What Explains the Gender Gap in College Track Dropout? Experimental and Administrative Evidence

By Ingvild Almås, Alexander W. Cappelen, Kjell G. Salvanes, Erik Ø. Sørensen, and Bertil Tungodden

American Economic Review, May 2016

We exploit a unique data set, combining rich experimental data with high-quality administrative data, to study dropout from the college track in Norway, and why boys are more likely to drop out. The paper provides three main findings. First, we show that ...

Commodity Prices and Growth in Africa

[Symposium: Slow Growth in Africa]

By Angus Deaton

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1999

African states that came to independence by the late 1960s made a rapid transition to authoritarian rule during a period of reasonably robust growth. Growth then faltered badly from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s as these regimes coped with external shock...

Information Aggregation in Polls

By John Morgan and Phillip C. Stocken

American Economic Review, June 2008

We study information transmission via polling. A policymaker polls constituents, who differ in their information and ideology, to determine policy. Full revelation is an equilibrium in a poll with a small sample, but not with a large one. In large poll...

The Effect of Cash, Vouchers, and Food Transfers on Intimate Partner Violence: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment in Northern Ecuador

By Melissa Hidrobo, Amber Peterman, and Lori Heise

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2016

Using a randomized experiment in Ecuador, this study provides evidence on whether cash, vouchers, and food transfers targeted to women and intended to reduce poverty and food insecurity also affected intimate partner violence. Results indicate that transf...

How Much Does Immigration Boost Innovation?

By Jennifer Hunt and Marjolaine Gauthier-Loiselle

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2010

We measure the extent to which skilled immigrants increase innovation in the United States. The 2003 National Survey of College Graduates shows that immigrants patent at double the native rate, due to their disproportionately holding science and engine...

Paying a Premium on Your Premium? Consolidation in the US Health Insurance Industry

By Leemore Dafny, Mark Duggan, and Subramaniam Ramanarayanan

American Economic Review, April 2012

We examine whether and to what extent consolidation in the US health insurance industry has contributed to higher employer-sponsored insurance premiums. We exploit the differential impact across local markets of a national merger of two insurers to identi...

Employment and Unemployment in the 1930s

[Symposium: The Great Depression]

By Robert A. Margo

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1993

Recent research on labor markets in the 1930s has shifted attention from aggregate to disaggregate time series and towards microeconomic evidence. The paper begins by reviewing the conventional statistics of the United States labor market during the Great...

Information, Liquidity, and the (Ongoing) Panic of 2007

By Gary Gorton

American Economic Review, May 2009

Subsidies, Hierarchy and Peers: The Awkward Economics of Higher Education

[Symposium: The Economics of Higher Education]

By Gordon C. Winston

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1999

Higher education is an industry where markets don't clear, prices on average cover less than a third of production costs, the resulting student subsidies are given in strikingly different amounts by different schools, creating a sharply hierarchical marke...

Is the EITC as Good as an NIT? Conditional Cash Transfers and Tax Incidence

By Jesse Rothstein

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2010

The EITC is intended to encourage work. But EITC-induced increases in labor supply may drive wages down. I simulate the economic incidence of the EITC. In each scenario that I consider, a large portion of low-income single mothers' EITC payments is cap...

Year-End Tax Planning of Top Management: Evidence from High-Frequency Payroll Data

By Claus Thustrup Kreiner, Søren Leth-Petersen, and Peer Ebbesen Skov

American Economic Review, May 2014

Using Danish high-frequency payroll data and tax reform variation, we detect year-end tax avoidance among top managers. Five to seven percent of top managers exploit year-end tax planning strategies to save taxes. Around 30 percent of the top managers eng...

Preferences over Equality in the Presence of Costly Income Sorting

By Gilat Levy and Ronny Razin

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2015

We analyze preferences over redistribution in societies with costly (positive) sorting according to income. We identify a new motivation for redistribution, where individuals support taxation in order to reduce the incentives to sort. We characterize a si...

Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk?

[Symposium: Emigration]

By Michael A. Clemens

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2011

What is the greatest single class of distortions in the global economy? One contender for this title is the tightly binding constraints on emigration from poor countries. Vast numbers of people in low-income countries want to emigrate from those countries...

The Case for Paying College Athletes

By Allen R. Sanderson and John J. Siegfried

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2015

Big-time commercialized intercollegiate athletics has attracted considerable attention in recent years. Popularity of this uniquely American activity, measured by attendance, television ratings, or team revenues, has never been higher. At the same time,...

The Politics of Market Socialism

By Andrei Shleifer and Robert W. Vishny

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1994

The debate over market socialism has ignored the importance of the assumptions about the objectives of politicians in determining resource allocation. Theory and evidence suggest that totalitarian socialism does not lead to efficient resource allocation b...

Stationary Concepts for Experimental 2 X 2 Games: Comment

By Christoph Brunner, Colin F. Camerer, and Jacob K. Goeree

American Economic Review, April 2011

Reinhard Selten and Thorsten Chmura (2008) recently reported laboratory results for completely mixed 2 X 2 games used to compare Nash equilibrium with four other stationary concepts: quantal response equilibrium, action-sampling equilibrium, payoff-sampli...

Regulation under Asymmetric Information in Water Utilities

By Isabelle Brocas, Kitty Chan, and Isabelle Perrigne

American Economic Review, May 2006

Optimal Abolition of FCC Spectrum Allocation

[Symposium: Regulatory Economics]

By Thomas W. Hazlett

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2008

Ronald Coase based his 1959 call for spectrum markets on theoretical conjecture. Today abundant evidence supports his case. Targeted liberalization in cellular markets, as contrasted with regulatory planning of the digital TV transition and other traditio...

Measuring the Trends in Inequality of Individuals and Families: Income and Consumption

By Jonathan D. Fisher, David S. Johnson, and Timothy M. Smeeding

American Economic Review, May 2013

We present evidence on the level of and trend in inequality from 1985-2010 in the United States, using disposable income and consumption for a sample of individuals from the Consumer Expenditure (CE) Survey. Differing from the findings in other recent res...

Do Output Contractions Trigger Democratic Change?

By Paul J. Burke and Andrew Leigh

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2010

Does faster economic growth increase pressure for democratic change, or reduce it? Using data for 154 countries for the period 1963-2007, we examine the short-run relationship between economic growth and moves toward and away from greater democracy. To ad...