of Louis Kaplow's The Theory of Taxation and Public Economics

By Robin Boadway

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2010

Louis Kaplow proposes a two-step methodology for normative policy analysis and illustrates it using various policy reforms. The first step is to identify efficiency gains when hypothetical lump-sum taxes can undo redistributive consequences. The second s...

Revealed Preference in a Discrete Consumption Space

By Matthew Polisson and John K.-H. Quah

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2013

We show that an agent maximizing some utility function on a discrete (as opposed to continuous) consumption space will obey the generalized axiom of revealed preference (GARP), so long as the agent obeys cost efficiency. Cost efficiency will hold if th...

Nominal Exchange Rate Determinacy under the Threat of Currency Counterfeiting

By Pedro Gomis-Porqueras, Timothy Kam, and Christopher Waller

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2017

We study the endogenous choice to accept fiat objects as media of exchange and their implications for nominal exchange rate determination. We consider a two-country environment with two currencies that can be used to settle any transactions. However, curr...

Borrowing on the Wrong Credit Card? Evidence from Mexico

By Alejandro Ponce, Enrique Seira, and Guillermo Zamarripa

American Economic Review, April 2017

We establish new facts about the way consumers allocate debt among their credit cards using data for a representative sample of cardholders in Mexico. We find that relative prices are weak predictors of the allocation of debt, purchases, and payments. Con...

Many Children Left Behind? Textbooks and Test Scores in Kenya

By Paul Glewwe, Michael Kremer, and Sylvie Moulin

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2009

A randomized evaluation in rural Kenya finds, contrary to the previous literature, that providing textbooks did not raise average test scores. Textbooks did increase the scores of the best students (those with high pretest scores) but had little effect...

Keeping Secrets: The Economics of Access Deterrence

By Emeric Henry and Francisco Ruiz-Aliseda

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2016

Keeping valuable secrets requires costly protection efforts. Breaking them requires costly search efforts. In a dynamic model in which the value of the secret decreases with the number of those holding it, we examine the secret holders' protection decisio...

Does Tax-Collection Invariance Hold? Evasion and the Pass-Through of State Diesel Taxes

By Wojciech Kopczuk, Justin Marion, Erich Muehlegger, and Joel Slemrod

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2016

In simple models, the incidence of a tax is independent of the identity of the remitting party. We illustrate that this prediction fails to hold if opportunities for evasion differ across economic agents. Second, we estimate how the incidence of state ...

The Difference That CEOs Make: An Assignment Model Approach

By Marko Tervio

American Economic Review, June 2008

This paper presents an assignment model of CEOs and firms. The distributions of CEO pay levels and firms' market values are analyzed as the competitive equilibrium of a matching market where talents, as well as CEO positions, are scarce. It is shown ho...

Emotions in Economic Theory and Economic Behavior

By George Loewenstein

American Economic Review, May 2000

An Interview with Zvi Griliches

By Alan B. Krueger and Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2000

Alan Krueger and Timothy Taylor interviewed Zvi Griliches, Paul M. Warburg Professor of Economics at Harvard University, at his home near the Harvard campus on June 21, 1999. The interview touches on his harrowing journey from Lithuania to Chicago; year...

In Honor of Andrei Shleifer: Winner of the John Bates Clark Medal

By Olivier Blanchard

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2001

Firm Entry and Macroeconomic Dynamics: A State-Level Analysis

By François Gourio, Todd Messer, and Michael Siemer

American Economic Review, May 2016

Using an annual panel of US states over the period 1982-2014, we estimate the response of macroeconomic variables to a shock to the number of new firms (startups). We find that these shocks have significant effects that persist for many years on real GDP,...

Are Female Supervisors More Female-Friendly?

By Steven Bednar and Dora Gicheva

American Economic Review, May 2014

We introduce the idea that easily inferable demographic characteristics such as gender may not be sufficient to define type in the supervisor-employee mentoring relationship. We use longitudinal data on athletic directors at NCAA Division I programs to id...

The Growth in the Social Security Disability Rolls: A Fiscal Crisis Unfolding

[Symposium: American Employment]

By David H. Autor and Mark G. Duggan

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2006

The U.S. Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) program has grown dramatically over the last 20 years in size and expense. This growth poses significant risks to the finances of the DI program and the broader Social Security system, and raises troublin...

The Aftermath of Financial Crises

By Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff

American Economic Review, May 2009

Transactional Sex as a Response to Risk in Western Kenya

By Jonathan Robinson and Ethan Yeh

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2011

Though formal and informal sex work has long been identified as crucial for the spread of HIV/AIDS, the nature of the sex-for-money market remains poorly understood. Using a unique panel dataset constructed from 192 self-reported diaries, we find that wom...

Properties of the Combinatorial Clock Auction

By Jonathan Levin and Andrzej Skrzypacz

American Economic Review, September 2016

The combinatorial clock auction has become popular for large-scale spectrum awards and other uses, replacing more traditional ascending or clock auctions. We describe some surprising properties of the auction, including a wide range of ex post equilibria ...

Anomalies: Interindustry Wage Differentials

By Richard H. Thaler

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1989

Firms advertise widely varying wages for jobs that appear to be very similar, such as secretary, data entry clerk, or "tele-marketing representative." Students who graduate from Cornell's MBA program often receive offers from several firms in the same cit...

The Political Economy of Trade Policy

By Robert E. Baldwin

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1989

International trade seems to be a subject where the advice of economists is routinely disregarded. Economists are nearly unanimous in their general opposition to protectionism, but the increase in U.S. protection in recent years in such sectors as automob...