Transfer Program Complexity and the Take-Up of Social Benefits

By Henrik Jacobsen Kleven and Wojciech Kopczuk

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2011

We model complexity in social programs as a by-product of the screening process. While a more rigorous screening process may improve targeting efficiency, the associated complexity is costly to applicants and induces incomplete take-up. We integrate the s...

Valuing the Environment through Contingent Valuation

[Symposium: Contingent Valuation]

By W. Michael Hanemann

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1994

Contingent valuation is now used around the world to value many types of public goods, including transportation, sanitation, health, and education, as well as the environment. The author describes how researchers go about making such surveys reliable, men...

Getting More Work for Nothing? Symbolic Awards and Worker Performance

By Michael Kosfeld and Susanne Neckermann

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2011

We study the impact of status and social recognition on worker performance in a field experiment. In collaboration with an international non-governmental organization, we hired students to work on a database project. Students in the award treatment were ...

Speculative Prices and Popular Models

[Symposium: Bubbles]

By Robert J. Shiller

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1990

The key idea of rational expectations models is to assume that people know (or behave as if they know) the true model that describes the economy. However, popular economic models (the models that are used by the broad masses of economic actors to form the...

The Single Transferable Vote

[Symposium: Economics of Voting]

By Nicolaus Tideman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1995

The single transferable vote (STV) is a family of vote-counting procedures that use voters' rankings of candidates as input and achieve proportional representation. This paper compares STV with other types of voting procedures and discusses the history of...

The Resurgence of Growth in the Late 1990s: Is Information Technology the Story?

[Symposium: Computers and Productivity]

By Stephen D. Oliner and Daniel E. Sichel

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2000

The growth of U.S. labor productivity rebounded in the second half of the 1990s, after nearly a quarter century of sluggish gains. We assess the contribution of information technology to this rebound, using the same neoclassical framework as in our earlie...

The Monetary Transmission Mechanism: An Empirical Framework

[Symposium: The Monetary Transmission Mechanism]

By John B. Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1995

This paper provides an overview of the monetary transmission mechanism describing the impact of changes in monetary policy on real GDP. Changes in financial market prices--including long-term interest rates and exchange rates--are the main vehicle for the...

Beyond Signaling and Human Capital: Education and the Revelation of Ability

By Peter Arcidiacono, Patrick Bayer, and Aurel Hizmo

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2010

We provide evidence that college graduation plays a direct role in revealing ability to the labor market. Using the NLSY79, our results suggest that ability is observed nearly perfectly for college graduates, but is revealed to the labor market more gradu...

The Importance of School Systems: Evidence from International Differences in Student Achievement

[Symposium: Schools and Accountability]

By Ludger Woessmann

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2016

Students in some countries do far better on international achievement tests than students in other countries. Is this all due to differences in what students bring with them to school--socioeconomic background, cultural factors, and the like? Or do school...

Calorie Posting in Chain Restaurants

By Bryan Bollinger, Phillip Leslie, and Alan Sorensen

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2011

We study the impact of mandatory calorie posting on consumers' purchase decisions using detailed data from Starbucks. We find that average calories per transaction fall by 6 percent. The effect is almost entirely related to changes in consumers' food choi...

Social Limits to Redistribution

By Giacomo Corneo and Hans Peter Gruner

American Economic Review, December 2000

The Effect of Shift Structure on Performance

By Tanguy Brachet, Guy David, and Andrea M. Drechsler

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2012

The effect of shift structure on worker performance and productivity is of increasing interest to firms and regulatory bodies. Using approximately 743,000 emergency medical incidents attended by 2,381 paramedics in Mississippi, we evaluate the extent that...

Simple Analytics of the Government Expenditure Multiplier

By Michael Woodford

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2011

This paper explains the key factors that determine the output multiplier of government purchases in New Keynesian models, through a series of simple examples that can be solved analytically. Sticky prices or wages allow for larger multipliers than in a ne...

Do Juntas Lead to Personal Rule?

By Daron Acemoglu, Georgy Egorov, and Konstantin Sonin

American Economic Review, May 2009

A Potential Disintegration of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet: Implications for Economic Analyses of Climate Policy

By Delavane Diaz and Klaus Keller

American Economic Review, May 2016

The Earth system may react in a nonlinear threshold response to climate forcings. Incorporating threshold responses into integrated assessment models (IAMs) used for climate policy analysis poses nontrivial challenges, for example due to methodological li...

Skill Dispersion and Trade Flows

By Matilde Bombardini, Giovanni Gallipoli, and Germán Pupato

American Economic Review, August 2012

Is skill dispersion a source of comparative advantage? In this paper we use microdata from the International Adult Literacy Survey to show that the effect of skill dispersion on trade flows is quantitatively similar to that of the aggregate endowment of h...

How Does the Market Use Citation Data? The Hirsch Index in Economics

By Glenn Ellison

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2013

A large literature following Hirsch (2005) has proposed citation- based indexes of individuals' research output. This paper views Hirsch's index as one member of a larger class and examines how well different indexes align with labor market outcomes f...

Retrospectives: Lionel W. McKenzie and the Proof of the Existence of a Competitive Equilibrium

By E. Roy Weintraub

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2011

The theorem proving the existence of general equilibrium in a competitive economy, which necessarily involved specifying the conditions under which such an equilibrium would exist, is an extraordinary achievement of twentieth-century economics. The discov...

Restricting the Trash Trade

By Eduardo Ley, Molly Macauley, and Stephen W. Salant

American Economic Review, May 2000

Indirect Effects of a Policy Altering Criminal Behavior: Evidence from the Italian Prison Experiment

By Francesco Drago and Roberto Galbiati

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2012

We exploit the 2006 Italian prison pardon to evaluate peer effects in criminal behavior. The pardon randomly commutes actual sentences to expected sentences for 40 percent of the Italian prison population. Using prison and geographical origin to construct...