Pitfalls of Forward-Looking Monetary Policy

By Michael Woodford

American Economic Review, May 2000

Women's Inheritance Rights, Household Allocation, and Gender Bias

By Nayana Bose and Shreyasee Das

American Economic Review, May 2017

We analyze the impact of improved land inheritance rights for women in India on female empowerment by examining their educational attainment and the intergenerational effects of the reform. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, we find that the amen...

Systematic Bias and Nontransparency in US Social Security Administration Forecasts

By Konstantin Kashin, Gary King, and Samir Soneji

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2015

We offer an evaluation of the Social Security Administration demographic and financial forecasts used to assess the long-term solvency of the Social Security Trust Funds. This same forecasting methodology is also used in evaluating policy proposals put fo...

Monetary Policy and the Financing of Firms

By Fiorella De Fiore, Pedro Teles, and Oreste Tristani

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2011

How should monetary policy respond to changes in financial conditions? We consider a simple model where firms are subject to shocks which may force them to default on their debt. Firms' assets and liabilities are nominal and predetermined. Monetary policy...

Delay and Deadlines: Freeriding and Information Revelation in Partnerships

By Arthur Campbell, Florian Ederer, and Johannes Spinnewijn

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2014

We study two sources of delay in teams: freeriding and lack of communication. Partners contribute to the value of a common project, but have private information about the success of their own efforts. When the deadline is far away, unsuccessful partners...

The Impact of Global Warming on Agriculture: A Ricardian Analysis: Reply

By Robert Mendelsohn and William D. Nordhaus

American Economic Review, September 1999

The Impact of Indonesian Forest Fires on Singaporean Pollution and Health

By Tamara L. Sheldon and Chandini Sankaran

American Economic Review, May 2017

Forest burning in Indonesia results in severe episodes of "seasonal haze" in neighboring Singapore. We offer the first causal analysis of the transboundary health effects of the Indonesian forest burning. Instrumenting for air pollution with satellite fir...

Urban Accounting and Welfare

By Klaus Desmet and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg

American Economic Review, October 2013

We use a simple theory of a system of cities to decompose the determinants of the city size distribution into three main components: efficiency, amenities, and frictions. Higher efficiency and better amenities lead to larger cities but also to greater ...

Competition as a Discovery Procedure: Schumpeter Meets Hayek in a Model of Innovation

By Pedro Bento

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2014

I incorporate an insight of Friedrich Hayek—that competition allows a thousand flowers to bloom, and discovers the best among them—into a model of Schumpeterian innovation. Firms face uncertainty about the optimal direction of innovation, so m...

Individual Perceptions of the Criminal Justice System

By Lance Lochner

American Economic Review, March 2007

This paper empirically examines belief updating of the perceived probability of arrest and its criminal deterrence effects using two longitudinal data sources. While beliefs about the probability of arrest are positively correlated with local official arr...

A Review of Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World

By Robert C. Allen

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2008

A Farewell to Alms advances striking claims about the economic history of the world. These include (1) the preindustrial world was in a Malthusian preventive check equilibrium, (2) living standards were unchanging and above subsistence for the la...

Labor Supply Responses to Large Social Transfers: Longitudinal Evidence from South Africa

By Cally Ardington, Anne Case, and Victoria Hosegood

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2009

We quantify the labor supply responses of prime-aged adults to the presence of pensioners in their households, using longitudinal data collected in South Africa. We compare households and individuals before and after pension receipt and pension loss, w...

Disasterization: A Simple Way to Fix the Asset Pricing Properties of Macroeconomic Models

By Xavier Gabaix

American Economic Review, May 2011

A central difficulty in economics is to create a model with both good business cycle properties and asset pricing properties. I show how to solve this difficulty by a simple portable modeling device: the "disasterization" of models. Take an economy with g...

Review of Political Economy: An Introductory Text, by Edmund S. Phelps

By Michael M. Weinstein

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1987

Political Economy is a scintillating excursion into modern economic thinking. Not a stultified world of price elasticities of demand. Nor a world where transaction costs are zero and information is perfect. Rather, Phelps's world is a modernist (his word)...

Can Warranties Substitute for Reputations?

By James W. Roberts

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2011

In markets where product quality is imperfectly observed or delivery is uncertain, seller reputations and product guarantees or warranties can impact equilibrium prices and quantities. Using data from a decentralized online market, this paper empirically ...

The Twin Crises: The Causes of Banking and Balance-of-Payments Problems

By Graciela L. Kaminsky and Carmen M. Reinhart

American Economic Review, June 1999

In the wake of the Mexican and Asian currency turmoil, the subject of financial crises have come to the forefront of academic and policy discussions. This paper analyzes the links between banking and currency crises. The authors find that problems in the ...

Information Rigidity and the Expectations Formation Process: A Simple Framework and New Facts

By Olivier Coibion and Yuriy Gorodnichenko

American Economic Review, August 2015

We propose a new approach to test the full-information rational expectations hypothesis which can identify whether rejections of the null arise from information rigidities. This approach quantifies the economic significance of departures from the null and...

Expertise versus Bias in Evaluation: Evidence from the NIH

By Danielle Li

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2017

Evaluators with expertise in a particular field may have an informational advantage in separating good projects from bad. At the same time, they may also have personal preferences that impact their objectivity. This paper examines these issues in the cont...

Taxman's Dilemma: Coercion or Persuasion? Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment in Ethiopia

By Abebe Shimeles, Daniel Zerfu Gurara, and Firew Woldeyes

American Economic Review, May 2017

We analyze data from a randomized controlled trial of two innovative anti-tax evasion schemes in Ethiopia that signal threats of audit and complimentary messages that encourage tax morale. Our results indicate that the threat of audit reduces tax evasion ...

Does Quality Adjustment Matter for Technologically Stable Products? An Application to the CPI for Food

By John S. Greenlees and Robert McClelland

American Economic Review, May 2011

Most indexes in the Consumer Price Index (CPI) use a form of the "matched-model" approach. It is frequently assumed that this approach accurately reflects inflation for items that have no major trend in quality. In this paper we investigate that hypothesi...