Aligned Delegation

By Alexander Frankel

American Economic Review, January 2014

A principal delegates multiple decisions to an agent, who has private information relevant to each decision. The principal is uncertain about the agent's preferences. I solve for max-min optimal mechanisms— those which maximize the principal's payoff...

Proposals to Restructure Social Security

[Symposium: Social security]

By Peter A. Diamond

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1996

This paper discusses five proposed changes in Social Security: indexing the normal retirement age to life expectancy (as Sweden is doing); investing part of the trust funds in private securities; partial privatization (as has been proposed by Senators Ker...

Rare Disasters, Asset Prices, and Welfare Costs

By Robert J. Barro

American Economic Review, March 2009

A representative-consumer model with Epstein-Zin-Weil preferences and i.i.d. shocks, including rare disasters, accords with observed equity premia and risk-free rates if the coefficient of relative risk aversion equals 3-4. If the intertemporal elastic...

Child Health and Household Resources in South Africa: Evidence from the Old Age Pension Program

By Esther Duflo

American Economic Review, May 2000

Facts and Myths about Refereeing

By Daniel S. Hamermesh

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1994

Referees' and editors' behavior is illustrated by data from a random sample of refereeing requests by seven economics journals. Referees tend to be higher-quality (better-cited, prime-age) than authors. Except for a few superstar authors, there is no matc...

Does Disability Insurance Receipt Discourage Work? Using Examiner Assignment to Estimate Causal Effects of SSDI Receipt

By Nicole Maestas, Kathleen J. Mullen, and Alexander Strand

American Economic Review, August 2013

We present the first causal estimates of the effect of Social Security Disability Insurance benefit receipt on labor supply using all program applicants. We use administrative data to match applications to disability examiners and exploit variation in ...

John Law's System

By François R. Velde

American Economic Review, May 2007

Did the Housing Price Bubble Clobber Local Labor Market Job and Worker Flows When It Burst?

By John M. Abowd and Lars Vilhuber

American Economic Review, May 2012

We use the Census Bureau's Quarterly Workforce Indicators and the Federal Housing Finance Agency's House Price Indices to study the effects of the housing price bubble on local labor markets. We show that the 35 MSAs in the top decile of the house price b...

Official Intervention in the Foreign Exchange Market: Is It Effective and, If So, How Does It Work?

By Lucio Sarno and Mark P. Taylor

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2001

Our paper assesses progress made by the profession in understanding whether and how exchange rate intervention works. We review theory and evidence on official intervention, concentrating primarily on work published in the last decade or so. We conclude t...

The Weight of History on European Cultural Integration: A Gravity Approach

By Pauline Grosjean

American Economic Review, May 2011

The cultural gravity model proposed in this paper uses micro-level survey data of 21,000 households to estimate the contribution to cultural heterogeneity of a long history of division between the Ottoman, Habsburg, Russian or Prussian Empires since the y...

Measuring the Financial Sophistication of Households

By Laurent E. Calvet, John Y. Campbell, and Paolo Sodini

American Economic Review, May 2009

Modernizing Federal Economic Statistics

By William G. Bostic Jr., Ron S. Jarmin, and Brian Moyer

American Economic Review, May 2016

Official statistical data on the structure, evolution and performance of the U.S. economy are produced by a variety federal, state and local agencies. Much of the methodology, policy frameworks and infrastructure for U.S. economic measurement have been in...

Are Micro and Macro Labor Supply Elasticities Consistent? A Review of Evidence on the Intensive and Extensive Margins

By Raj Chetty, Adam Guren, Day Manoli, and Andrea Weber

American Economic Review, May 2011

We evaluate whether state-of-the-art macro models featuring indivisible labor are consistent with modern quasi-experimental micro evidence by synthesizing evidence on both the intensive and extensive margins. We find that micro estimates are consistent wi...

The Flypaper Effect

By James R. Hines and Richard H. Thaler

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1995

What happens to a state's spending when it receives an unconditional grant from the federal government? The standard theoretical analysis predicts that the increase in spending will be the same as that generated by an equivalent increase in local incomes-...

The (Paper)Work of Medicine: Understanding International Medical Costs

[Symposium: Constraining Healthcare Costs]

By David M. Cutler and Dan P. Ly

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2011

This paper draws on international evidence on medical spending to examine what the United States can learn about making its healthcare system more efficient. We focus primarily on understanding contemporaneous differences in the level of spending, general...

The Economic Effects of Climate Change

[Symposium: Climate Change]

By Richard S. J. Tol

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2009

I review the literature on the economic impacts of climate change, an externality that is unprecedentedly large, complex, and uncertain. Only 14 estimates of the total damage cost of climate change have been published, a research effort that is in sharp c...

Teachers' Views on No Child Left Behind: Support for the Principles, Concerns about the Practices

[Symposium: No Child Left Behind]

By Richard J. Murnane and John P. Papay

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2010

In this article, we describe teachers' views of the behavioral responses the No Child Left Behind legislation has elicited and the extent to which research reveals evidence of these responses and their effects on the distribution of student achievement. W...

Evolution of the Marriage Earnings Gap for Women

By Chinhui Juhn and Kristin McCue

American Economic Review, May 2016

Using Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) panels linked to Social Security earnings records, we examine the earnings gap associated with marriage for cohorts of women born between 1936 and 1975. We compare ordinary least squares and fixed-ef...

Markets: State Franchise Laws, Dealer Terminations, and the Auto Crisis

By Francine Lafontaine and Fiona Scott Morton

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2010

In fall 2008, General Motors and Chrysler were both on the brink of bankruptcy, and Ford was not far behind. As the government stepped in and restructuring began, GM and Chrysler announced their plan to terminate about 2,200 dealerships. In this paper, we...

Risk and Global Economic Architecture: Why Full Financial Integration May Be Undesirable

By Joseph E. Stiglitz

American Economic Review, May 2010