The Short-Run and Long-Run Effects of Behavioral Interventions: Experimental Evidence from Energy Conservation

By Hunt Allcott and Todd Rogers

American Economic Review, October 2014

We document three remarkable features of the Opower program, in which social comparison-based home energy reports are repeatedly mailed to more than six million households nationwide. First, initial reports cause high-frequency "action and backsliding,...

Faculty without Students: Resource Allocation in Higher Education

By William R. Johnson and Sarah Turner

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2009

Colleges and universities display substantial differences in the ratio of students to faculty across fields or disciplines. At Harvard University, for example, economics has about 16 students majoring in the subject per full-time-teaching equivalent, whil...

Marrying Up: The Role of Sex Ratio in Assortative Matching

By Ran Abramitzky, Adeline Delavande, and Luis Vasconcelos

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2011

We assemble a novel dataset to study the impact of male scarcity on marital assortative matching and other marriage market outcomes using the large shock that WWI caused to the number of French men. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we find that...

Affirmative Action and the Quality-Fit Trade-Off

By Peter Arcidiacono and Michael Lovenheim

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2016

This paper reviews the literature on affirmative action in undergraduate education and law schools, focusing especially on the trade-off between institutional quality and the fit between a school and a student. We discuss the conditions under which affirm...

Central-Bank Independence, Economic Behavior, and Optimal Term Lengths: Comment

By Xiang Lin

American Economic Review, September 1999

Internal Migration in the United States

By Raven Molloy, Christopher L. Smith, and Abigail Wozniak

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2011

This paper examines the history of internal migration in the United States since the 1980s. By most measures, internal migration in the United States is at a 30-year low. The widespread decline in migration rates across a large number of subpopulations su...

Confucianism and the East Asian Miracle

By Ming-Yih Liang

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2010

We examine two behavioral traits essential to Confucianism, and put forward hypotheses as to whether these behavioral traits impede or are conducive to "leading" or "follower" mode growth. A dynamic leader-follower general equilibrium model with appropria...

Are Women's Wage Gains Men's Losses? A Distributional Test

By Nicole M. Fortin and Thomas Lemieux

American Economic Review, May 2000

Pitfalls of Participatory Programs: Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation in Education in India

By Abhijit V. Banerjee, Rukmini Banerji, Esther Duflo, Rachel Glennerster, and Stuti Khemani

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2010

Participation of beneficiaries in the monitoring of public services is increasingly seen as a key to improving their quality. We conducted a randomized evaluation of three interventions to encourage beneficiaries' participation to India: providing info...

The Potential of Social Identity for Equilibrium Selection

By Roy Chen and Yan Chen

American Economic Review, October 2011

When does a common group identity improve efficiency in coordination games? To answer this question, we propose a group-contingent social preference model and derive conditions under which social identity changes equilibrium selection. We test our predict...

The European Sovereign Debt Crisis

[Symposium: Government Debt]

By Philip R. Lane

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2012

The origin and propagation of the European sovereign debt crisis can be attributed to the flawed original design of the euro. In particular, there was an incomplete understanding of the fragility of a monetary union under crisis conditions, especially in ...

Screening for Good Patent Pools through Price Caps on Individual Licenses

By Aleksandra Boutin

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2016

Patent pools reduce prices when selling complementary inputs to technologies, but can also effectively cartelize markets when involving substitutes. Independent licensing, by reintroducing competition, ensures that only good pools form when there are two ...

School Vouchers: A Survey of the Economics Literature

By Dennis Epple, Richard E. Romano, and Miguel Urquiola

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2017

We review the theoretical, computational, and empirical research on school vouchers, with a focus on the latter. Our assessment is that the evidence to date is not sufficient to warrant recommending that vouchers be adopted on a widespread basis; howe...

New Evidence on the Aftermath of Financial Crises in Advanced Countries

By Christina D. Romer and David H. Romer

American Economic Review, October 2017

This paper examines the aftermath of postwar financial crises in advanced countries. We construct a new semiannual series on financial distress in 24 OECD countries for the period 1967-2012. The series is based on assessments of the health of countries' f...

Economic Perspectives on Privatization

By John Vickers and George Yarrow

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1991

Despite being one of the most fundamental issues in political economy, the question of the appropriate boundary between public and private enterprise received relatively little attention in mainstream economic analysis until quite recently. In the 1980s, ...

The Impact of Insurance Provision on Household Production and Financial Decisions

By Jing Cai

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2016

This paper uses a natural experiment to study the impact of an agricultural insurance program on household production, borrowing, and saving behavior. The empirical strategy includes difference-in-differences and triple difference estimations. The resu...

Trade Costs, CO₂, and the Environment

By Joseph S. Shapiro

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2016

This paper quantifies how international trade affects CO2 emissions and analyzes the welfare consequences of regulating the CO2 emissions from shipping. To this end, the paper describes a model of trade and the environment, compiles ...

Report of the Editor: American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics

By Steven J. Davis

American Economic Review, May 2010

Pinocchio's Pupil: Using Eyetracking and Pupil Dilation to Understand Truth Telling and Deception in Sender-Receiver Games

By Joseph Tao-yi Wang, Michael Spezio, and Colin F. Camerer

American Economic Review, June 2010

We report experiments on sender-receiver games with an incentive for senders to exaggerate. Subjects "overcommunicate" -- messages are more informative of the true state than they should be, in equilibrium. Eyetracking shows that senders look at payoffs i...

Rules, Communication, and Collusion: Narrative Evidence from the Sugar Institute Case

By David Genesove and Wallace P. Mullin

American Economic Review, June 2001

Detailed notes on weekly meetings of the sugar-refining cartel show how communication helps firms collude, and so highlight the deficiencies in the current formal theory of collusion. The Sugar Institute did not fix prices or output. Prices were increased...