"Momma's Got the Pill": How Anthony Comstock and Griswold v. Connecticut Shaped US Childbearing

By Martha J. Bailey

American Economic Review, March 2010

The 1960s ushered in a new era in US demographic history characterized by significantly lower fertility rates and smaller family sizes. What catalyzed these changes remains a matter of considerable debate. This paper exploits idiosyncratic variation in...

The Productivity Gap between Europe and the United States: Trends and Causes

[Symposium: Productivity]

By Bart van Ark, Mary O'Mahoney, and Marcel P. Timmer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2008

Since the mid-1990s, labor productivity growth in Europe has significantly slowed compared to earlier decades. In contrast, labor productivity growth in the United States accelerated, so that a new productivity gap has opened up. This paper shows that thi...

Contingent Valuation: Is Some Number Better than No Number?

[Symposium: Contingent Valuation]

By Peter A. Diamond and Jerry A. Hausman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1994

Without market outcomes for comparison, internal consistency tests, particularly adding-up tests, are needed for credibility. When tested, contingent valuation has failed. Proponents find surveys tested poorly done. To the authors' knowledge, no survey ha...

South Africa's Post-apartheid Two-Step: Social Demands versus Macro Stability

By Brahima Coulibaly and Trevon D. Logan

American Economic Review, May 2009

Social Security Reforms: Benefit Claiming, Labor Force Participation, and Long-Run Sustainability

By Selahattin Imrohoroğlu and Sagiri Kitao

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2012

This paper develops a general equilibrium life-cycle model with endogenous labor supply in both intensive and extensive margins, consumption, saving, and benefit claiming to measure the long-run effects of a proposed Social Security reform. Agents in the...

Health Insurance for "Humans": Information Frictions, Plan Choice, and Consumer Welfare

By Benjamin R. Handel and Jonathan T. Kolstad

American Economic Review, August 2015

Traditional models of insurance choice are predicated on fully informed and rational consumers protecting themselves from exposure to financial risk. In practice, choosing an insurance plan is a complicated decision often made without full information. In...

Intergenerational Cultural Transmission as an Evolutionary Game

By James D. Montgomery

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2010

We generalize the Bisin-Verdier model of intergenerational transmission to permit an arbitrary number of cultural traits. A key observation—that this model is equivalent to an evolutionary game under replicator dynamics—facilitates our analysi...

Paying Respect

[Symposium: Human Resource Management]

By Tore Ellingsen and Magnus Johannesson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2007

Why do people work? Economic theory generally, and the principal-agent model specifically, emphasize the role of material incentives. But many academics, for example, work diligently year after year for a nearly fixed real salary, continuing to work hard ...

Multi-Product Firms and Exchange Rate Fluctuations

By Arpita Chatterjee, Rafael Dix-Carneiro, and Jade Vichyanond

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2013

This paper studies the effect of exchange rate shocks on export behavior of multi-product firms. We provide a theoretical framework illustrating how firms adjust their prices, quantities, product scope, and sales distribution across products in the eve...

Health Care for the Aging Baby Boom: Lessons from Abroad

[Symposium: The Future of Medicare]

By Uwe E. Reinhardt

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2000

The economic, social, and political challenges posed by the aging of the population are real in many nations, under virtually any set of assumptions about the future. However, cross-national data on health spending on the elderly, to be presented in the f...

Origins of the Unemployment Rate: The Lasting Legacy of Measurement without Theory

By David Card

American Economic Review, May 2011

The modern definition of unemployment emerged in the late 1930s from research conducted at the Works Progress Administration and the Census Bureau. According to this definition, people who are not working but actively searching for work are counted as une...

Why Has Africa Grown Slowly?

[Symposium: Slow Growth in Africa]

By Paul Collier and Jan Willem Gunning

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1999

We distinguish between policy and "destiny" explanations of Africa's slow growth during the past three decades. Policies were poor: high export taxation and inefficient public service delivery, and "destiny" was adverse: landlocked, tropical locations, an...

Income and Democracy: Comment

By Matteo Cervellati, Florian Jung, Uwe Sunde, and Thomas Vischer

American Economic Review, February 2014

Acemoglu et al. (2008) document that the correlation between income per capita and democracy disappears when including time and country fixed effects. While their results are robust for the full sample, we find evidence for significant but heterogeneou...

The Interaction of Public and Private Insurance: Medicaid and the Long-Term Care Insurance Market

By Jeffrey R. Brown and Amy Finkelstein

American Economic Review, June 2008

We show that even incomplete public insurance can crowd out private insurance demand. We estimate that Medicaid could explain the lack of private long-term care insurance for about two-thirds of the wealth distribution, even if no other factors limited th...

International Financial Crises: Causes, Prevention, and Cures

By Lawrence H. Summers

American Economic Review, May 2000

Risk Sharing and Transactions Costs: Evidence from Kenya's Mobile Money Revolution

By William Jack and Tavneet Suri

American Economic Review, January 2014

We explore the impact of reduced transaction costs on risk sharing by estimating the effects of a mobile money innovation on consumption. In our panel sample, adoption of the innovation increased from 43 to 70 percent. We find that, while shocks reduce...

Using Performance on the Job to Inform Teacher Tenure Decisions

By Dan Goldhaber and Michael Hansen

American Economic Review, May 2010

The Declining Price Anomaly in Dutch Dutch Rose Auctions

By Gerard J. van den Berg, Jan C. van Ours, and Menno P. Pradhan

American Economic Review, September 2001

Decision Making in Committees: Transparency, Reputation, and Voting Rules

By Gilat Levy

American Economic Review, March 2007

In this paper I analyze the effect of transparency on decision making in committees. I focus on committees whose members are motivated by career concerns. The main result is that when the decision-making process is secretive (when individual votes are ...

Consumer Shopping Behavior: How Much Do Consumers Save?

[Symposium: Price Variation for Households]

By Rachel Griffith, Ephraim Leibtag, Andrew Leicester, and Aviv Nevo

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2009

This paper documents the potential and actual savings that consumers realize from four particular types of purchasing behavior: purchasing on sale; buying in bulk (at a lower per unit price); buying generic brands; and choosing outlets. How much can and d...