Gross Worker Flows over the Business Cycle

By Per Krusell, Toshihiko Mukoyama, Richard Rogerson, and Ayşegül Şahin

American Economic Review, November 2017

We build a hybrid model of the aggregate labor market that features both standard labor supply forces and frictions in order to study the cyclical properties of gross worker flows across the three labor market states: employment, unemployment, and nonpa...

There Will Be Killing: Collectivization and Death of Draft Animals

By Shuo Chen and Xiaohuan Lan

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2017

The elimination of private property rights can lead to inefficient use of productive assets. In China's collectivization movement from 1955 to 1957, instead of transferring draft animals to the ownership of the collectives, peasants slaughtered them to ke...

Private Information and Trade Timing

By Lones Smith

American Economic Review, September 2000

Does Grief Transfer across Generations? Bereavements during Pregnancy and Child Outcomes

By Sandra E. Black, Paul J. Devereux, and Kjell G. Salvanes

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2016

Using population data from Norway, we examine the effects of stress induced by the death of the mother's parent during pregnancy on both the short-run and the long-run outcomes of the infant. Using a variety of empirical strategies to address the issue of...

Liquidity Constraints, Fiscal Externalities, and Optimal Tuition Subsidies

By Nicholas Lawson

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2017

A large literature focuses on two important rationales for government subsidies to college students: positive fiscal externalities from a larger tax base, and liquidity constraints. This paper provides a first attempt to gauge the relative importance of t...

Does Merger Simulation Work? Evidence from the Swedish Analgesics Market

By Jonas Björnerstedt and Frank Verboven

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2016

We analyze a large merger in the Swedish market for analgesics (painkillers). The merging firms raised prices by 40 percent, and some outsiders raised prices by more than 10 percent. We confront these changes with predictions from a merger simulation mode...

Can Online Learning Bend the Higher Education Cost Curve?

By David J. Deming, Claudia Goldin, Lawrence F. Katz, and Noam Yuchtman

American Economic Review, May 2015

We examine whether online learning technologies have led to lower prices in higher education. Using data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, we show that online education is concentrated in large for-profit chains and less-selective p...

Taboos and Identity: Considering the Unthinkable

By Chaim Fershtman, Uri Gneezy, and Moshe Hoffman

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2011

A taboo is an "unthinkable" action. Even the thought of violating a taboo triggers a punishment. We consider a model in which taboos are part of the definition of one's identity. Deliberating over breaking the taboo changes the individual's choice set, an...

Competition with Exclusive Contracts and Market-Share Discounts

By Giacomo Calzolari and Vincenzo Denicolò

American Economic Review, October 2013

We analyze firms that compete by means of exclusive contracts and market-share discounts (conditional on the seller's share of customers' total purchases). With incomplete information about demand, firms have a unilateral incentive to use these contrac...

A New History of Banking Panics in the United States, 1825-1929: Construction and Implications

By Andrew J. Jalil

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2015

There are two major problems in identifying the output effects of banking panics of the pre-Great Depression era. First, it is not clear when panics occurred because prior panic series differ in their identification of panic episodes. Second, establishing...

Implementation of a New Architecture for the US National Accounts

By Dale W. Jorgenson and J. Steven Landefeld

American Economic Review, May 2009

Barriers to Household Risk Management: Evidence from India

By Shawn Cole, Xavier Giné, Jeremy Tobacman, Petia Topalova, Robert Townsend, and James Vickery

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2013

Why do many households remain exposed to large exogenous sources of nonsystematic income risk? We use a series of randomized field experiments in rural India to test the importance of price and nonprice factors in the adoption of an innovative rainfall...

Understanding the Gains from Wage Flexibility: The Exchange Rate Connection

By Jordi Galí and Tommaso Monacelli

American Economic Review, December 2016

We study the gains from increased wage flexibility using a small open economy model with staggered price and wage setting. Two results stand out: (i) the effectiveness of labor cost reductions as a means to stimulate employment is much smaller in a curren...

Negative Returns to Seniority and Job Mobility across the Program Quality Distribution: Are Top Public PhD-Granting Programs Different?

By Michael J. Hilmer and Christiana E. Hilmer

American Economic Review, May 2011

We analyze a unique data set containing annual salary and detailed job and publication histories for a sample of 1,009 faculty members drawn from 53 public Ph.D.-granting economics departments. Empirical results suggest that all else equal: (1) statistica...

Is China Socialist?

[Symposium: China]

By Barry Naughton

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2017

It has been 40 years since Deng Xiaoping broke dramatically with Maoist ideology and the Maoist variant of socialism. Since then, China has been transformed. Forty years ago, in 1978, China was unquestionably a socialist economy of the familiar and well-s...

Estimating the Knowledge-Capital Model of the Multinational Enterprise

By David L. Carr, James R. Markusen, and Keith E. Maskus

American Economic Review, June 2001

Secular Stagnation? The Effect of Aging on Economic Growth in the Age of Automation

By Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo

American Economic Review, May 2017

Several recent theories emphasize the negative effects of an aging population on economic growth, either because of the lower labor force participation and productivity of older workers or because aging will create an excess of savings over desired invest...

Investment Behavior, Observable Expectations, and Internal Funds

By Jason G. Cummins, Kevin A. Hassett, and Stephen D. Oliner

American Economic Review, June 2006

We use earnings forecasts from securities analysts to construct a new measure of the neoclassical fundamentals that drive investment spending. We find that investment responds significantly to our new measure of fundamentals but is insensitive to cash fl...

Financial Innovation and Portfolio Risks

By Alp Simsek

American Economic Review, May 2013

I illustrate the effect of financial innovation on portfolio risks by using an example with risk-sharing needs and belief disagreements. I consider two types of innovation: product innovation, formalized as an expansion of new financial assets; and proces...

Learning about a New Technology: Pineapple in Ghana

By Timothy G. Conley and Christopher R. Udry

American Economic Review, March 2010

This paper investigates the role of social learning in the diffusion of a new agricultural technology in Ghana. We use unique data on farmers' communication patterns to define each individual's information neighborhood. Conditional on many potentially ...