Does Machine Learning Automate Moral Hazard and Error?

By Sendhil Mullainathan and Ziad Obermeyer

American Economic Review, May 2017

Machine learning tools are beginning to be deployed en masse in health care. While the statistical underpinnings of these techniques have been questioned with regard to causality and stability, we highlight a different concern here, relating to measuremen...

The Impact of High School Financial Education: Evidence from a Large-Scale Evaluation in Brazil

By Miriam Bruhn, Luciana de Souza Leão, Arianna Legovini, Rogelio Marchetti, and Bilal Zia

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2016

We study the impact of a comprehensive high school financial education program spanning 6 states, 892 schools, and approximately 25,000 students in Brazil through a randomized control trial. The program increased student financial proficiency by a quarter...

Soil Endowments, Female Labor Force Participation, and the Demographic Deficit of Women in India

By Eliana Carranza

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2014

Differences in relative female employment by soil texture are used to explain the heterogeneous deficit of female children across districts within India. Soil texture varies exogenously and determines the depth of land tillage. Deep tillage, possible i...

Adam Smith Goes to College: An Economist Becomes an Academic Administrator

[Symposium: The Economics of Higher Education]

By Ronald G. Ehrenberg

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1999

The author asks whether it is useful to view universities in a utility-maximizing framework and shows that university organizing virtually guarantees that the utility-maximizing model is the incorrect approach. He then discusses resource allocation issues...

Globalization and the Welfare State: A Review of Hans-Werner Sinn's Can Germany Be Saved?

By Dennis J. Snower, Alessio J. G. Brown, and Christian Merkl

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2009

What are the challenges that globalization makes on welfare states and how should welfare states respond? How should welfare states be designed to enable countries to reap the benefits of globalization? These are the main themes of Hans-Werner Sinn's b...

Raising Retailers' Profits: On Vertical Practices and the Exclusion of Rivals

By John Asker and Heski Bar-Isaac

American Economic Review, February 2014

Resale price maintenance (RPM), slotting fees, loyalty rebates, and other related vertical practices can allow an incumbent manufacturer to transfer profits to retailers. If these retailers were to accommodate entry, upstream competition could lead to ...

Corporate Finance, the Theory of the Firm, and Organizations

[Symposium: The Firm and its Boundaries]

By Patrick Bolton and David S. Scharfstein

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1998

Much of the modern research on firm boundaries, following Ronald Coase (1937), assumes that firms are run by owner-managers. This contrasts with the agency literature, following Adolph Berle and Gardiner Means (1932), that emphasizes the problems that ari...

Odious Debt

By Seema Jayachandran and Michael Kremer

American Economic Review, March 2006

Trade sanctions are often criticized as ineffective because they create incentives for evasion or as harmful to the target country's population. Loan sanctions, in contrast, could be self-enforcing and could protect the population from being saddled with ...

Worker Protection Policies in the New Century

[Symposium: Forecasts for the Future of the Economy]

By Bernard E. Anderson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2000

Federal workplace regulations describe a set of baseline requirements which must apply in every employment relationship. The purpose of such policies is to help improve the standard of living and assure a satisfactory quality of worklife for the workforce...

Isolating the Symbolic Implications of Employee Mobility: Price Increases after Hiring Winemakers from Prominent Wineries

By Peter W. Roberts, Mukti Khaire, and Christopher I. Rider

American Economic Review, May 2011

Because wines are aged for several years before they are released, newly hired winemakers arrive as wines made by their predecessors enter the market. An analysis of winemaker hiring events reveals that wines released right after a new winemaker's arrival...

Will We Ever Stop Using Fossil Fuels?

[Symposium: Oil and Gas Markets]

By Thomas Covert, Michael Greenstone, and Christopher R. Knittel

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2016

Scientists believe significant climate change is unavoidable without a drastic reduction in the emissions of greenhouse gases from the combustion of fossil fuels. However, few countries have implemented comprehensive policies that price this externality o...

Credit Traps

By Efraim Benmelech and Nittai K. Bergman

American Economic Review, October 2012

This paper studies the limitations of monetary policy in stimulating credit and investment. We show that, under certain circumstances, unconventional monetary policies fail in that liquidity injections into the banking sector are hoarded and not lent out...

Personnel Economics: The Economist's View of Human Resources

[Symposium: Human Resource Management]

By Edward P. Lazear and Kathryn L. Shaw

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2007

Personnel economics drills deeply into the firm to study human resource management practices like compensation, hiring practices, training, and teamwork. Why should pay vary across workers within firms -- and how "compressed" should pay be within firms? ...

The Intergenerational Correlation of Consumption Expenditures

By Kerwin Kofi Charles, Sheldon Danziger, Geng Li, and Robert Schoeni

American Economic Review, May 2014

Using data recently collected by the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we find that the intergenerational correlation in expenditures is no larger than that in income, suggesting limited intra-family risk-sharing. On the other hand, even after controlling f...

Productivity Growth and Capital Flows: The Dynamics of Reforms

By Francisco J. Buera and Yongseok Shin

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2017

Why doesn't capital flow into fast-growing countries? Using a model with heterogeneous producers and underdeveloped domestic financial markets, we explain the joint dynamics of total factor productivity (TFP) and capital flows. When a large-scale economic...

The Impact of Including, Adding, and Subtracting a Tax on Demand

By Naomi E. Feldman and Bradley J. Ruffle

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2015

We test the equivalence of tax-inclusive, tax-exclusive and tax-rebate prices through a series of experiments differing only in their handling of the tax. Subjects receive a cash budget and decide how much to keep and how much to spend on various attracti...

Generalizing the Taylor Principle

By Troy Davig and Eric M. Leeper

American Economic Review, June 2007

The paper generalizes the Taylor principle—the proposition that central banks can stabilize the macroeconomy by raising their interest rate instrument more than one-for-one in response to higher inflation—to an environment in which reaction c...

Measuring the Impacts of Teachers: Reply

By Raj Chetty, John N. Friedman, and Jonah E. Rockoff

American Economic Review, June 2017

Rothstein (2017) successfully replicates Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff's (2014a, b)—henceforth, CFR's—results using data from North Carolina, but raises concerns about CFR's methods. We show that Rothstein's methodological critiques are invali...

Information from Markets Near and Far: Mobile Phones and Agricultural Markets in Niger

By Jenny C. Aker

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2010

Price dispersion across markets is common in developing countries. Using novel market and trader-level data, this paper provides estimates of the impact of mobile phones on price dispersion across grain markets in Niger. The introduction of mobile phone ...

Who Thinks about the Competition? Managerial Ability and Strategic Entry in US Local Telephone Markets

By Avi Goldfarb and Mo Xiao

American Economic Review, December 2011

We examine US local telephone markets shortly after the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The data suggest that more experienced, better-educated managers tend to enter markets with fewer competitors. This motivates a structural econometric model based on ...